Standing up for Council housing

Sometimes attacks on the key foundations of our society are obvious and direct, sometimes they are covert. As a direct consequence of Government policies the future for Council housing is now looking very uncertain, and if Council housing disappears into room 101 Housing Associations will inevitably follow.
Recognising the need for action Defend Council Housing has prepared the following emergency statement - if you agree please email your support. Many thanks.

Housing Emergency – Time for an

AlternativeGovernment is fuelling a housing emergency, with an all-out attack on tenants

and council housing.

With house building collapsing, mortgages unaffordable, and private

rents rising, Government is forcing up rents, attacking secure tenancies, and

drastically cutting housing benefit.

Homeless applications and rough sleeping are already rising, and there

are 4.5 million people on housing waiting lists

1.3 million private tenants face homelessness or debt (Chartered Institute of Housing), and 7 million report using credit to pay for their home last year (Shelter).

Government’s housing measures do not have an electoral mandate. They will create more evictions, homelessness and fear, but will not curb high rents.

They do nothing to create secure, affordable homes for rent desperately needed for all those who are priced out by the housing market. They will create exclusion zones driving out the low-paid, the sick and the poor, and their families.

We call on Councillors, MPs, tenant and trade union organisations, housing, disability and poverty campaigners and all who want sustainable,mixed communities across the UK to join in a campaign around these Action points:

1. Resist and campaign against cuts in housing benefit: we call on Councillors and other landlords not to evict tenants who fall behind with their rent as a result of the new cuts in housing benefit.

2. Reject huge council rent rises driven by government debt and inflation formula.

3. Oppose the use of so-called "Affordable Rent", in fact unaffordable and insecure, with near-market rents and time-limited tenancies.

4. No scapegoating: The shortage of housing is a result of underinvestment and failure to build. It is not caused by existing or would-be tenants in work or not, of whatever race or religion.

5. Defend security of tenure for existing and future tenants.

6. Regulation to control private sector rents.

7. A programme of investment in new and improved council and other house building at genuinely-affordable rents.

It’s time to stand together, in a united, determined campaign to stop these

attacks and demand investment in the homes we need: secure, accountable

and genuinely affordable.

Add your name to this statement, and get your tenant group, trade union,

campaign or community group to sign it. To sign send your name and

organisation to Housing Emergency Alternative to

mitchellav@parliament.uk or

info@defendcouncilhousinguk

All in this together?

It's becoming increasingly clear that those with the least are having to give the most in austerity Britain. Residents might have expected that Labour-controlled Bolsover would protect the most vulnerable but today it became clear that the Cabinet is recommending to Council that the full 9% average rent increase recommended by the coalition government is implemented. Nationally a growing list of Council's including Ipswich, Birmingham and Newcastle are recognising that rent increases of this level are simply unaffordable for tenants and are cutting management costs and reducing voids to keep rent increases at, or below, inflation.

The same Bolsover councillors who had no hesitation in rejecting the advice of the independent panel on member allowances (who proposed major cuts to the basic allowance) now seem to say that they have no option but to do the coalition's bidding. The truth is that the Council, not the government, sets rents in Bolsover and if we can freeze Council tax we can certainly keep an increase at, or below, inflation. The question is how many other members of the Council will stand-up for the poorest in our community - we'll find out the answer at next Wednesday's Council meeting, if you are a tenant you might want to come along it starts at 10am.

Who benefits from housing benefit cuts?

You may have thought it was a London issue, but there could be much misery for tenants in Bolsover from the coalitions cuts to housing benefit.

If you've not had the time to follow the details, here's an excellent article from Tim Leuen in the Guardian which will put you in the picture:

Imagine two sets of people, both renting from private landlords. One is an Islington couple who have never worked. The other is an Oldham family with four children, where the working parent has just lost his or her job. The Islington couple currently receive £250 a week in housing benefit, while the Oldham family gets only £150.
Times are tough, and the government wants to save money. Which family should have its housing benefit cut? George Osborne has chosen the Oldham family. He is cutting its housing benefit to £96 a week, while allowing the Islington couple to continue to claim £250 a week for as long as they like.
It may sound like odd logic, but that is the reality of the £26,000 benefit cap. It takes no account of your employment history or family size. So a central London couple who have never worked are unaffected, because they currently receive less than £26,000 in benefits. But a large family – even in a cheap house – will be hit. That is not sensible.
The worst hit, of course, are large families in the south-east, where rents are higher. Even in Tolworth, described by the Evening Standard as the "scrag end of Kingston borough", a four bedroom house will give you little change from £400 a week. Cutting housing benefit to £100 a week – which is broadly what the cap means if you have four children – makes life impossible. After rent, council tax and utilities, a family with four children would have 62p per person per day to live on. That is physically impossible.
It is easy to say that people shouldn't have large families if they can't afford them. But most affected families could afford their children when they conceived them, and continued to be able to afford them – until they lost their jobs in what has proven to be the worst recession for more than a century. Should they now follow Greece and give up their children for adoption?
It is the effect on children in large families that has led Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders to take a stand against the government over the weekend, speaking up for the poor in a way entirely consistent with their faiths.
The cap doesn't even hit the families the Daily Mail so dislikes – single parents with many children and many fathers who have never worked. Those families, by and large, are sufficiently dysfunctional to be in social housing, and so will not be hit – at least not much – by the reforms. Instead the people hit hardest are stable families previously in work on low to middle incomes – the really squeezed middle, if you like. They were not rich enough to buy a house, and not poor enough to qualify for social housing. As a result they pay a fortune to rent privately and are vulnerable to the cap.
Civil servants tell me they don't expect rents to fall – quite the reverse, as the market is buoyant. Nor do they expect families to migrate from the south-east to low-cost housing areas such as Merthyr Tydfil or Barrow. These are, in the main, people who want to work and will choose to stay in an area with good job prospects. Instead, they expect families to downsize. Children will end up sharing a room with multiple siblings, and parents will sleep on a sofa bed in the lounge. Clearly people can live like that, but frankly I thought that overcrowded tenements were something that Britain had left behind.
Britain is not poor. In only five years of our history have we ever been richer than we are today. The savings from the cap are very small – £270m. Yet we spend £53bn on welfare payments to people in the top half of the income distribution. Cutting their payments by one half of one per cent would be a much better way to save £270m.
Even better would be to allow more houses to be built in the south-east, over the objections of organisations such as the CPRE and the National Trust. Standard supply and demand tells us that more houses mean lower prices and lower rents. Lower rents mean lower housing benefit bills without making a single poor family suffer. If you crunch the numbers, you find that increasing the number of houses by 1.3% would cut the housing benefit bill by £270m. It would also get people back into work. Surely that is a better option.

Derbyshire - no place for the young?

I've just come back from a protest march and a County Council consultation meeting in Chesterfield regarding its proposed closure of all its youth centres.

Unlike those who are making these decisions, it’s not our children who caused the recession; however not having a vote has made their services a soft target. With youth unemployment across Europe at an all-time high, tuition fees tripling and the EMA gone it’s no longer good to be young.

Those making these decisions say there’s no choice. If we are “all in this together”  a fairer way would be for those individuals and large businesses who can afford it to give a little more back to the people who generated their wealth in the first place. The truth is there is always a choice; it depends on where your priorities are.

Cutting youth services may save a little money in the short-term but in the longer term it is economically as well as socially, disastrous. If the County Council didn’t know this before the meeting started they certainly should do now. If, as they say, they are listening and haven’t made any decisions yet they had better start working on a different plan.

If you have the time, please complete the on-line survey available here: www.derbyshire.gov.uk/youthservice2012

Many thanks

Council housing - what's going on in Bolsover?

It comes to something when we have to rely upon the Government to tell us things that Bolsover won’t but there’s something rather strange about how the Council manages its housing. There’s a Council meeting at 10am on Wednesday the 25^th of January and here’s a couple of questions I’ll be asking the portfolio-holder for housing management:

1.       According to the data provided by Bolsover to the DCLG (Department of Community and Local Government) the number of vacant council properties in Bolsover over the past few years was as follows:

2008 : 10

2009 : 40

2010 : 106

2011 : 128

With average rents of over £63 this dramatic deterioration in performance has lost the authority over £350,000 in the last year alone.

During the same period there has been a national improvement of nearly 25% in reducing voids so can he account for Bolsover’s problems?

2.       According to the data provided by Bolsover to the DCLG the number of applicants on the Council’s housing register dropped from 3,299 in 2010 to 1,180 in 2011 meaning that nearly two in three applicants have been removed from the register.

As a result Bolsover now has not only the shortest list in the County but also the smallest percentage of households in its District on the register. Going right back to 1997, when DCLG records begin, Bolsover has never had so few people on its housing register. It is all the more remarkable that it has occurred when the national trend has seen another increase in households registering.

Can he explain what traumatic event in 2011 occasioned this outcome in Bolsover and what measures has he put in place to ensure that no-one in genuine housing need has been removed from the register?

 
I’ll let you know what reply I get.

Better News for 2012?

Some good and some not so good news from the last meeting of Bolsover Council in 2011. The good news first:

A presentation was given on the Council’s excellent apprenticeship scheme, which as the Leader pointed out, is particularly impressive because it last for 18 months and offers placement to people who do not have many, or indeed any, qualifications, a particular issue in Bolsover.

Second piece of good news was the Council’s decision to continue to investigate the installation of photo-voltaic cells on the Council’s housing stock even though the reduction in the feed-in tariffs reduces the financial returns. Credit to Bolsover for persisting when other Councils have pulled the plug. Yes it would have been even better if the Council had moved earlier but I blame the Government not Bolsover for this. Their U-turn leaves the claim of being the “greenest government ever” in tatters and threatens to destory our solar industry which includes companies employing people here in Bolsover.

On the debit side the Council received a very bleak report from District Auditor. You can choose your own adjective to describe it and the circumstances that led to it: “critical, damning, a good hiding and abysmal” were all terms used at the meeting. Either way the Auditor told the Council that this was the worse audit letter she had written this year. Gloomy though it is it does at show that the Labour group are now starting to realise the severity of the situation and that is the first step on the road to improvement. You can call me an optimist but I think some Councillors now “get it” and with a new Director we should be able to take some steps towards recovering public confidence. The nagging voice is of course that the Council said all this last year and instead of getting better it got worse.

No more "improvements" please

The handful of Labour Councillors on Bolsover’s Cabinet have just decided to close all the Contact Centres in the District on Saturday morning claiming they can’t afford to run them anymore. However the savings are less than the extra £25,000 that they had to pay the auditor this year because of their failure to prepare the accounts, and a lot less than the excessive amounts they voted themselves in member allowances. They seemed to have forgotten that in these difficult times the public need easy access to the Council more than ever and for many that means Saturday mornings.

At the last Council  meeting the Leader, Clr Eion Watts, claimed that they had been and would be no cuts. So it’s perhaps not surprising, if a little bizarre, that Bolsover’s press release tries to spin these closures as some sort of “improvement” (yes really). If that’s what they think is an improvement perhaps they had better stop trying.