In bed with landlords

Published: 12 November, 2010

• ASK tenants if they expect more of their landlords and they will generally reply in the affirmative. 

Tenants will generally mean by this that they expect a more professional job from those who get their rent money. They expect a job that is at least as good as they could do themselves and they are shocked, time and time again, to see how much money is wasted with abortive and unnecessary work.

Landlords, on the other hand, will use a tenant’s “yes” to justify venturing into the provision of additional services, the cost of which must inevitably be recovered through rents and service charges.

So it is that whoever gets to write the questions and process the answers gets to determine the outcomes.

 Many of us who have bothered with consultation exercises were troubled by this until Labour councillors drew our attention to Lord Justice’s Sedley’s requirements for proper consultation whereby:

• Consultation must be made at a time when proposals are at a formative stage;

• Sufficient reasons for the proposals must be given to allow intelligent consideration and response;

• Adequate time must be given for a response; and

• The product of the consultation must be conscientiously taken into account in finalising proposals.

But that was when Labour was in opposition. Now that it is in power and in bed with the landlords, Sedley requirements have been set aside.

The Tenant Services Authority (TSA), in accord with the doctrine of “localism”, writes in Going Local: Landlords and Tenants Working Together to Raise Standards: “The TSA wants tenant empowerment to be at the heart of the new regulatory regime.”

Proper consultation should have been regarded as the essential foundation for tenant empowerment – if indeed there ever was to be any real empowerment.

CHRIS GRAHAM
Tollington Park
N4