What are they hiding?

Published: 19 November, 2010

• WEEKS ago I made a Freedom of Information request to have itemised the Homes for Islington (HfI) resident board directors’ individual yearly expenses from HfI’s inception in 2004 to the present. I was sent, almost a month after the legal deadline, a sanitised list, which gave me a fraction of information about how much each director spent and on what and for only one quarter of years 2010 and 2009. 

Goodness knows what is spent by HfI directors in the other three-quarters of those two years and why can’t I have the information between 2004 and 2008? The supplementary document claims HfI board members are restricted to £500 a quarter, but if they will not make the information public how can we be really sure this is fact?  

Our MPs and councillors all make this information available for 12 months of the year, so I’m not clear either why HfI resident directors feel they are somehow exempt from closer scrutiny, and what it is exactly that they are hiding? 

I cannot imagine that, if these expenses were all above board, HfI would be so resistant to transparency. It must keep accounts surely and why would it take so long to be given two spread sheets? It argued in writing that it needed extra time to make the information palatable and digestible for the public, so it can be published on HfI’s website. 

I did not ask HfI to publish this information online. Nor would I ever assume the public were so financially innumerate they would need this information reduced to one quarter. I simply asked HfI to make all the information available for the years 2004 to 2010.  

I urge fellow residents to make a similar request to HfI and find out for themselves that the only bricks and mortar it seems really good at constructing is a wall for similarly concerned residents to bang their heads on. Like other tenants and leaseholders, in theory I pay HfI for housing services, not for the privilege of metaphorical concussion. 

JUSTINE GORDON-SMITH
Crouch Hill, N4