‘Just providing social housing in itself is not enough as, at its heart, it needs to be open, accountable and responsive to the needs of its residents’

• READ through any property auction catalogue and chances are that in amongst all of the homes listed for sale by individuals there will also be a surprising number that are being sold off by housing associations as well.

According to the Guardian newspaper: “Nationally, sales of housing association social homes to the private sector have more than tripled since 2001, with 3,891 social homes sold in 2016. Overall, more than 150,000 homes for social rent have been lost since 2012.”

They go on to add: “Housing associations have made at least £82.3m from auctioning homes in five London boroughs (including Camden) since 2013, according to figures seen by the Guardian.”

Like Islington and Shoreditch Housing Association (ISHA) in last week’s paper (Social housing flats sold on private market to pay for post-Grenfell safety works, July 14), the reasons that are often put forward by landlords as to why this is happening is to either fund desperately needed work to their remaining stock, or because some of the individual properties themselves need extensive repair and this is too expensive for them to carry out.

Quite how selling two properties in Newton Street for around £600,000 each will help ISHA in any significant way financially is a mystery to us, as is the reason why landlords leave some of their properties sitting empty for so long that they then become too expensive to renovate, especially in a time where there is such a huge shortage of genuinely affordable social housing.

We do understand, as ISHA states in the article, that: “Grenfell highlighted shocking standards amongst many building contractors”, but the question we would ask of them and the other housing associations operating in Camden, is why don’t they have the necessary staff and systems in place to rigorously manage their contractors and ensure that the work they carry out on their behalf (which is being paid for by the tenants) is of the required standard?

This seeming inability to manage both reactive repairs and cyclical works also has some major implications for these landlords, when it comes to managing the large-scale retrofitting work their stock will require as part of their contribution towards meeting the government’s net zero emissions targets for 2050.

The tenants who attend our quarterly Camden Housing Association Residents Group meetings continually complain of poor communication from their landlords, something which is echoed by the tenant in the article who says: “We feel let down that no one has even told us about the plans before it was well under way.”

What this tells us is that just providing social housing in itself is not enough as, at its heart, it needs to be open, accountable and responsive to the needs of its residents.

Will the proposals in the government’s Social Housing White Paper be enough to achieve the “transformational change” for social housing residents they claim it will bring about?

Although the White Paper is a step in the right direction, we think that its failure to mention things like making housing association boards and their members accountable to residents, means that it doesn’t go anywhere near far enough, to achieve the culture shift that is so urgently needed in this vital sector of housing.

ROBERT TAYLOR
Camden Federation of Private Tenants 13 Malden Road, NW5