I went along to the council meeting last night, and I wasn’t alone. It seemed like half the Labour Party were in the public gallery and the overflow seating, as well as all the Respect/SWP lot, and a fairly large crowd of council ternants.

Yes it was the special meeting for the council to decide whether to let the council tenants decide what to do with council housing. This is a very emotive issue for a lot of tenants and a lot of Labour party members. Jonathan Myerson wrote a good piece about it in the Guardian’s Society section this week. The crucial line in it was:

“The campaigning was bitter – the issue of stock transfer seems to be a galvanising crusade for the hard left, a no-brainer for everyone else.”

which pretty much sums it up for Crawley too.

Its quite a relief to not be on the council any more because this is a nasty decision to have to make. I think it is wrong that the government has imposed conditions and deliberately created a situation where councils have huge financial incentives to sell off their stock rather than keep it. However, the council (and its tenants) don’t have a vote to change that situation and level the playing field and have to decide what whether to cost the town a large amount of money on a matter of principle. They should not be put in the position where doing the wrong thing is the right thing to do.

At the moment the housing subsidy system takes about £12 million a year out of Crawley. I think. I am guessing a bit here, but working from the assumption of about £29 per week for about 8,500 council properties. Added to that, something like 75% of receipts from right-to-buy get taken by the government. If the houses were transferred to a housing association thats £1.2 million more which stays in the town, plus whatever the proceeds from sales are. Thats a lot of money to make up from somewhere else.

In an ideal world these inequalities would be sorted out before the tenants get balloted, but I doubt that they will be. The party, the labour group on the council and our MP all take whatever opportunities there are to lobby the ODPM, but I don’t think the DPM listens very well.

Mind you , there was a lot of rubbish talked last night, from both sides of the argument. A couple of points ought to be picked up on.

One point which is raised often is that council tenants can go to their local councillor if they are not getting satisfaction from the housing department, and the councillor can then sort everything out.

Firstly I slightly resent the suggestion that councillors can’t help housing association tenants: they can. They can deal with the various associations’ housing officers, make suggestions, and get things done. They just have to do it by presenting proper arguments because they can’t use bullying or other pressure on them like they can with council housing staff. MPs manage to get results for constituents from housing departments, benefit offices, social services, schools, bus companies etc. without having a direct connection with them, so a competent councillor can certainly get a result from a housing association.

Secondly I am amused by the notion that councillors can always get a result from their own housing department. There are good and bad housing departments and good and bad area managers. If you get a bad housing manager you are stuffed. If the whole department is bad you are doubly-stuffed. I have seen what should be trivial matters dragged out for years by housing officers even with several councillors all putting pressure on.

Another point which is raised often is that of political accountability. If council tenants are not happy with the deal they get they can vote out their landlord. Well, sort of. Their problems are likely to be institutional and their local councillor could be banging his head against a brick wall for them. They can vote to have someone else bang their head against that wall, but they can’t vote to have the wall knocked down. And of course there is the small matter that council tenants are not the only people voting – lots of owner-occupiers are voting as well and they are not bothered about council tenants. Added to that, its a shame but council tenants do not have a good record for bothering to vote at all. In this area the council tenants are a minority of the electorate as a whole, but a much smaller minority of the people who actually bother to vote.

Having said that, small minorities can hold the balance of power, and in Broadfield with its pitifully low turnout you only need to mobilise a couple of hundred people to swing a borough election.

It shouldn’t be beyond the wit of man to devise a system which is more accountable than council housing – like making all tenants shareholders in a housing association or making sure that tenants representatives make up a percentage of the board of a newly-formed association or something. A sort of co-operative. But that looks unlikely too.

The way it looks at the moment, a new new housing association would have all the Crawley council housing staff running it, so people who are happy with everything should find themselves still happy, but people with problems will still have problems. All I know for sure is that if retaining the stock caused financial problems which led to either cutbacks in other services, or increases in rents or council tax, the tenants who voted for retention would be first in line to complain about the consequences.

One other thing which I wonder about is why the ‘defend council housing’ campaign (which is mostly SWP/Respect) are so against the idea of a tenants’ ballot. They insist that nearly every tenant is in favour of retention, so why are they so opposed to a proper ballot to prove that? Is it that most tenants are not so opposed, but the campaign uses a few very vocal people to make it look that way? Or are they afraid that a ballot or its supporting literature would be worded in such a way, and with enough bias, to persuade people to vote for transfer?

Personally I hope that the council retains its stock somehow. If it is transferred then there is no way to reverse the decision – its gone forever. Voting to keep the stock is not irreversible. If it really does turn out to put too much strain on the town’s finances and the effects of that become apparent the decision can be revisited later.