Our Chair Sue Roberts was on particularly fine form in Harrogate. Spotting the Housing Minister, Grant Shapps, out of the corner of her eye, she managed to collar him ahead of some 200 other housing delegates at a reception put on by the Chartered Institute of Housing.
After the introductions, Mr Shapps said he was a strong supporter of ALMOs and believed that ALMOs should be given the ability to build new homes (but was still fighting with the Treasury on that one).
He also stated loud and clear that ALMO tenants should be given a vote should their local authority want to bring the ALMO back in house or make some – not that this is an issue in any way in Wolverhampton. It was great to hear him continue to back tenant involvement so robustly – such a key element of the ALMO movement.
As vice chair of the National Federation of ALMOs, Sue now has lots of experience of meeting Ministers and other decision makers. She left Mr Shapps in no doubt as to her views on how ALMOs have improved services with tenant involvement.
I’d like to extend an open invitation to Mr Shapps to visit us at Wolverhampton Homes and hear about how tenant involvement has been critical in our success. My door is open, Minister!
Showing posts with label Harrogate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Harrogate. Show all posts
Tuesday, 5 July 2011
Thursday, 30 June 2011
Enough of the glass half-empty
I’m just back from the annual CIH conference at Harrogate and feeling rather depressed, not just because I am half a stone heavier. The tone of most of the sessions that my Chair, Sue Roberts MBE, and I attended was negative and flat, and the people I spoke to agreed.
While I know there are worries ahead with benefit cuts and so on, surely we go to these annual get togethers to come away inspired and reinvigorated, better equipped and more enthusiastic to improve homes and lives locally?
Most of the depression stemmed from the fact that building new council and other social homes is now much more difficult with less funding for building new homes. The cuts have hit housing harder than any other service.
Houisng is suffering some of the deepest cuts of all Government services. The government sees new social housing being funded by increasing the rent on some new homes in the housing association sector to 80% of market rent. Councils can also borrow money for new building, if they have the headroom in their business plans, and pay it off using the rental income over the next 30-40 years. Whether or not they have the capacity to borrow, councils may be called on to contribute in kind by giving away land and allowing private homes to be built to subsidise the social ones.
As an Arms Length Management Organisation, we don’t own homes or land and at the moment, we cannot access funding to build new homes in our own right. The challenge we face is to work out how can we contribute to getting more social homes in Wolverhampton where we now have more than l3,000 people on the waiting list. Many of these are our own tenants who desperately need larger or more suitable housing.
One way is to work with investors – large insurance companies, pension funds and the like – who could buy or build homes and then lease them to Wolverhampton Homes to manage for the next 10, 20 or 30 years – or even longer. We already manage nearly 23,000 homes, so it would be both easy and cheap for us to manage several hundred more.
As a three star housing organisation, the investor could be safe in thinking that their investment was in good hands and they would get a small but steady return on their investment. When the homes are eventually paid for, depending on whether or not the council contributed the land free of charge or not, the homes could be sold and profits split, or they would pass to the council forever.
Much of the talk at conference was about now being the time of management not building so I for one, feel cheered by the prospect of capitalising on our strength in managing homes while creating more Council housing for the people of Wolverhampton.
While I know there are worries ahead with benefit cuts and so on, surely we go to these annual get togethers to come away inspired and reinvigorated, better equipped and more enthusiastic to improve homes and lives locally?
Most of the depression stemmed from the fact that building new council and other social homes is now much more difficult with less funding for building new homes. The cuts have hit housing harder than any other service.
Houisng is suffering some of the deepest cuts of all Government services. The government sees new social housing being funded by increasing the rent on some new homes in the housing association sector to 80% of market rent. Councils can also borrow money for new building, if they have the headroom in their business plans, and pay it off using the rental income over the next 30-40 years. Whether or not they have the capacity to borrow, councils may be called on to contribute in kind by giving away land and allowing private homes to be built to subsidise the social ones.
As an Arms Length Management Organisation, we don’t own homes or land and at the moment, we cannot access funding to build new homes in our own right. The challenge we face is to work out how can we contribute to getting more social homes in Wolverhampton where we now have more than l3,000 people on the waiting list. Many of these are our own tenants who desperately need larger or more suitable housing.
One way is to work with investors – large insurance companies, pension funds and the like – who could buy or build homes and then lease them to Wolverhampton Homes to manage for the next 10, 20 or 30 years – or even longer. We already manage nearly 23,000 homes, so it would be both easy and cheap for us to manage several hundred more.
As a three star housing organisation, the investor could be safe in thinking that their investment was in good hands and they would get a small but steady return on their investment. When the homes are eventually paid for, depending on whether or not the council contributed the land free of charge or not, the homes could be sold and profits split, or they would pass to the council forever.
Much of the talk at conference was about now being the time of management not building so I for one, feel cheered by the prospect of capitalising on our strength in managing homes while creating more Council housing for the people of Wolverhampton.
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