Camden chief blasts unions over loss of "fourth option"

Camden council has hit out at unions over what it calls “a lost opportunity” for councils to access a “fourth option” for funding housing.

Neil Litherland, director of housing at the council was speaking in the wake of the announcement by John Prescott that a mooted review of council funding leading to a possible fourth option was not happening.

In a letter to Austin Mitchell MP last Thursday – which Mitchell read from at last Friday’s Defend Council Housing Annual conference – and which was to be copied to the leaders of all English stock-owning councils, Prescott wrote: “There is not and will not be a ‘fourth option’ for providing direct additional funds to local authorities to meet the decent homes standard.”

The letter referred to a vote at the Labour party conference, where the government failed in its attempts to persuade delegates not to support a motion calling for tenants not to be “financially disadvantaged” if they chose to retain their local authority as their landlord (HT, 1 October, page 7).

In the negotiations that led up to this vote, Prescott offered to undertake a review of council funding. This would explore the possibility of ensuring a level-playing field between councils retaining ownership of their stock or transferring it to an ALMO or housing association. The condition was the withdrawal of the proposed motion.

Negotiations over this review broke down when the unions and their negotiators were unhappy with the lengthy timescale over which the ODPM planned to conduct the review. Labour was defeated by eight votes to one.

It was this decision that was blasted this week by Litherland, whose council earlier this year received a resounding “no” vote for its plans to set up an arm’s length management organisation.

“I have quite a lot of sympathy for Prescott on this issue as prior to the Brighton vote the ODPM was looking to offer a constructive way forward. But this was blown out of the water by old-fashioned posture politics.”

He added that the negotiators had failed to adopt a “pragmatic position” that would have been to local authorities’ advantage over the longer term and that as a result the “opportunity could be lost forever”.

Daniel Zeichner, a member of Labour’s national policy forum who proposed the Brighton motion and who played a leading role in the negotiations prior to the vote, said: “I appreciate that from certain councils’ point of view, it would have been useful for us to have agreed a deal [that led to the review]. But we had to consider the policy as a whole and other authorities. Pressing ahead with the motion was felt to be the best way forward.”