@upthecreekyetagain wrote:
“Is it not time that these large developers are curbed, and told to build what is desperately needed, rather than what will make them the most money.”
Isn’t a more pertinent question, why can’t local councils be given the ability to raise the funding to develop their land themselves?
That way they decide what is needed and how many are needed.
Tens of thousands of new homes are being built within a 10 mile radius of where I live, (Horley/Gatwick/Crawley/Horsham), - the number of these which are for housing association use is less than 5% and the 10% or so of “affordable” housing in this number are only “affordable” if you can finance at least a quarter of a million!
Part of the problem is that many "Housing Associations" are so entwined with the Local Authorities and the developers they have completely lost sight of what a housing association was meant to be.
My mum lives in a flat in what was originally run by an association set up by the local authority when housing was taken away from them. It was small and local and specifically for Sheltered and Residential Care Homes, separated from the general housing stock so the council couldn't fill all the vacancies with it's nominees who didn't need the same level of support.
As time has gone on that idea has also gone. The local Association was first absorbed into the larger more general one. It was then merged with others in a cost cutting exercise and finally taken over by Orbit Group. Orbit calls itself a group of Housing Associations but is, in fact, a property developer. More interested in expanding its empire by concentrating on New Build and cost cutting everything else to facilitate that aim.
The block where my mother lives once had a residential warden/manager, available to stop problems before they became serious and support the residents. When she retired, her flat was rented out and she was replaced with a full time manager working office hours. That position was later down-graded to part-time with one manager covering several schemes. The latest cost cutting means there is no manager and the residents get a twice weekly "Welfare Visit" -- a knock on the door to ask if everything is alright. If it isn't they are referred to another agency.
The only way to get a flat in the block is through local council nomination and in another block, where there has been no manager since the last one left and was replaced by twice weekly visits the council has dumped several "problem" tenants. Easy to do as there is no manager to reject their application as inappropriate.
Meanwhile Orbit is celebrating its partnership with Housing England to build ever larger new build developments, its existing tenants can fend for themselves.
Effectively Orbit is just the old Council Housing Dept. under a different name. The staff hop back and forth between the two as part of their career path, everything is run to "Council Standards", meaning they are as inefficient and wasteful as they ever were. Lights go out regularly for a week or more. The entry-phone didn't work recently for nearly a month meaning carers had difficulty getting into the building.
In reality there are two organisations in one. A small underfunded one dealing badly with the day-to-day running of existing schemes. The other presided over by the usual tier of remote, over-paid empire builders, running a property empire (and probably hoping to privatise it before they retire taking millions with them when they go).
The reason there are the rigid procedures surrounding allocations and transfers is supposed to ensure transparency and fairness, but equally it rules out any use of common sense or logic. Most importantly, when things go wrong the Association can say "Nothing to do with us -- we did everything by the book, we're not to blame for anything that goes wrong."
