Rooting for gossip truffles in the social housing woods
The screens, nurse! The screens!
Sometimes I worry about this sector, I really do.

Take, for instance, the strange case of Nottingham Community Housing Association. Delegates attending its annual conference were greeted by senior staff in white coats and stethoscopes, accompanied by support staff dressed as nurses.

The theme of the conference was "health check", apparently because NCHA was one of the first to be inspected by the Housing Corporation and has made its way through rent reform.

All well and good, but the sight of your bosses playing doctors and nurses would be enough to give anyone palpitations, wouldn't it?

The right-wing to buy
It seems those companies who bombard council tenants with leaflets extolling the virtues of the right to buy have found a new way of reaching their audience.

This week an advert appeared in the news pages of the highbrow Daily Telegraph, warning the masses of council tenants who – presumably – are avid Telegraph readers that the government is set to scrap the homeownership policy.

Perhaps the company was inspired by reports last week of a central London couple making a £94,000 profit selling on their former council home.

Is this evidence that former deputy prime minister Michael Heseltine was right when he said the right to buy was the first step in turning council tenants into Conservative voters?

Anybody there?
My old pal Dr Tom Manion of Irwell Valley Housing Association was left flummoxed by the news that a switchboard glitch closed his office to callers one Friday, the "thinking day".

Most Irwell Valley staff were on an awayday, but directors were required to be all present and correct at HQ, he tells me. "We were all sitting there thinking it was a quiet day," he adds mournfully.

Lara Croft hits the valleys
It's all go in north Wales. Last week Gwynedd council planning and economic development director Henry Roberts was lucky enough to meet Lara Croft, pneumatic star of the Tomb Raider computer games and film.

Actually, it was Angelina Jolie, who is playing Lara in the sequel to Tomb Raider, parts of which are being filmed in a specially-made Chinese village in Gwynedd.

I know the estimable Lara is supposed to be a whiz at solving intricate puzzles, but I'd like to see her negotiate a section 106 agreement.

Our next speaker is …

I am sad to report that political correctness and stringent security checks have taken the edge off the Liberal Democrats’ annual conference. In the old days anything could, and would, happen. Addressing last week’s conference fringe meeting on homelessness, Baroness Maddock, the Liberal Democrats’ housing spokeswoman in the Lords, recalled an occasion when a homeless man wandered into the very same meeting a number of years before. Having followed signs reading “Homelessness: this way”, he apparently supplied a particularly trenchant critique of politicians’ cosy views on rough sleeping. But far from being evicted, he was invited back for the full debate the following day.

Source

Housing Today