CCH / NFTMO Conference Blackpool 2007 : Tenant control - community democracy
See also: Pictures from the conference
Conference report
This was a conference jointly hosted by the CCH and the NFTMO at the Norbreck Castle Hotel in Blackpool on a sunny and hot weekend by the sea between 8th and 10th June 2007. The conference was attended by 310 delegates (including 28 children) from housing co-ops, tenant management organisations, Community Gateway Associations, support and agency staff and others.
Overall it was a successful conference, but there were some problems with the venue (with the 15% of delegates who indicated that they were not satisfied perhaps being a fair reflection, noting that 85% were satisfied).
One delegate referred to the conference as "damned good", and another summed up the conference as "well prepared and very friendly - thank you to all who made this weekend great. I learnt a lot and can't wait for the next one."
However, there were large numbers of comments on the feedback forms about problems with the venue (see below). A sprawling and faded chocolate box venue something akin to Butlins, the Norbreck was not an ideal venue, not least because we were sharing it with the eclectic mix of an Elvis lookalike convention and a marines reunion.
The programme
The conference was opened by the Mayor of Blackpool, Councillor Robert Wynne, welcoming the community spirit of tenant controlled organisations, trying to convince the audience that it never rains in Blackpool, and presenting NFTMO awards to Friday Hill TMO and Belle Isle EMB for effective governance.
A change to our normal schedule, the two organisation's AGMs were held on the Friday night, which worked quite well, apart from problems some delegates had in finding the CCH AGM, and the one delegate who complained about us holding the AGM on the Friday night because he wasn't there! This was followed by the quiz, usually popular but less so this year (so much so that two delegates chose to pay to go to the Elvis convention instead).
Saturday was opened by addresses from NFTMO chair Terry Edis, highlighting issues relating to TMOs, and by CCH Chair Nic Bliss, who invited the audience to play Room 101, with arrogant paternalistic housing association Chief Executives, poorly performing Councils (as represented by their patron saint Dame Shirley Porter), the Government and the Housing Corporation all being voted into Room 101 (whilst the excellent Bloomsbury EMB, Watford Community Housing Trust and Rainbow Housing Co-op all successfully avoided such an ignominious fate).
Hardly the best introduction to Julie Fawcett's address to the conference. Speaking as the tenant board member of the Housing Corporation, Julie, herself a veteran of the tenant controlled Stockwell Park Community Trust in London and free for the day from Corporation handlers, delivered a passionate address in support of community empowerment. However, she suggested that the Corporation is merely a tool of Government, and advised the conference that somehow we need to reassure civil servants that control is safe in the hands of communities.
Concluding the opening plenary, Lea Mutsearts, supported by Katrien Van Mechelen, from VIVAS, a tenant representative body in Belgium, extended European greetings to the conference and outlined the complexities and structures of tenant empowerment over the channel.
The opening plenary session was also punctuated by stirring cameos from Ade Lasaki and John Lynch from Leathermarket Joint Management Board in London, Margaret Cope from Paddock Housing Co-op in Walsall, and Wendy Walsh from Castle Vale Community Housing Association in Birmingham - all illustrating the strength and vitality of community controlled housing.
The plenary was concluded by a lively Q&A session, with questions about the need for unity between the CCH and NFTMO and asking why Tony Blair had not been offered up as a candidate for Room 101 being perhaps two of the more memorable ones.
The conference then split into a dazzling array of 28 workshops run by a number of excellent facilitators over the weekend, covering everything from business planning to parish councils, from changing the us and them culture of housing associations to negotiating TMO management allowances, from choice based lettings to a European tour of tenant control, from the practical to the more esoteric.
Mention might be given to the Choice based lettings workshop run by the CCH's Phil Brown, the Anti-Social Behaviour workshop run by Mark Lolley from Bloomsbury EMB and Andrea Brown from Green Dragon Lane Housing Co-op, and to the Improving Governance workshop run by the CCH's Blase Lambert and Paul Lusk from Partners in Change, all scoring well on feedback forms.
Special mention should also be given to the inspirational workshop on involving young people led by Adeleke Adeyemi from Holland Rise & Whitebeam Close TMO, who with a young colleague filmed the conference, interviewing many of the delegates (the film may soon be available on the CCH and NFTMO websites along with various photos from the conference).
All the other workshops were generally well received, but there were two particular issues highlighted on feedback forms:
3 delegates indicated that they found the What happens if it all goes wrong? workshop particularly useful - interesting in that the workshop had to be cancelled due to the facilitator being ill.
Some delegates were perplexed by the lack of a facilitator at the Don't Stop Learning workshop. Unfortunately those delegates must have arrived late at the workshop, after the group had chosen to move the workshop to a different room. Those who did attend found the workshop useful.
Also of note was the successful study trip to Preston Community Gateway. Many delegates highlighted how useful, inspirational and "brilliant" this trip had been.
Having been entertained by the multi-generational and community based Quinton Community Choir (a happy diversion in the afternoon for many conference delegates), delegates either participated in networking discussions (of particular note was an informal session for Community Gateway delegates where a decision was taken to form an informal tenant led Community Gateway group), enjoyed possibly more informal networking by the seaside, or sauntered off to enjoy the delights of Blackpool.
Reunited for a generally well received but spectacularly hot gala dinner (although some delegates didn't enjoy it - one suggested it was grim), the conference raised £200 for the Mayor of Blackpool's charity, an amount doubled by contributions from NFTMO and the CCH.
We made the mistake of asking delegates to tell us on their feedback forms what they thought of the Norbreck's Butlin's style "entertainment". Happily most just told us they didn't like it, with variations on are you joking? being an example of comments received. Hmmm.
Discussion groups
Sunday saw a number of groups discuss threats and opportunities for community controlled housing, and what they would like to see happening in the future. The groups yielded a number of interesting themes:
- unity - there is a need to develop greater unity between the CCH & NFTMO, with some delegates calling for the two organisations to come together;
- promotion - NFTMO & CCH should do more to promote community controlled housing, using the media more effectively and particularly highlighting the success stories;
- a duty to promote community control - a proposal that we should call for local authorities to have a statutory duty to promote community control;
- external threats - concerns about local authority and housing association attitudes, divide and rule tactics, affordable housing not being affordable, the challenge of encouraging democracy and accountability in an environment which doggedly wants to hang on to the status quo, the complacency of communities taking community controlled housing organisations for granted;
- developing links with allies - including TAROE, ATIC and Co-operatives UK;
- political information - ensuring that the CCH & NFTMOs keeps community controlled organisations informed of political issues like the housing white paper;
- remaining rooted in the community - ensuring that whatever we do, we remain rooted in our community origins;
- tenant management - simplifying and publicising the Right to Manage (and extending it to the housing association sector);
- community ownership - ensuring the conference supported proposals to call for a Right to Community Ownership with particular work done to consider what TMOs would be interested in exploring this option;
- young people conference - holding a young person's conference to run alongside our main conference;
- twinning community controlled groups - looking at twinning arrangements between community controlled housing organisations.
The venue
Most of the negative comments on feedback forms related to the venue. 28% of delegates were not happy with the accommodation; 33% not happy with the facilities; and 40% not happy with the catering. Prior to the conference, the conference organisers had been alerted to negative comments about the Norbreck on websites.
We had tried to address the flavour of problems identified, but the truth of the matter was that whilst some people like the Norbreck, it would never be everyone's cup of tea, and it was not going to be a venue that would please everyone.
The problems particularly identified were as follows:
- lack of air conditioning - a majority of the forms identified the heat in the main ballroom particularly during the gala dinner. We happened to hold our conference on one of the hottest weekends of the year, and the windows on the south of the Norbreck turned the ball room into a greenhouse. The Norbreck, decaying old monolith that it is, was not built to deal with this sort of problem, having no air conditioning, no fans and no means of air circulation.
- quality of catering - whilst in some cases this was a matter of taste, the lack of salads and quality vegetarian options were particularly serious concerns.
- lack of soft drinks - whilst we did ask the venue to provide juice and water in tea and coffee breaks for some reason they didn't, and this problem was compounded by difficulties in getting drinks from vending machines.
- staff attitude - some delegates noted the Norbreck staff as being friendly and helpful; others said they were rude and discourteous.
- cleanliness - some delegates suggested rooms and some of the facilities (cups, plates etc) were not clean.
- the crèche - we heard a number of comments about the crèche during the weekend, and we were concerned that the problems were to do with the crèche company we used. Feedback forms actually suggest that the problems largely arose from the quality of the crèche room provided by the hotel, which in turn led to a need for the crèche workers to take the children out of that room, and having limited places to take them.
Conclusions
Overall it was a successful weekend, but there were some problems with the venue we had chosen, and the conference illustrated two ongoing difficulties for us in organising our conferences:
- our members and delegates want to pay low fees for the conferences. This limits the quality of the venue we can use. There are two ways we could use a better quality venue - by either upping the fees, and/or by making the conference larger by incorporating a wider tenant audience
- some of our members prefer more intimate conferences like those held separately by the CCH and NFTMO in 2006. However, this approach would appear to conflict with what delegates were telling us at this conference about the need to develop stronger unity between the two organisations, particularly so that we can promote community control more widely. We can't do this by holding small inward looking conferences. If anything, to really promote our message widely, we need to be holding conferences that attract a much wider body of tenants to our conferences so that we strengthen the tenant movement, because it will only be as a robust tenant movement that we will get the national support that community controlled housing should have.
See also: Pictures from the conference
