Please add your stories as a comment below

Camden is carrying out decent Homes works throughout the borough.

We have heard anecdotal reports from many residents of the quality and efficiency of the wroks carried out. We belive that there have been promises made and not kept, sometimes the work has been poorly carried out, and sometimes the serfice provided has exceeded expectations.

We would like to gather more evidence to use in our discussions with Camden Council and to help local tenants and residents associations working on behalf of their respective estates.

Take a minute or two to write down your experiences and views?

• Has decent homes worked on your estate?
• If not, do you have a date when will the work start?
• If work has started on your estate are you happy with the quality of work?
• Are you happy with the standard of communication from the Council and Contractors?

Please post your comments below giving as much detail as you wish

Tenants Services Authority The January 2010 meeting of Camden Fed was visited by Mr. Adrian Peacock from the Tenant Services Authority (TSA) who spoke on the new regulatory regime that will commence in April 2010.

Mr Peacock gave an overview on why the TSA has been set up. The organisation resulted from the Cave Review that examined the way housing worked as a ‘market’. The Cave Review came to the conclusion that housing operated in an imperfect market in which there was an imbalance of power to the disadvantage of tenants. It was felt necessary that tenants needed further protection through intervention and debate centred upon how to produce frameworks to protect tenants and guarantee the quality of service that followed from state investment. The outcome of this debate was the creation of the Tenants Services Authority in 2008 . The legislation also defined social housing for the first time. The TSA has inherited the regulatory aspect from the out-going Housing Corporation and is a non-departmental Government body acting as a consumer regulator and guardian of public investment.

The objective of the TSA is to bring all social housing into the same regulatory framework. The objectives can be summarised as:

1.                   Improving standards of service and delivery to tenants.

2.                   Promoting tenant involvement and empowerment.

3.                   Obtaining value for money.

4.                   Protecting public investment

5.                   Promoting the supply of social housing.

The TSA has sweeping powers to intervene with housing providers if need be but its approach is one of co-regulation as the TSA does not have significant resources to intervene heavily. The importance of tenants having ‘sign-off’ on proposals is recognised as is the need for more accountability in housing and less ‘red tape’. The TSA is establishing the principles of national standards which are outcome based and flexible. Part of this process places a duty upon social landlords to produce a compliance statement.

Mr Peacock placed the TSA within the wider European context. The British system was different to many other parts of Europe where wholesale de-socialisation has taken place. Mr Peacock thought that the TSA would do a credible job within the British system based on a mix of council-owned stock plus RSLs.

Response to: “A new inclusive Tenant Participation Strategy”

If we remove the gloss from this report titled “A new inclusive Tenant Participation Strategy (TP Strategy)”, the Council proposes a fundamental overhaul of tenant participation in Camden.

Words like inclusiveness are repeated several times, and while such words on the surface are admirable, there is a sense that current representative tenant structures are going to be somehow watered down by overemphasising the importance of the individual voice in tenant participation. While Camden Fed values the importance and added value of listening to the ‘individual’ voice we hold paramount collective and democratically accountable tenant structures.

Camden’s new found emphasis on the individual comes across significantly because the first reports brought to District Management Committees (DMC) was talking about the need to “build on, and strengthening existing TP structures such as DMCs and District Monitoring Panels (DMP)”. However in the agreed strategy document the play on words have changed to “building and strengthening tenant participation”. Instead, sentences like “strengthening and building on existing structures such as DMCs” have disappeared all together.

If there is a move towards “equal” involvement regardless of status (i.e. elected representative tenants) or tenure (i.e. a Housing Association or private tenant), then the council needs to be honest and tell existing DMCs and their member Tenants and Residents Associations (TRA) that they don’t need to jump through the hoops and set up democratically accountable TRAs because whether individuals or democratically accountable groups, we shall all have equal access to tenant participation.

Also there is a feel to this report that somehow existing structures may not be truly representative. If the Council believes this is a problem then lets see the evidence and address it instead of chucking the baby out with the bath water.

Key Line of Enquiries (KLOE) are a necessary evil as this is one of the tools used by government to judge councils performance in TP. However in eagerness to impress governments we mustn’t divert the necessary focus away from tenant participation and from actually doing the work on the ground to encourage tenants to get involved.

The Compact Monitoring Board (CMB) welcomes the support from DMCs for widening its remit to monitor the Tenant Participation Strategy. However there is some disappointment that CMB Members have had no opportunity to see this report before it was presented to DMCs. Clearly if the CMB is going to monitor the strategy there needs to be better protocols to ensure CMB members have opportunities to carry out their monitoring function.

Photo by gaspi