Sarah Paton
and Riverside`s
 |
Sarah Paton will again meet critical Carlisle city councillors next
month as the council tries to keep in check her Riverside Housing Association.
Keeping in check because many people say that Riverside is flawed
in its culture and in the way it deals with its 6,000 tenants and leaseholders
in the Carlisle area.
The meeting will be the third the council`s Community Overview and
Scrutiny Panel has arranged following the recent appointment of Ms Paton
as Riverside`s north regional director.
Councillors are hoping for ideas from these meetings that will help them
to come up with a new checking system to put an end to the apparently
endless series of complaints about Riverside`s dictatorial
culture and its gross inefficiency.
A starting point for the councillors in their search is a comparison ot
Riverside`s methods and culture with the methods and culture of two other
housing associations operating in Carlsle.
The two, Impact and Two Castles are not at all like Riverside … they are
highly respected in the city.
Representatives of the two have addressed the councillors and answered searching
questions relating to what Ms Paton told the councillors a few weeks ago and
relating also to the apparently endless series of complaints about Riverside.
Hopefully after all of that a new checking system will be formulated.
And hopefully that will be the end of the matter.
But critics of Riverside should not hold their breath. Riverside
have been here before.
Riverside spin and Riverside gobbledegook ensured that things never
changed in the 14 years since the Merseyside- based Riverside took over the
city`s former council houses.
There never has been an effective checking system. Riverside remained a
law to itself.
How did this come about?
Like all the other housing associations, Riverside escaped being
included with other public bodies in Tony Blair`s freedom of information legislation.
Lucky for Riverside, its dark corners remained hidden away.
The one hopeful check during those 14 years was a government checking
system, the Audit Commission.
The Audit Commission was a statutory corporation whose main objective was to appoint auditors to local public bodies in England, set the standards for auditors and oversee their work.
The Audit Commission was a statutory corporation whose main objective was to appoint auditors to local public bodies in England, set the standards for auditors and oversee their work.
The commission had Riverside`s Carlisle operation in its sights and
produced reports on its inspections there.
Riverside became very much on the defensive but fought back and managed to get at least one Audit
Commission report watered down. That made made the report ineffective, said
critics at the time.
An ineffective report was bad enough. But a fatal blow came in 2010 when
David Cameron`s coalition government abolished the commission. It was one of
that government`s first acts. The commission was in effect privatised.
Lucky once again for Riverside. The dark corners continued to remain
hidden.
The abolition of the commission was bad for tenants recalls Jimmy Devlin
a veteran tenants` champion and chairman of the North West Tenants` Assembly.
Jimmy told this blog: “We`ll never understand why the Audit Commission
was scrapped. It was a great friend of
housing association tenants. The Assembly says bring back the Audit
Commission“.
