21 June 2002
Increasing numbers of councils claim they will not be able to help the government achieve its decent homes target via the three existing mechanisms – stock transfers, arm's-length management organisations and the Private Finance Initiative.
Lynne Pennington, director of housing services at Nottingham City Council, told a fringe session at the Chartered Institute of Housing's annual conference in Harrogate that her authority needed to spend £450m over eight years but could afford only about half this sum.
If it made cuts elsewhere, services for tenants would deteriorate and they might move out – leaving the council with estates nobody wanted to live in.
A national market renewal fund would not help councils such as Nottingham, because neighbouring areas were worse off. 'The challenge is to find a fourth way,' she said. 'The clock is ticking. I have two years to find an answer to the problem.'
A vote taken among delegates at the conference, held on June 13–14, showed two-thirds of housing professionals do not believe that all 1.7 million unfit social sector homes in England will be brought up to standard by 2010.
In his presidential address, CIH president Richard Kitson accused the government of sending out mixed messages about alternatives to stock transfer following the Birmingham ballot, where tenants turned down plans to transfer 94,000 properties to a housing association.
'Having made real progress in improving homes and set the ambitious ten-year decent homes target, it would be a major tragedy
if the government were now to lose its way and allow council housing to slide back into disrepair just when the tide is beginning to turn,' he said.
Delegates were delighted by the draft Local Government Bill which outlines plans for councils to borrow money without Whitehall approval. But Mavis McDonald, permanent secretary at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, warned that it was premature to suggest this might open the floodgates to spending. 'To pay for the cost of borrowing you have to have the revenue resource to pay the debt,' she said.
Earlier she had stressed that the sector needed to show that with the money it had already received, 'it can spend effectively and deliver real improvements now'.
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