Insanity!

Published: 13 January, 2011

• A REPORT will be going before the council cabinet titled Housing Revenue Account Rent Charges Review, in which head of housing Councillor Julian Fulbrook proposes that money can be saved, by “reducing non-essential communal repairs”. 

His report continues “the proposal is that non-essential communal repairs are not carried out… examples of non-essential communal repairs are listed below: Repairing boundary walls/ fences which do not pose a health & safety or security risk”.

The cavalier attitude revealed in this spending decision was at the heart of the housing capital programme of the last Labour administration, before it was booted out in 2006. 

It was a programme that told some tenants they would have to suffer sub-standard housing till possibly as late as 2030 and that expenditure on safety repairs would only be in extremis. 

Further to your report (Wall death: council in the dock, January 6) concerning Saurav Ghai, I am sure readers will be incredulous at Cllr Fulbrook’s proposal for the walls of the council’s estates. His report makes neither mention of a strengthened inspection regime nor the introduction of new safeguards to prevent estate managers from making incorrect judgments upon whether any particular case of disrepair presents health & safety or security risk. 

So… a council estate’s walls will only be considered to pose a risk when the district housing budget allows them to be considered so or when they actually fall over.

If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, then surely Cllr Fulbrook’s most recent decision deserves that epithet.

KEITH SEDGWICK, NW5