A CHRISTMAS STORY

No room

BARRAS HOUSE..built in 1992 by Carlilse City Council

`in the

inn`

The  front page Christmas headline has an echo of Bethlehem and the Nativity. The headline says:“Old Folks Forced Out of Homes”

The homes are in Riverside Housing Associaton`s Barras House sheltered housing  complex at Dalston, near Carlisle. Twelve elderly people live there but now, like Mary and Joseph, there is no room for them in the inn.

The twelve are being forced out and are angry about this upheaval to their lives and the break-up of their sheltered  home community says the newspaper, the News and Star, Carlisle.

In the case of one of the twelve- a man of 85- this is the third Riverside sheltered home he has  been forced to quit in the last five years. Others of the twelve have  twice previously been  asked by Riverside to quit homes.

A  woman living near Barras House is quoted  in the article as saying there is a real sense of community in and around the home and the planned closure is an absolute disgrace.

Riverside says it plans to upgrade Barras House in 2016, converting it from 19  flats to14 larger flats. Before then, the properties have to be vacated.

The  row about Barras House is not the first sheltered housing row Riverside has had since it took over the city council houses eleven years ago.

There have been several similar rows, largely because Riverside promised the city council at the takeover to keep all the city`s sheltered housing.

This was then located at  Morton. Harraby, Longtown, Botcherby, Brampton and Dalston.

Has Riverside kept that promise to the council?

In those eleven years , wardens were withdrawn from the homes. Then some homes were demolished, and  rebuilt with  a smaller number of larger more expensive flats or houses. One home remaining demolished is Lady Seat at Longtown.

In Brampton, after Riverside closed its sheltered housing complex, West Hill House,   another housing association has stepped in  to fill the breach and cater for the town`s continuing need for sheltered housing.

Impact Housing Association is  going ahead with plans for 38 extra care flats in the town.

In Brampton and other places with sheltered housing there  was the evictions, the upheavals  and destructions of the community inside each home. It was the same sort of  evictions, upheavals and community destruction now causing an outcry at Barras House.

This repeated  upheaval and community destruction since Riverside took over the Carlisle council houses is of  great concern to Carlisle Tenants` and Residents` Federation and to other critics of Riverside.

The concerns are about that promise to the city council, about the apparent  abolition of sheltered housing in the Carlisle area, and whether the people of Carlisle have been properly consulted and involved in all that has gone on in those eleven years.

And  what about Riverside`s present status as a  profit-making property developer? 

Has property developer Riverside-unelected and unaccountable- the democratic mandate to take on the job of properly responding to the crying local  need for sheltered housing?

(Incidentally, the need for sheltered housing is also a national problem says the Daily Mail today. It reports a survey by Saga saying that that thousands of older people are stuck in large family homes  because of a chronic shortage of retirement housing.)

Back to the local problem and another question:Has Riverside the skllls and know- how needed to cater for the needs  for retirement housing in the Carlisle area? Is Riverside up to the job?

And what about Riverside`s duty of care?

The best people to answer this question and the other questions are the sixty unfortunate frozen - out Riverside tenants in Longtown.

Once again,they are now struggling in deep mid-winter, unable to afford to heat their homes properly.

It is their third deep-midwinter of struggle. 

Community Voice, Carlisle is the blog of Carlisle Tenants` and Residents` Federation. Information about the Federation is available from 01228 532803 or 01228 522277. 

DAVID AND THE BEANSTALK

It`s panto

time

again...

Cyber attacks from North Korea would find it hard to outnumber  David Cameron`s  incentives to push us all on to housing  ladder and, hey presto, solve the housing crisis.

Government subsidies for Help to Buy and similar schemes  are all that is needed to provide that extra shove  to get us on to that magical mortgage ladder we can all climb and get a home. A bit like Jack and the Beanstalk,the stuff of pantomime

Welcome to tjhe mortgage ladder...David Cameron and a new- home couple

Back in the real world where the number of homeless  goes on rising and food banks go on expanding, several councils have resorted to buying back  at full market value some of the homes they sold off at a discount under the right to buy legislation.

The failure  in the past to replace this  sold-off social housing stock has led to a critical shortage of homes, reports The Times  newspaper this week.

The Times  highlights Leeds where the council recently paid nearly £1.24 million for 15 homes it sold over the  past decades for the total sum of £411, 000 at today`s  prices.

Next  year, Leeds plans to buy back a further 100 former council properties under the same scheme.

For The Times, this pantomime  story is what it calls” a huge loss  to the taxpayer.” The homeless, of course, see it  in a vastly different light. No pantomime for them.

Readers of the Times see it differently again. One of those readers in a letter to the editor looks back 30 years to the huge popularity of the sale of council houses when  the policy was announced, and the thousands of votes that policy won for Mrs Thatcher.

But, says that reader, the sale of council houses was nothing more than a private killing for some of us  at the expense of the rest of us. We are now living   with the consequences,  the consequences being   the housing crisis.

Tenants of who bought their council homes were not alone in making a  killing at the expense of the rest of us. Housing associations made a killing too.

They were given Whitehall cash  to take over many of the remaining council houses and are now growing fat in size and profitability under their new guise.

They are now mainly property developers like the much-criticised  Riverside Housing Association of Liverpool which has a near- monopoly of social homes in the Carlisle area.

Community Voice Carlisle is  the blog of Carlisle Tenants` and Residents` Federation Information about the Federation is available  from 01228  527358 or   01228 22277.

WILL EMILY THORNBERRY M.P. NOW TWEET FROM ENFIELD?

The Right to Buy

and The Right

to Buy Back

Emily Thornberry M.P. (above) should get inspiration for another tweet from an opinion poll in yesterday`s Times newspaper. The YouGov poll shows that most British people would like the energy companies and the railways to be bought back into public ownership.

Mrs Thornberry who was furiously attacked last week as snobbish following her tweet about the White Van Man in Rochester would probably agree with the poll. The rip-off energy companies are a  disgrace and you need a second mortgage to afford to travel by train.

But what about another privatisation that Mrs Thornberry showed a lot of interest , a privatisation that  has become just as unpopular as the energy companies and the railways? That is the privatisation of social housing, particularly privatisation by the bossy and autocratic housing associations?

Housing associations are still as bossy as ever and just as much in need of democracy as they were  when Mrs Thornberry introduced a private member`s bill in the House of Commons to make them more democratic. Sadly, the bill failed to become law.

 

Mrs Thornberry,  M.P. for Islington South and Finsbury said  at that time that most MPs felt that tenants' opinions were not being listened  to by housing associations. She said: I have estates in my constituency where tenants are pulling their hair out.”

Riverside Housing Association tenants and leaseholders in Carlisle and Longtown are still pulling their hair out.

Their annoyance and  anger is about the failures of their housing association landlord, the uncaring and inefficient Liverpool-based Riverside Housing Association with its 50,000 homes, many of them in the Carlisle and Longtown areas.

Two reports  this week aim to stop that hair pulling, The reports want  social housing to move on... but  to  starkly  different futures

The future seen by the first report- from the think-tank Policy Exchange-  is  a future of more and more privatisation. Housing  associations,  it  recommends should become free housing associations, possibly eventually  ending up with a stock market quotation.

(The homeless charity Shelter  will have  none of that. Shelter says in reply:`Housing associations are being forced  to chose between what is good for their balance sheets and what is good for the people they were set up to help. Who will provide the new homes  for the increasing number of needy people who can’t afford the market?)

The future seen by the second report - from the London borough of Enfield - wants  an end to privatisation and an end to  Right to Buy  which was brought in by Mrs Thatcher 30 years ago with big discounts for tenants.

Right to Buy  decimated social housing. But many tenants have become wealthy after  selling their former council house homes at a massive profit.

Enfield  has decided to try to end all this .It is to borrow up to £100m  to buy and renovate homes,  before transferring them to  a separate company it has set up.They would then be made free of Right to Buy.

This company will lease these properties at low rates  to cut  down the  7,700  people now in Enfield temporary accommodation, each costing up to £80 a night. There will be  another big saving - 25 per cent off the council`s  total  temporary accommodation bill.

 A council spokesman said;”Under Right to Buy we are forced to sell off our social housing at a bigger discount than ever and at the same time we are forced to pay bigger costs than ever for temporary  accommodation to house those people that social housing was created for. It just didn`t make sense. “

Enfield is Labour controlled, and Mrs Thornberry is from the same party. Labour once opposed  Right to Buy.

Mrs Thornberry wants to reform housing associations. But many people consider  housing associations are already too full of flaws and are beyond reform.

Mrs Thornberry`s White Van Man tweet was :"Images from Rochester".

Her next tweet should be:" Images from Enfield."