DavidThat was such an intelligent and sensible posting that instinctively I find myself wondering whether somebody else has logged into your account. If it was indeed you then might I suggest that you aspire to the same high standard whenever you venture to share your wisdom with us in the future?There are a lot of people in my community who would agree with you. Isleworth ward has, I believe, proportionately more local authority housing than any other in the borough. Both as Lead Member and as a ward councillor I am acutely aware of the extent of the crisis which we are faced with in this borough.Your party's political achievement has been to divide that community against itself, with the larger part of it having turned its back on you. The consequence of this has been six lost seats and with it control of the council. For some peculiar reason you and yours apparently view this as cause for self-congratulation.If only you could see beyond your desire to regulate, infiltrate and control communities you might, as another poster has already stated on another thread, have been in a better position to have continued the good work which you seem to believe that your administration did. But it is not for me to give your party advice - let's face it, you wouldn't heed it anyway - so let's just leave that there for now.David, you will remember your outburst on this forum on the subject of the Hounslow Homes Management Agreement Review, which I conducted last year. My real agenda, you told us, was to steer the Review towards the conclusion that we should sell off all our housing stock. Even Councillor John Connelly told you at the time that there was nothing about my Review to suggest that I would do this, but you persisted with your wild and unsubstantiated claim regardless.It is now a matter of historical record that the Review concluded with a recommendation to continue the Management Agreement with Hounslow Homes for a further five years. My agenda, insofar as I had one, related solely to the issue of Tenant Participation. I had resolved from the day that I took on the Housing portfolio that I would introduce the principle of a right of participation for all our tenants, irrespective of political views or affiliation. It was what the ICG was created to do in the very first instance, back in 1994.This (to most people) self-evidently reasonable aspiration was bitterly opposed by members and supporters of your party on the council, within HFTRA and at all levels within Hounslow Homes. The ferocity, not to mention the characteristic underhandedness, with which the campaign to derail the Review was conducted did, for a short while, come as something of a surprise. You fought as though everything you owned and stood for depended on it, which of course in a way it did.But guess what? At the end of it all, when the smoke had cleared, I had achieved my objective. Those who couldn't live with it had voted with their feet and we now have a good working relationship between company (under new management) and council, with the company quite rightly operating at arm's length and without undue interference, but within the strategic direction offered to them by me as Lead Member. No mean achievement for an idiot, don't you think David?The question which I still grapple with, however, is whether you really believed that I wanted to sell off our housing stock, or whether this was simply a distraction tactic because you knew you couldn't generate any sympathy by crying foul over my efforts to bring democracy to our tenants' movement. Maybe you will enlighten us now that it is all done with?The only circumstances in which I would ever consider transferring the management of our housing stock would be if the relationship between the council and the ALMO broke down to such an extent that we could not work together. This was indeed a possibility under the old management and perhaps this is what you were driving at at the time - using your political influence to ensure a breakdown in the relationship and thereby deliberately creating the very situation which you were warning of. I believe your party in its current guise is perfectly capable of trying this.But you miscalculated. Had we been minded to terminate the Agreement with Hounslow Homes my advice would have been not to sell off the stock, but to bring it back in-house.Now let's move on to the subject of New Build. Well, six bids were approved by the then London Housing Board last year and no fewer than three of them were made by the London Borough of Hounslow. Once we had received approval I recommended three New Build projects to the Executive and all three were approved. Another achievement by the idiot. So David, whatever you may say to the contrary the fact is that Tory/ICG Hounslow will not only be building more local authority housing than your administration managed in 35 years (not through your own choice, I grant you), but also more than any other council in London. We also have the Extensions and Adaptations programme, not to mention the family-sized dwellings which we rescued from your friends at Co-Op Homes.I believe in social housing. I don't believe that any local authority in London, whoever runs it, can do enough to fully address its housing problems, but we are demonstrably doing more about trying than your administration ever did.Let's hope that when and if you ever come to form another administration in Hounslow, you will this time devote less energy to trying to control our tenants and more to trying to house them.
Phil Andrews ● 6445d