One Week With John Gulliver - Housing Associations - benevolent landlords or market-driven companies?

Published: 1 July, 2010

ONCE housing associations were seen as benevolent landlords. Tenants felt secure, rents were low.

Now many of them act more like private companies pursuing the best return on their capital.

A 13-room, five-floor Victorian terraced house in Hurdwick Place, Mornington Crescent, symbolises the turn of the wheel.

Its recent history goes back to 1989 when NHS Camden bought it from the proceeds of the sale of Friern Barnet asylum, one of the biggest mental health homes in Britain.

In 2006 One Housing Group (OHG) – in an earlier incarnation partly known as Community Housing Association – bought the same building and the mental health charity Umbrella, who had been in the property for 17 years, continued to run it as a care home.

When Umbrella lost their funding the powers-that-be “de-registered” it as a care home and the residents were moved out to more modern homes.

After six months of the property sitting empty and unused, you’d think this would give OHG the chance to return to their roots – and turn it into either refurbished flats or more up-to-date hostel accommodation.

Instead, they have put it up for sale at an auction to be held on Monday at BAFTA, Piccadilly, where it is expected to fetch at least £725,000.

Repeating an explanation made so often by local authorities and other housing associations when about to sell a property, OHG told me:  “The cost of refurbishing the property is too high to warrant keeping it.”

Umbrella’s chief executive Gareth Pountain is a disappointed man.

“It was not in a particularly bad state,” he told me.

“It wouldn’t have cost an absolute fortune to turn it into bedsits. It would be a shame if it was lost as supported housing for the vulnerable.”

I expect one of Umbrella’s patrons, Lord Melvyn Bragg,  would feel disappointed too.

OHG appears to be financially healthy. It has received massive government subsidies to provide affordable homes.

It recently won a £42million contract to provide 284 homes for the King’s Cross redevelopment scheme and has received £80m from the Homes and Communities Agency.

The OHG chairwoman is the Lib Dem peer Dame Rabbi Julian Neuberger, a mental health campaigner.

A recent bulletin from OHG chief executive Mick Sweeney reported improved finances and soaring “satisfaction” in the last year, adding, “all of this has been achieved despite the credit crunch, bank loan freezes and property collapse”.

At the same Piccadilly auction, OHG will unload another similar-sized property in Holloway.

An OHG spokesman told me: “OHG policy around the disposal of properties is to sell the minimum properties necessary to fund the Decent Homes Programme.

“The local authorities, the HCA and the Tenants Services Authority have been informed of our intention to sell and proceeds from the sales will be reinvested into our remaining stock to bring them up to the government’s housing standard.”

OHG obviously means every word of its statement. 

But it is all a far cry from those halcyon days in the 1970s and 1980s when housing associations were untarnished by mercenary motives – however essential they may be in today’s perilous financial climate.

Oil’s well that ends well in North Sea?

I WAS taken aback a bit when, at the Canonbury Society annual garden party, host Gordon Mackintosh mentioned the Gulf oil spill as I sipped lemonade on Sunday.

A blue sky, a glorious sunny afternoon, where did the oil spew fit in?

But Mr Mackintosh – described to me earlier by guests as a successful entrepreneur – introduced the subject.

As a man from Inverness, not too far from the North Sea oilfields, he explained how difficult it would have been to hit the right spot for drilling on the Gulf ocean floor.

As for the North Sea oilfield, he said, its life  is nearing an end. In the 80s its revenue helped Mrs Thatcher pay for  the army of the unemployed, I remembered.

“But there’ll be plenty of demolition work on the rigs,” Mr Mackintosh explained as we chatted outside his Victorian house in Alwyne Road, Canonbury. 

“Imagine,” he said “the rigs are the size of the Eiffel Tower – it will take 20 years to demolish them.”
Mr Mackintosh, born into a farming family, studied at Edinburgh University, then spent two years at a Dagenham plant linked to Fords.

Then he struck out on his own and now runs several businesses.

This week he is due be part of a government trade mission looking for orders in China.

I wonder whether he will promote a flourishing business his nephew runs in Inverness – the manufacture of oil from fields of rapeseed.

I gather the product, called Mackintosh of Glendaveny, sells well in supermarkets, possibly in Camden and Islington.

Mr Mackintosh, who has lived in Alwyne Road for eight years, is a keen member of the Canonbury Society.

It was founded in the 1970s when the famous architect Sir Basil Spence and developers wanted to demolish Alwyne Road for one of his spectacular creations.

But the residents resisted, and the society, one of the most influential  amenity bodies in north London, was born.

The party may have gone on until late after­noon but I noticed guests drifting away after 3pm – to watch the England-Germany match.

I dropped in at the crowded local pub to see the match but left at half-time – England were clearly going down. The oil spill seemed far away.

Moving (front) lines

AS the rays of the dying sun filtered through the windows of Lauderdale House in Highgate on Friday evening it was eerie listening to the disembodied voices reading the last letters of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some of the audience may have thought they were the real voices of soldiers – nowadays they are encouraged to compose a last letter.

But the talented contralto Lili La Scala , who interspersed songs of the last two world wars with these letters, explained that though they were genuine – many had come from the Imperial War Museum –  she had got her friends to read them.

Lili plans to take her show to the Edinburgh Festival next month.

It was a splendid opening night for the Holloway Arts Festival – reminding me of Kipling’s poems about our “Tommies” fighting, ironically, similar battles more than 100 years ago in Afghanistan.