Tenants pay when things go wrong

SOCIALIST PARTY members are actively involved in the campaign by tenants of Peabody Housing Trust to stop it selling off 1,100 homes on the open market. These homes are concentrated in areas of central London where the shortage of social housing reaches crisis proportions.

The Trust says it's short of £165 million needed to bring its homes up to the government's "decent homes standard". Certainly many Peabody tenants live in Dickensian conditions but to 'solve' the problem by selling off "assets" shows Peabody is operating like a private landlord.

Council tenants are told to accept transfer of their homes to HAs because associations can borrow the money needed to do up their homes. But it's the banks rather than the tenants that really benefit.

Peabody has lost financial control of high-profile building developments and made a mess of its borrowing. Last year, it had to spend £55 million to get out of a long-term bond deal where it was paying very high interest (10.25%). That money could have gone towards improving homes.

What happened to the bosses that made this mess? Richard McCarthy, chief executive at the time, has gone on to an even better paid job as the senior civil servant in charge of the decent homes standard! In this role he refused Peabody tenants' pleas to use government cash to save the homes for the social housing sector.

Apparently HAs now need to be subject to 'financial disciplines'. Floating housing associations on the stock market would give them greater 'financial freedoms' and much more scope for the bosses to mess up. The people who pay when things go wrong are tenants and homeless people.