First the positive news. Amongst the yes votes this summer was East Staffordshire which overcame Green Paper distractions and a short-lived anti campaign to secure a very solid 77.5 per cent mandate for its 5,800-home transfer plan in August (Housing Today, 17 August).
Property services manager Gordon Alexander explains: "The timing of the Green Paper was difficult, but at the end of the day none of it is guaranteed. We are a small rural council, our capital budgets have been falling for years. We never seriously thought any money would come to us."
And in July two more transfers, West Wiltshire and Richmond, got the go ahead from respectable majorities of tenants. Yet both of those had managed to secure 10-year rent guarantees for tenants - a "carrot" that cannot have failed to win tenants’ support but which government has now scrapped.
A third was not so lucky. Wycombe district council believed it had also secured a rent guarantee as part of its planned 6,915 home transfer. But the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions rebuffed the idea (Housing Today, 25 May).
"Ministers believe that the wider objectives of rent restructuring - achieving a fairer and more rational structure across social housing - outweigh the arguments for long rent guarantees", it said.
However Ian Westgate, acting director for property and housing recalls: "Tenants were very keen to have the guarantee and we could account for it in our business plan. It was a real blow when we were told that we could no longer do it." A strong no-campaign was also in place.
"We also had reports throughout the lead-up to the ballot about misinformation," reports Westgate. "Some elderly tenants told us they would not vote in favour because they would not be able to keep their pets, and others had been told they would be forced to move home."
In the event, nearly 70 per cent of tenants voted and a slim 51.6 majority per cent scuppered the transfer plan on 11 August.
The issue of no campaigning reared its head far more strongly in South Bedfordshire last month, where the highest vote against transfer for twelve years was recorded (Housing Today, 17 August). Here tenants voted in droves (72.4 per cent) to reject plans to transfer 5,970 homes. The council was under sustained attack by anti-campaigners and a vociferous local press which ‘exposed’ plans to pay ‘fat cat’ RSL directors up to £50,000 per year. When the transfer failed the press followed up with a story ‘exposing’ the £300,000 bill spent on consultants.
The experience for corporate director of community and policy John Dean is illustrative of the pressures facing transfer ballot councils.
"If it was up to me I would tell tenants up front they are going to get bombarded with information that is incorrect. I would do this despite what consultants say," he says.
"When you pay for consultants you ignore them at your peril. It might make no difference but I would be more open in future about the sort of things we were caught out by during the ballot."
The kind of campaigning that caught South Bedfordshire out is a factor that councils, and all involved in the transfer process, ignore at their peril. For while housing professionals’ eyes were on the Green Paper, the anti-transfer movement has been growing.
A packed rally by Defend Council Housing at Westminster Hall in July had to close its doors on queues of more people waiting to get in. And an Early Day Motion against the ‘privatisation’ of council stock by veteran Labour left winger Jeremy Corbyn MP has 48 Commons signatures and counting.
It is now far more difficult to ignore the fact that the anti sell-off movement is a national campaign.
For Birmingham Selly Oak MP Lynne Jones, one of the signatories of the early day motion, the battle is between councils and central government.
"The government is embarrassed," she says: "I don’t think tenants should be treated as disrespectfully as they have been. They want to pay rent for a service [council housing] in the same way that middle class people expect to get a service for what they pay for."
She cites anti-social behaviour as the main cause of decline on council estates and accepts some councils make bad managers.
"But transfer should be the very last resort," she insists. "And housing associations should be small scale innovative organisations, not the main providers of social housing."
Meanwhile Defend Council Housing steering committee member Mark Weeks dismisses claims the campaign sows misinformation to secure anti-transfer votes. And he sounds a chilling warning to those high profile councils currently gearing up for transfer. "Birmingham is going to have a serious fight on and Walsall should give up now," he says.
You have been warned.
Source
Housing Today
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