It used to be said that only three people ever understood how Council housing was funded and one of them was dead. But it matters to tenants, enormously.
One of the "bright ideas" of the last Labour Government was to get Council's to borrow a shed load of money to keep the rents from the Council houses that everyone thought they already owned. In the case of Bolsover the amount needed to be borrowed is some £94M. Unsurprisingly when the coalition took over they rather liked this idea as it raised a big wedge of money so it has already been implemented.
So when Bolsover Council officers drew-up the Housing budget and rent increase in early March they had to guess how much it would cost them to borrow £94M later that month. They took a prudent view and one of the consequences was a huge average increase of over 9% in the rent which was then approved by the Labour controlled Council.
At the April Council meeting I asked them what the difference was between the budgeted cost for borrowing in early March and the actual costs in late March and what the rent increase would have been if they had got the guess right. The answer was that the rent increase could have been 6% instead of 9% as the cost of borrowing had been £1.4M below the budget provision.
The next obvious step is to pay this money back to the tenants it was taken from..........but don't hold your breadth.
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