Payment decision is not ‘hasty’

I totally disagree with the views of Robert Appleyard, chairman of London & Quadrant Housing Trust, in the correspondence columns of your latest number (21 February, page 22). It cannot be said too often that there will be no compulsion on housing associations to introduce a payment regime if they are opposed to it. But there is no justification for the continuing blanket prohibition on payment.

I take particular exception to the final paragraph of the letter, where he suggests that the Housing Corporation might be about to take a “hasty and ill-advised decision” to allow payment. This topic has been around for years and to my knowledge the latest round of consideration of the subject began in early 2001. I was told by a very senior Housing Corporation official at the NHF Conference in September 2001 that a decision to allow payment was imminent.

We had a long, ponderous and absurd consultation paper on the subject a few months ago, which seemed to be declaring on the one hand that the corporation was about to allow payment and on the other hand specified so many requirements that individual associations would have to meet before this would be allowed, that it completely negated the declaration.

Since then, there has been a further step in the consultation process: the issue of questionnaires to individual board members of associations.

The corporation is obviously scared stiff of taking any decision at all and the notion that it might take a “hasty and ill-advised” decision is ludicrous.

It is likely to take another year at least before the corporation takes any decision, negative or positive, in this matter.