03 March 2006
Scottish Communities Minister Malcolm Chisholm has given assurances that plans to transfer control of Glasgow's public housing stock to community ownership will go ahead despite a reported £300m funding gap.
In one of Britain's biggest council housing transfers, the city's 80,000 council houses were taken over by the newly formed Glasgow Housing Association in 2003. The GHA is due to hand over control to local community organisations.
Fears that the proposals could be derailed were voiced this week when a GHA document leaked to BBC Scotland revealed a £300m funding gap for the second stage transfer. It warned that the GHA alone could not deal with the scale of the funding gap.
However, the Executive denied that the plans were in jeopardy and stressed that ministers were 'absolutely committed' to community ownership via the second stage transfer. According to the Executive, the funding gap figure is out of date.
Chisholm said the document 'assumed 63 new local housing organisations with separate staff, premises and bureaucracy, and that will not happen. Many of the local housing organisations are existing housing organisations.'
The GHA has come in for criticism over an alleged lack of progress in moving towards the second stage transfer.
The spokesman for one housing association said he believed the document had appeared now because the GHA was 'fundamentally finding the whole thing just too difficult and too awkward'.
PFmar2006
