SPINNING TO A MERSEY BEAT

Do You Want

To Know

a Secret?

                             Mersey Beat 1961....THE BEATLES

It has been a  busy week for spin doctors.

And it has been a busy week for those of us who want to know the truth behind  what  the spin doctors tell us.

No spin doctors have worked harder this week than those with a Mersey  beat. They are  working their spin on those of us  who are simple enough to believe that their  Liverpool housing association is some semi-benevolent organisation motivated mainly by charitable aims.

Housing associations are no such thing. We now have it confirmed that housing associations are in fact  nothing more than  mainly business companies, motivated increasingly by making a profit. And despite what the spin doctors tell us, that is now an undeniable fact.

The spin doctors with the Mersey  beat are part of the massive Riverside Housing Association,  which has 50,000 homes, many of them in  the Carlisle area.

For many months, it has been clear that Riverside, with its recent rocketing extra charges to tenants and leaseholders in the Carlisle district  and its increasingly bossy ways, is in fact  mostly a business organisation  making a profit.

Up to recent years, Riverside, like the other housing associations has been propped up by government  grants and subsidies. Now Riverside and the others are being  increasingly propped up by  business  activities.

In the past year there has been a sharp rise in these business activities...such a sharp rise that experts are now talking about “a tipping point”. This is the point where housing associations become more dependent on  profits than  government cash.

One expert - Steve Douglas, a partner at consultancy organisation Altair - put it this way this week in the influential social housing magazine, Inside Housing. He wrote: “I think what we have seen this year is the tipping point, away from grant and public subsidy to underpin development to commercial activity.”

Tipping points of course lead to a complete change of balance and with  this a complete change of direction. The indications are that  this change will lead to the complete privatisation of housing associations.

And then, more tipping points?

And then, where?