In the past year, the corporation has been stripped of its watchdog role for housing associations, undergone a major restructure and suffered a strike threat; and next month, it will welcome a new chairman.
Perhaps the ODPM feels these changes provide good reasons to put the quango under the microscope. And while the review team is at it, it could unravel the confusion over the regional housing boards.
On the contrary, there are good reasons to leave it alone. After such a period of upheaval, sending in the inspectors is asking for trouble. Surely the corporation should be getting on with delivering the Communities Plan?
Any review will fuel the debate over the organisation's future. Deputy prime minister John Prescott admitted back in February that he had "given strong consideration" to merging the corporation with English Partnerships and the outgoing Housing Corporation chair Baroness Dean said in April that "there will come a point when the question of merger will have to be asked".
After such a period of upheaval, sending in the inspectors is asking for trouble
Although this review has not been set up to decide on the corporation's survival, it could bring us closer to asking that question.
A drop in the ocean
"I limit what I ask my landlord for now," says one long-suffering private sector tenant (page 22). "He thinks I'm a troublemaker already."
Campaigners had hoped that measures in the Housing Bill and Antisocial Behaviour Bill, plus the imposition of the decent homes standard on private housing (page 9), would give some power to the elbows of tenants too scared to complain to their dodgy landlords about shoddy living conditions.
But without widening the scope of the legislation – extending the licensing of private landlords to high-demand areas, for example – the plans appear merely to scrape the tip of the iceberg.
Source
Housing Today
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