• Gremlins struck last week's announcement of a new discussion body for tenants headed by Lord Falconer, our most voluble minister. The email ended up unkindly headed "Sounding boar". He's obviously warming to his tusk, er, task.

  • The wags at Housing Quality Network have come up with a more pithy version of the Housing Inspectorate's ratings system. From now onit seems, councils will be "thriving, striving, skiving or diving".

  • That august body the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has bats in its belfry. It has issued a solemn warning that "construction professionals must always assume bats are present and act accordingly, or face prosecution". This must surely refer to building projects, as opposed to bats flapping about the ears of builders as they lie in bed or go to the pub or whatever. But still, it is enough of a problem for the RICS to have commissioned academic Peter Fenn to investigate.

    Several pieces of legislation, Fenn found, protect bats and their roosts, adding the possibility of prosecution to the potential ecological damage.

    Unstartlingly, he discovered that, "awareness of bat-related issues is low within the construction industry", and suggests a number of "bat detection techniqus".

    Whether this involves a bat detector van to record high-pitched squeaks is unclear.

  • Every newspaper diary column seems to have a "wicked whispers" item in it these days, and Reality Check always enjoys a bit of bandwagon jumping. So here goes: Which tenant board member apparently enjoyed the hospitality at a recent Housing Corporation event so much that, following some tired and emotional shenanigans, he was colourfully "unwell"?

    Allegedly, his unwellness occurred all over a high-profile corpy bigwig, who this column suspects would also like to remain nameless. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase 'tenant involvement'.

    • Source

    Housing Today