• I LIVE on a King’s Cross estate owned by housing association One Housing Group (OHG) which is urging its tenants to take part in a “resident engagement strategy consultation” with a deadline of February 14.

This follows a “consultation” with tenants about One Housing becoming part of The Riverside Group, a bigger organisation based in Liverpool.

That exercise was rushed through, with the 60,000 OHG tenants having little information about the Riverside organisation OHG was to “merge” with.

All we had to go on were vacuous mission statements such as “Better And Stronger Together” and information supplied by the Social Housing Action Campaign via a Riverside whistleblower, which showed the new organisation to be as opaque, anti-democratic and anti-tenant participation as our 30 year experience of OHG has shown them to be.

These facts resulted in only 804 tenants of OHG or 1.5 per cent replying to the merger consultation; 2,828 tenants of Riverside took part, or roughly 3 per cent.

Yet we received a brightly coloured leaflet trumpeting the success of the exercise with “49% in favour and 12% against”, and an endorsement from TPAS “tenant engagement experts”.

The merger was spun by One Housing as “our plans to come together in a merger and create a new partnership”. But from what we can make out One Housing management has seen a £80million surplus in the mid 1990s being turned into a £10million deficit in 2019/20.

And despite the deficit the annual report for 2020/21 shows for that year 91 members of OHG staff earned between £60K and £100K and that 22 staff earned more that £100K.

Lower paid OHG workers are in the same position as us – in the dark.

One joint pledge on the coloured merger leaflet was that: “We will make sure there is a louder customer voice.” Well we won’t be holding our breath.

One Housing has behaved more like a predatory property developer than a social housing provider. We are the figleaf to cover their purely private and mixed developments with private, “affordable” that is, unaffordable housing and “poor doors”.

They have refused to recognise our tenants’ association, which has existed since 1980, because we won’t sign a corporate constitution which would allow them to shut us down and take our money if we disagreed with them.

They banned us from our own tenants’ hall for years. They tried and failed to start a yellow parallel tenants’ group.

They have tried to divide tenants by letting a large number of flats at up to 80 per cent of market rent with short-term agreements. They abolished the estate manager role which allowed us some sort of interface with the organisation.

To the extent that they have listened to our concerns, it is because we have made them do it or when they see it is in their own interests to know what is happening on the ground. But that is miles away from genuine, democratic tenant involvement.

So, as a tenant of OHG, I do not intend to take part in this new “consultation”. Based on past experience, I do not believe that OHG is acting in good faith. We shouldn’t lend credibility to another piece of box-ticking designed hide the truth and cover their backs.

I urge other OHG / Riverside tenants not to take part. We should instead look to our own organisations for strength and join together across estates and housing associations to defend our interests whatever the future holds.

The Social Housing Action Campaign unites housing association tenants and workers. They can be contacted at: shac.action@gmail.com

CHRIS REEVES
Co-chair
Hillview Residents’ Association
– in a personal capacity