Hypocrisy from H&F’s part-time Labour Opposition but where’s the housing scandal?

Cllr Andrew Johnson, the Cabinet Member for Housing, writes:

There’s been a rather strange whiff in the air blowing through the Borough recently. No it’s not the slightly iffy Thames Water consultation over the super sewer, but something far more potent. It’s the stench of hypocrisy emanating from our esteemed part-time Leader of the Opposition, Cllr Steve Cowan.

Steve, fresh from a recent series of no shows at important cabinet meetings, seems to think that he has uncovered a major scandal within the Housing and Regeneration Department; namely the sale of a number dilapidated and empty council housing properties across the Borough.

Properties which, when they become void, are generally found in need of significant work to bring them back up to a habitable standard. Naturally, this costs money and in many cases is simply not a viable prospect. So we do what any landlord with a portfolio of properties would do. We manage our assets effectively to ensure that our limited resources are used to best effect and we do not end up spending significant sums of money which could be better used elsewhere. So in housing this means we’re disposing of a number of expensive void properties and using the money raised from the sale to reinvest in our housing stock and to help fund the building of new council homes.

So this year of the £35 million we’re spending on the capital works programme to our stock, a substantial proportion of that will be funded from the proceeds of expensive voids sales. Why is this you may ask? Well, without this top-up we would not be able to address many of the issues which are currently of concern to our tenants and leaseholders, including new lifts, new windows and doors and interior and exterior works to our properties.

We’re also using some of the money generating from the sales to fund the building of new ‘hidden homes’ across the Borough. These are homes which can be built on disused garage sites, pram sheds and void spaces beneath existing council blocks. These are being built to enable local residents, priced out of owning a home in H&F, to get a foot on the property ladder and remain within the Borough.

Now where’s the scandal, you may ask. Well so far there doesn’t seem to be one. Not when you also consider the fact that from April this year we will have to start to fund the servicing of our housing debt to the tune of £12m per year, under the new self financing model for council housing. That’s £12m taken out from the Housing Revenue Account (the account for funding our housing services and completely separate to the council tax) before we spend a penny on providing any services. Therefore, clearly we need to reduce this payment on debt in order to have more money to invest in our stock, or keep rent rises and charges down. So the only way to do this is by starting to repay the £200+million of debt, part of which has to be achieved by using the money raised from selling expensive voids.

So if the alternative is having rents rocket or selling a few empty properties, which need a fair bit of money spent on them, to reduce debt, fund some of the capital works and build new homes, then it’s expensive void sales every time. For it remains that if we stopped selling expensive voids we’d be looking at a rent rise of nearer 22% for our tenants rather than 7.65%.

It’s funny, but it appears that there’s still no scandal, not when you realise why it’s been done. But maybe it’s the fact that, what Steve failed to mention, was that when he was Cabinet Member for Housing he oversaw the sale of council houses too. At last we see the scandal, the scandal of hypocrisy.