• I AM pleased to see the CNJ highlight the plight of our 93-year old resident who was told she would have to wait three months for an emergency repair, (Housing repair delays are due to funding cuts, August 12).

I think the source of the issue can be found in the response by Camden’s housing management that “once the severity of the situation was correctly understood the following morning, a repair team was immediately instructed to attend”.

It boggles the mind that it takes more than a day of persistent phone calls from a 93-year-old’s daughter / carer to finally convince the council that a wheelchair-bound resident experiencing water streaming through her light fixtures should be considered urgent!

This is far from an isolated instance. Three other flats in the same building have dealt with this problem recently due to blockages in the roof guttering from overhanging leafy trees.

The Ludham and Waxham estate is one of the largest social housing estates in Camden with 276 households generating over £2million in revenue for Camden, but has suffered from the under-funded, poorly co-ordinated, remote-style management ultimately leading to the false economy of costly remedies and increased complaints.

Both phone and email requests from the tenants’ and residents’ association (TRA) to meet our housing officer over the past months have gone unanswered.

As chair of the TRA, I completely concur with Shirley Neighbour that the source of the problems are lack of funding, training and staffing levels to provide an adequate service to an estate of our size.

In addition, the disco-ordination between council departments and the unwillingness to work directly with TRAs (who have the best perspective of the issues on their estates) makes the job of maintaining housing estates increasingly, and unnecessarily, unmanageable. The money is there.

We are now being surrounded by hugely ambitious building plans by Camden Council for the Bacton low rise estate, the Wendling estate and the Murphy’s Yard developments.

But there is a clear disconnect between the funding commitment for more bricks and mortar housing infrastructure, and the funding commitment for the human infrastructure needed to maintain them.

BRAD HEPBURN
Chair, Ludham and Waxham Tenants’ and Residents’ Association, NW3