Where was Peabody’s board?

The Peabody Trust focused on “cutting-edge designs that do not meet the housing need of tenants” at the expense of “modernising the greater proportion of traditional tenement blocks”. What a damning judgment from the Audit Commission (14 May, page 9).

As tenant board members of an association where tenants have the majority voice, we have to ask: what advice was being given to the Peabody board members about its decent homes responsibilities when they approved high-cost, high-fashion schemes like BedZED?

Why did board members not demand that Peabody give priority to improving the awful state of their Victorian tenements before seeking to win the acclaim of the architectural press?

If our housing association had made such catastrophic misjudgments with public money, it seems certain that it would have been – rightly – put under supervision by the Housing Corporation and that we tenants would have been voted off the board.

Perhaps if Peabody, and all other RSLs, chose to have a balance of board power between tenants and professional board members, as in our case, such betrayals of tenants’ interests would be avoided. As it is, this fiasco appears to have left all the prime movers of the Peabody policy untouched or promoted, while the price is paid by tenants and scores of redundant staff.