This meeting is in Friary Hall, Crawley (by the bus station) on October 19th at 7:30pm.

The invited speakers are Norman Baker MP, John McDonnel MP, Henry Smith MP, Bill Randall (Leader of B&H council), Bob Lanzer (Leader of Crawley council), Eileen Short (from Defend Council Housing) and Robin Burnham (Independent Tenants Association)

Worth going if only to see how many of the 7 turn up. I’m guessing at least 5. But it is a serious topic and a topical one. In the Guardian today there is a scary story about unaffordable private rents which backs up all the points made in the flyer for this meeting, except it is even worse. The flyer says that private rents can top £1000 a month, but the Guardian story features a family in Brighton who are paying £1550 a month on rent out of their take-home pay of about £2000.

Of course, £2000 a month means they earn too much for a council house and they are not likely to save up for a 25% deposit with the £500 a month they have for food, clothes, heating, etc. so they are stuck there unless something is done to reduce the demand for private rentals – like building more social housing.

If you can’t make it and want to sign their petition go to http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk and search for Housing crisis! Build council houses.

The local aspect of this is that the story includes reference to a Channel 4 News report which claims that homelessness is being underestimated.  It says:

In Crawley, West Sussex, the Open House hostel said it turned away people needing a bed almost 2,000 times last year, although official figures estimate there are just seven homeless people in the town.

It is all doom and gloom, but I’m glad to see the issue of the so-called ‘hidden homeless’ getting more publicity, even though it is hardly a new phenomenon. It was a term being bandied around back when I was on the council, and the real problem with it is that, almost by definition, it is not easy to count.

One problem is that a family of three all living together in a friend’s spare bedroom are not officially homeless but just ‘overcrowded’ which doesn’t sound too bad but must be bloody awful and unlike people sleeping in parks and doorways they can’t be seen by driving around town, so the official homeless figures for the town are likely to remain nearer to seven for the time being.

I also sorted out all the bookshelves and put everything into some sort of order, put some pictures up on the walls and stored the rest in the loft.   Now all the frantic work is over I have put all my tools away and that makes a big difference. Still got a lot of our clothes in cardboard boxes until I decide whather we can afford to build a fitted wardrobe.

So we are all happy and cosy.  Just in time for the house to be turned upside-down this week when the electricians arrive mob-handed to re-wire the place.  Apparently it will take about four days and I am assuming the worst – like being left with lots of wallpapering and re-tiling to cover up the destruction, but it will be worth it in the long run if we get more plug sockets in more convenient places.  We also have a carpenter coming to look at a dodgy bit of flooring that could involve a bit of destruction, somebody measuring up to replace the bath, and somebody to do an asbestos inspection.  The fence in the back garden is also being replaced.  There may be something else I have forgotten about.

It is going to be a hectic few days, and electricity may be hard to come by at various times.  Hope the asbestos test has no nasty surprises though, given the number of holes I have been drilling.

A few surprises during the unpacking and sorting:

• I didn’t realise I had so many cuddly toys.  Six, including two Wile E Coyote dolls and a meerkat hand puppet.
• Found a Japanese phrase book that I have absolutely no recollection of buying.  I have never been to Japan or even had a trip there planned or considered.
• Noticed two CDs missing: Green Day’s American Idiot and Manu Chao’s Radiolina.   I am now starting to think that I never had them in the first place… I think I downloaded them instead of buying the CD, but I have spent the weekend interrogating everybody else about whether they have seen them.
• Found a poster from the first play I was in after leaving school.  A bit tatty, but it has gone up on the wall.

Perhaps the biggest surprise was just before we moved when we emptied our coin bottle.  It is a big plastic beer bottle that I have been dropping coppers into , as well as 20p and 5p coins.  It has been filling up over many tears until it reached the point of being hard to lift.  It seemed a bit unfair on the removers so Frankie and I took it to the coin-counting machine at Sainsburys.  Even with the larcenous commission that is taken, I ended up with over £200 which came in very handy indeed at such a time.

The second bedroom. Full of boxes

Third bedroom. Also full of boxes

I’m so glad I took a few days off work to get everything straight.Packing seemed to take forever, even though a lot of my stuff was packed months ago when our first move fell through.  It feels like we have been living surrounded by boxes forever, so it is a real relief to now only have a few left, and confined to one room.  On the day before we moved I got as far as about 8pm and ran away to Horsham to see Covered at the Queen’s Head, where on arrival the first person I saw was my erstwhile electoral opponent Jim Duggan. It was good to be able to catch up with him and with Damian.

The next morning the removal truck arrived early, so they were all parked and had their ramp set up for the time they said they would start.  They did a brilliant job too, so I’m only too happy to recommend Durrants to anybody wanting to move house in the Crawley/Horsham area.  A very good price too, though I’m sure that is partly based on not knowing just how many boxes of books I have.

By mid-day we were all moved in and getting everything in order.  Virgin said they would tbe around between 1pm and 6pm to connect the broadband, phone and TV and they turned up a bit before 5pm I think.   Everything was connected up and worknig well before 6pm so no complaints there either.

On the Sunday morning we were expecting a new cooker to be delivered, to replace the one I cooked at the old place.  I had ordered one online from AppliancesOnline because the price was quite good and they not only do free delivery but do weekend deliveries.   They called on Friday to confirm everything was OK, and then texted on Saturday to tell us a timeslot (between 8am and noon).   They turned up just after 8, unpacked everything and took away the old cooker and all the packaging, so after a few days of take-aways we had some home-cooked food Sunday night.

The kitchen and living room were sorted out fairly quickly, while Frankie helped a lot with the bedroom, putting together flat-pack wardrobes and chests of drawers, as well as moving heavy boxes around and putting all the camping and Christmas stuff up in the loft.  Very handy having a son who is built like a brick shithouse and currently unemployed!

Amongst all this I was gradually chipping away at the boxes of stuff: putting up shelves and filling them, with periodic trips to the tip to dispose of the empty cardboard boxes that were filling the house.  Somewhere along the line I changed my attitude towards books from “you can’t have too many books” to “I have too many books”.  I think that resulted in me throwing away about 10 books.  Well it’s a start.

By the end of the week I had put up 48 shelves with a total length of about 64 metres, or as my work would call it “64 linear metres” as if there is any other kind.  I think that may be a lot.  I think that another 3 shelves will just about do it.  I would have put them up already but I ran out of brackets.

The target was to get Chrystal’s room all set up before she got back from Uni on Friday, and we made it just in time.

The biggest help was from Southern Housing and Hyde Martlet who both worked wonders to get the exchange arranged in a really short time.  Jayne and the lady we exchanged with both work in schools so moving at the beginning of half-term was the best time for everybody.  Several times it looked like we would not be able to manage that, but in the end they managed to get past all the obstacles.

Throughout all of this I have been keeping away from the computer, except to keep up-to-date with newsfeeds and to tweet a bit.  I thought I should concentrate on the important stuff and not get distracted.   I think I am now near enough to being done to be able to once more dip a toe in the internet again.  It looks like there is plenty to moan about.

Normally I would worry about getting everything else in order before worrying about getting a PC or television set up, but it looks like we will have to get something in place so the engineer can test everything is working OK.

Very excited about it all really because this is the first place Jayne and I will move into together.  She was already living here when I met her and I moved in so this is like a new start for us.  It will be just like being newly-weds – right down to having bugger all furniture: as it stands our bedroom will contain only a bed for at least a couple of weeks.

On Sunday night I wrote about how we were only six days from moving house.  On Monday got a text from Jayne saying there was a hitch do do with the electrics at the new house.  Nothing to stop us moving, but it would delay it for a while.  Having already booked the lorry for Saturday, arranged for a new cooker and bed to be delivered to the new address, and with a Virgin engineer scheduled to turn up on moving day this was a bit of a disaster.

After work I went round to the new place so we could all discuss it and try to work out what to do.  It literally took me five minutes to walk there from work, reminding me of one reason I want to move there.  We had a plan, but not a great deal of confidence it would work.  I was so distracted that I went into work and forgot my security pass!

It sounds like a trivial thing, but I was very proud of getting close to four years working on the site without forgetting my pass once and having to go to security for an idiot’s pass.  It was especially annoying because our passes are used to buy things in the canteen and vending machines.

All day I was waiting for news of what outcomes our swappees had with the housing association, ombudsman, and all the other people they were talking to.   Not that I would get news anyway since I don’t get a mobile signal at work.   When I left for the day I called Jayne and she told me that everything was sorted and we were all set for moving on Saturday after all.

I’m not sure I dare believe it, and will not be totally comfortable until I am in there and busy erecting shelves, but for now it all looks good.

Earlier this year somebody put a slip of paper through all the doors in our street asking if we would be interested in exchanging house with them in Three Bridges.  We gave them a call as there was nothing to lose, and it turned out we all loved each other’s house.  We proceeded to fill out all the necessary forms and then it all got stopped because of a technicality.

By this time we had already got used to the idea of moving so when it fell through we started looking for somewhere else.

At the same time, the new government announced its intention to make council and housing association tenancies fixed-term for new tenants at some point, making it all a bit more urgent.  We didn’t want to find ourselves moving after then and facing another move after five years because all the kids had left home – far better to get it all sorted on the current tenancy basis, just in case.

We had a few people interested in exchanging house who then changed their minds for various reasons, and in the mean time we were still half-packed from the first prospect.  The problem was that I had a lot of shelves up for books and DVDs and we knew that our landlords would not let us move until the shelves were down and all the resulting holes in the walls filled in.  With well over a thousand books around the place this was quite a task.

It was getting to be a drag not having access to any of our books or DVDs, not to mention all the various files that were boxed up, and we got to the point where we decided to come off the home-swapping website and just re-settle here – but without fixing shelves to walls this time.   At that time we still had someone due to visit, so we said we would at least honour that appointment, not expecting much, and if nothing came of it we would take our lives off hold.

Of course, it turned out that the people who came here really liked our house, we really liked theirs, and there shouldn’t be the technical problems we had in the first case.  Even so, after so many false starts we were braced for disappointment again, but as each day passed it looked more likely to happen.

In fact the only problem was that we really wanted to move at the start of half-term so we would have time to settle in properly and that meant getting everything arranged very quickly.  Both landlords pulled out all the stops and that is going to happen after all.   The only practical problem was theat the other couple have a large marine fish tank, which takes a lot of moving, but they have moved a big vat of salt water and rocks here in preparation – making it very unlikely they will change their mind at the last minute.

After months of increasing stress it is all happening very suddenly and this was the last weekend to run car loads of stuff to the recycling centre, sort out clothes and dispose of furniture we are not taking – most of which has gone to the sister-in-law.  It has been a hectic weekend, but at least it now feels like ther will be an outcome at the end of it and the uncertaintly has been falling away.

The new house is slightly smaller than this one, but it has fewer stairs.  The only slight drawback is the location in relation to my workplace: it is about 100 metres away.  I had been hoping for something a little closer to work and not at the top of a hill to encourage me to use the bike again, but end up so close it is not worth cycling at all.  I shall just have to use the bike at weekends instead, and not being on top of a hill should encourage that.

Next weekend will be a bit fraught, getting all the gas, electric, phones and everything else swapped over, but it looks like we will only be without broadband for less than 24 hours if all goes to plan, which seems too good to be true.  The unsolicited testimonials to Virgin Media will be profuse and manifold if that happens.  I am already chuffed that, as a result of the move, we will get exactly the same services for abotu thirteen pounds a month less.

There is still a lot of stress associated with moving house but it is positive stress, if you know what I mean.  The stress of uncertainty has been negative, paralysing stress, leaving me feeling like a rabbit in the headlinghts, seeing a pile of things to do just building up but unable to actually do them.  I haven’t even brought myself to review any of the Amazon books I finished, let alone share my thoughts with an uninterested world about the new Labour leader and his cabinet, the recent Crawley by election results or anything else.

Maybe that will all change soon, though there is an awful lot of shelf-building to do first…

Of course, the other people decided they really wanted to move here, so we looked at their place and decided we really liked that, so now it is all on again.  Given our previous experiences with people being really enthusiastic and then changing their minds I am still going to assume this will fall through, but I hope it doesn’t.The previous aborted move was to Roffey and I’m quite relieved that didn’t happen.  Much as I like Roffey generally and the Roffey Griddle in particular, it was a very small house, a longer journey to work, and the loss of my old Blueyonder e-mail address.  Right now I am facing the prospect of having a shorter walk to my desk from home than I would have from our company car park to my desk.  So close it will not even be worth using the bike.

If it all goes ahead this time I think I will treat myself to 50MB broadband too – I can pay for it with the savings on the electricity bill that I am anticipating while Chrystal is away at uni.

Either way, I’ll be unpacking boxes and getting reunited with my books next month whether it is here or in Langley Green.  I can’t wait – I just got Moriarty by John Gardner.  It is the third book in a trilogy and it is so long since I read the first two that I want to read them first, but I can’t remember what box all my Sherlock Holmes-related books are in.

When Labour lost the election in May it was no great surprise, but when it became clear that the Tories hadn’t won either there was a glimmer of hope: at least those nice Lib Dems would rein in the worst excesses of the Tories wouldn’t they?   And then, like a scene with the Borg in Star Trek, they were assimilated all too quickly and the trappings of power seemed to take over.

Far from acting as a brake to the Tories’ plans they popped up fronting some of the worst and offering justification for others.  My erstwhile opponent, Francis Maude (AKA the Tory Peter Mandelson – I bet he loves that description) even felt able to say that the coalition is more radical than the Thatcher government.

As an aside: how well do you think they would have done if that had been their election slogan?  They have spent years trying to ‘detoxify the brand’ which in practical terms meant putting a lot of distance between the new cuddly Tories and the old nasty party; a tacit admission that they knew the general voting public wouldn’t see out-Thatchering Thatcher as an attractive proposition.

Last week I managed to get my hopes up again when I saw a headline in the Guardian about eliminating child detention.  This is one of those extremely illiberal situations that Labour really should be ashamed of that needs sorting out.  I would prefer it if a Labour government did it, but if the coalition sort it out then that is OK too.  Getting it sorted out is the important thing.

Then I read the actual story and found that the children would be freed from detention by being deported. Within two weeks. In some cases, though admittedly not all, the ‘freedom’ they face at home is far worse than detention in the UK could have been.     That is like saying all the right things about reducing the prison population and then revealing that the mechanism for doing that will be capital punishment – although to be fair Ken Clarke hasn’t said that yet.

A fine example of saying the right thing and then doing the wrong thing.  It reminds me of Peter Cook in the film Bedazzled where, as the Devil,  he grants Dudley Moore’s wishes but does so literally in a way that he really doesn’t enjoy.

Anyway, for those of us who like to think that there might be some hope for the Lib Dems after all, Simon Hughes popped up to criticise Cameron’s plans for social housing changes.  Hot on the heels of that is the news that he is not alone, and that the majority of other Lib Dems oppose the plans.

Of course if they had decided to not form a coalition, but let the Tories form a minority government, I would like to think that all of them would not only oppose the plans but be free to vote against them.

So far they are just saying the right thing and it remains to be seen whether they will follow it through with actually doing the right thing too.  We will have to wait and see.  My more cynical and Lib Dem-hostile colleagues would say that this opposition says more about the atrocious, ideologically motivated proposals than about the Lib Dems.

Meanwhile, if anybody needs a great example of what the country would be like with fixed-term tenures for social housing, just look at this story from Friday’s paper.

A day after Dave announced his intentions, Kensington & Chelsea council were onto a lady living alone in a two-bedroomed flat telling her that she had better move to a smaller place now while she can still choose where to go, because they will soon have the power to force her to move wherever they like.

Forget that Dave reckons it is all just an idea at the moment, and that even if it went into law it would only apply to new tenants and not affect existing tenants, we can see how some councils are absolutely raring to start harassing their tenants.

The lady in the story says:

I could not sleep for the last two nights. I have lived here for 22 years and my husband died 14 years ago. I told them the spare bedroom is very useful as I have grandchildren and I can have them to stay.

My children gave me £2,000 to paint my flat and put in new carpets because the council would not. So will I lose all this too? I know all the neighbours and my friends. Why make me move? I do not want to go.

Which captures a lot of the arguments already given for opposing the policy: tenants living in perpetual fear instad of feeling secure, the forced break-up of settled communities, and the removal of any incentive for tenants to decorate or furnish their homes properly.

Remember that all this pressure is being piled on before the policy even takes effect – a policy that is supposed to not affect existing tenants like this lady anyway – not to mention that most councils and housing associations define excessive under-occupancy as having more than one bedroom in excess of what is needed.  Current practice is to accept that a spare room is not an unthinkable luxury, but Kensington & Chelsea seem to think otherwise and maybe their hardline approach is pointing the way to what the future really holds.

If the Tories do force this policy through  – which they would surely need the support of the Lib Dems to do – that will be the hard part.  Extending the new erstrictions to existing tenants and redefining what underoccupancy means will be seen as tweaks that can be slipped in under the radar later. Or perhaps sooner rather than later.

I have to say that I would feel a lot more confident in the ability of the Lib Dems to prevent this if they were not embroiled in the coercion coalition and were not led by Nick Clegg.

Local Tories were shaking in faux outrage, accusing us of scaremongering.  Less than six months later comes the news that Cameron wants to remove the right to secure tenancies.  The reason given is to ‘make more efficient use of the social housing stock’, but really it is an admission that there is to be no attempt to increase supply to the level that is needed.

Already the shortage of affordable rented homes means that you have to be quite needy to get a council or housing association place, leading to a tendancy towards ghetto-type situations – a shortage which the New Labour government did not do nearly enough to fix.

Removing secure tenancies can only make this worse.  Having got the poorer people herded together in one place, these plans will ensure that they stay there.   Like the Tory cuts to services, this is a purely ideological and totally avoidable – though they are making sure to always say “unavoidable cuts” because if they say it enough they reckon enough people will believe them.

I have lived in privately rented rooms and flats, in a housing association house and in houses I have owned.  Of the three, I have only ever felt secure in the housing association house.  You have to have owned a house during a time when negative equity and mass redundancies were both rife to realise that home ownership does not automatically confer security.

I do agree that there should be incentives for people who are under-occupying homes to downsize and that lettings, transfers and exchanges should not increase under-occupancy, but incentives should mean the carrot and not the stick.

Imagine living in fear that getting even a small promotion at work could lead to you being forced out of your home when the lease expires and having to pay twice as much rent to a buy-to-let landlord?   Your income would not have doubled – it may have gone up a few percent, but enough to take you above some threshold.

Imagine having a child die and your housing association then forcing you to move to a smaller house because you now have a spare room.

Imagine that your son or daughter leaves school and get a decent job.  If they stay with you the family income means you have to move out, if they leave you are forced to move to a smaller home.

Despite the huge shortage of social housing, many council and housing association places are extremely well looked after.  On some estates you can’t always tell which homes have been bought and which are still rented because a lot of tenants feel it is worth investing in making the house nice.  If they do not feel secure will they bother getting a garden in order and planting shrubs they may never see grow to maturity?  Will they bother putting in decent fitted carpets or decorate to a high standard if there is a chance they will only enjoy the benefit for a couple of years?

This is the Tories’ way to keep the working classes in their place.

I have seen first-hand how people were tempted out of secure tenancies they could afford into home ownership that they couldn’t afford during the right-to-buy boom.  Of course many ex-tenants thrived – the ones who didn’t lose their jobs, develop a disability, get divorced or have some other change that made the mortgage harder to pay, or who didn’t buy at the wrong time and find interest payments shoot up.  That was bad enough, but to have people actually forced into such positions against their will is even worse.

So.  Council tenants will feel permanently insecure and if they are forced into the private sector they will feel even less secure.  Few tenants will be able to save enough for a deposit and so will be reliant on the buy-to-let landlords on rolling six-month leases, hoping that the landlord doesn’t get into difficulties and suddenly need to sell up, or doesn’t die and have his children want to sell up.

None of this will affect existing tenants they say, but you can bet it will affect existing tenants who want or need to transfer or exchange for whatever reason.  You can bet that the new place will be conditional on having a new, limited, lease.  All that means is that anybody who is already a tenant will have no incentive to downsize at all, and have less flexibility to move for employment.

Keeping us in our place, like I said.

When Francis Maude recently talked about going further and faster than Thatcher he really wasn’t kidding was he?