Social animal

Bringing the house down

The Scottish Federation of Housing Associations conference was the unlikely setting for a theatrical smash-hit in Edinburgh last week. A short play about Scotland’s dearth of affordable housing, performed by local actors to bolster the Federation’s campaign against right to buy, was what caused all the excitement. Music chosen for the performance was from 1980s favourites Madness; the track, of course, was Our House.

Regional dissembler

Anyone who mistypes the East of England Regional Assembly website address could be in for some interesting reading. Substitute “.org” for “.gov” after “www.eera” and you end up at an anti-assembly site where regional government is described as “a European Union form of government deceitfully introduced, often behind closed doors”. There are letters from one Tony Bennett (could it be the famous crooner?) and even from novelist Frederick Forsyth. But who’d get distracted by that when the real website offers such absorbing treats as that “regional integration strategy” report in full?

Sunshine on a rainy day

Nothing stops a member of the ODPM House of Commons select committee from getting to the facts. As wintry winds swept across their constituencies last weekend, four Labour committee members trudged off to work in – Singapore. This stop was followed by Melbourne, New Zealand and then San Francisco during a 13-day whirlwind tour. The four were committee chair Andrew Bennett, his deputy Clive Betts, Christine Russell and Chris Mole. Officially they were investigating tax and electoral systems but an ODPM source told Social Animal the trip “didn’t relate to any specific inquiry”.

Always the last to know

You might think the National Housing Federation would be the first to get the controversial news that associations would have to advertise procurement contracts in the European Union’s Official Journal. But NHF chief executive Jim Coulter says it was only given the details of this decision by press release. So that must be what the government means by “communicating with your stakeholders” then.

Scarily similar

The rank and file of the Conservative party may be worried that their “quiet man” has turned into an “invisible man”, as Jeremy Paxman put it on a recent Newsnight, but when it comes to housing Michael Howard has been putting in an appearance of sorts. Steve Clarke of Suffolk Housing Society told a recent National Housing Federation gathering that his staff mistook a slide of Housing Corporation head honcho Jon Rouse for the Tory leader. There’d be no mistaking their policies, of course.