Tenants who are left with nowhere to raise concerns

WITH “arms’-length management organisations” like Homes for Islington (HfI), councils have become commissioning bodies separated from the day-to-day responsibility of looking after housing stock. 

The question of accountability and responding to residents’ concerns has basically been lifted from councillors. That public accountability has not been taken up by HfI’s directors, who do not hold surgeries. Their code of practice means they are not allowed to voice opinions in public. Indeed, as directors they are required to support the company.

Whatever we think of politicians and political parties, there is at least another view or an opposition. Differences can be aired in public, performance can be criticised.

It may sound implausible, but as far as I can see the council may be free at some time in the future to commission any other company to manage our housing. Were that to be the case it is a moot point as to whether such a company would have any connection at all to Islington. It could be a private company whose primary duty was to increase its shareholders’ profits. What price then going to your councillors and asking them to intervene on your behalf? 

I’d like to see control handed back to the council but some degree of clear identity maintained. I’d like to see elected resident directors maintained, as long as they had the same freedom of opinion, accountability and availability at surgeries as councillors. I’d like to see proper residents’ consultation put back in place with the reinstatement of disbanded panels, including the Federation of Islington Tenants’ Associations.

RICHARD ROSSER
Highbury New Park, N5

• When I read “there are arguments for and against HfI” (Petition in call for HfI axe, July 1), I realised that stating the obvious is alive and well in Islington Council.

However, rather than dwell on the glib fence-sitting, I thought I’d set out the arguments for better-informed consideration. First, the arguments for HfI:

• Keeping HfI allows councillors to shirk a core responsibility of the local authority and plead impotence when approached by residents about mismanagement of services, shoddy workmanship, extortionate charging and ultimately non-delivery.

• It creates superfluous layers of highly-paid senior management (at our expense).

• HfI has great expertise in producing glossy brochures telling us about “fundamental housing issues” such as who will be participating in the 2012 Olympics, as well as reassuring the thousands of us who constantly experience appalling standards and treatment that ours are isolated incidents.

The arguments against HfI:

• HfI has the best part of 1,000 staff to manage 28,000 properties (let’s call it 30 properties per head?) and yet can’t even organise repairs, let alone carry them out

• Islington receives more from the national rent account (the HRA) than it collects in rent. From next year Islington will have to be self-financing, so rents will have to go up. And that’s before HfI’s extra costs for management fees and glossy brochures.

• HfI “resident directors” were elected as volunteers but pay themselves £10,000s in salaries (plus expenses).

In summary, HfI is inefficient, ineffective and unaccountable.

The online petition is now accepting signatures, but is not easy to locate on the council’s website. Anyone wishing to support the petition can easily link to it at www.disbandHFI.org.uk

THOMAS COOPER
Petition creator, N5

• HOMES for Islington should be renamed Havoc Follows Incompetence.

Thomas Cooper is spot on: everyone who has had HfI involved in their refurbishment has something to complain about.

On the first day, dozens of workmen invaded your home; over the next few days they disappeared (and not because the job was completed).

Then they kept coming and going, would ask for keys (and lose them) and leave your street door open when no one was in your house. There have been cases reported of workmen found sleeping in beds.

Everyone involved should hang their heads in shame.

KEN PAYNE
Poets Road, N5

LIBERAL Democrats went into the elections last year promising to consult tenants and leaseholders about the future of housing provider HfI. We have since been calling for a ballot on whether HfI should continue now that most of its work is complete. But Labour councillors have refused to back this idea.  

Whatever your views on the future of HfI, tenants and leaseholders deserve to have their say. The fact that some residents have started a petition just shows the strength of feeling among some parts of the community. 

As an HfI tenant, I am concerned that the council’s “consultation” will just be a sham designed to produce the answers they want because they have already made their minds up. To already have tenant and leaseholder representatives pulling out of the council consultation does not exactly bode well.  

CLLR LORRAINE CONSTANTINOU
Lib Dem, Hillrise ward 

Published: 8 July, 2011