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Alison Thain Old Boiled Egg for services to housing destruction
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read more about Alison Thaine http://middlesbrough-council.com/forum/ ... =534#p4298
Pat Dunn is a 70-year-old grandmother recovering from cancer. Her husband, John, 73, sounded distressed when I called. They live in a Victorian terrace house of some architectural merit in the centre of Bootle, Merseyside. Their home, in what was once a prosperous, middle-class area, did not stand in the way of a road, airport or any project of public importance, but last week Sefton council compulsorily purchased it and told them they had a month to get out. The Dunns are one of four families left in Hertford Road who will lose their homes as part of a regeneration scheme that will not necessarily build any new houses.
Their entirely serviceable home will be flattened in the service of the last government’s discredited ideology of “housing market renewal” because they live in a Pathfinder regeneration area and because private developers once told the council they wanted the site.
The Dunns have been living with demolition for years, as the bulldozers work their way up the street. Their windows are filthy and there is always noise. “It’s just their way of persecuting us and driving us out,” Pat told me. They would go now, but the council has paid them only £97,000 for their four-bedroom home, whereas they have been advised comparable homes are worth £180,000. This will have to be resolved at a tribunal. Elsewhere in Bootle, in the Klondyke area, an 88-year-old pensioner who has lived, free, in her house all her life is refusing to move to a bungalow where she will have to pay rent of £70 a week.
Local Labour councillors and MPs have been slow to take up the cause of these elderly victims. The Dunns’ MP, Joe Benton, claimed they had cancelled their appointment with him, which they had not. It is heretical in this Labour heartland to criticise an industry that puts state money into councillors’ budgets and also benefits housing associations and developers — but not its frail victims. The regeneration industry gets money out of the state by blighting streets, leaving a crop of boarded-up homes to be “harvested” — as one expert acting for the victims described it. The pattern is clear across the north of England. It brings in millions.
The regeneration industry gets money out of the state by blighting streets, leaving a crop of boarded-up homes to be “harvested”I thought this disgraceful story was over, for on November 24 last year the housing minister, Grant Shapps, told the Commons that he was winding up Pathfinder, “ending the Whitehall obsession with demolitions” and taking steps to get empty homes back into beneficial use. He criticised the demonisation of the traditional British terrace under the last government. He identified the perverse incentive to run down areas, the large profits handed to developers and the damage done to Victorian heritage. He said people were told they would see a transformation of their area, when what this meant was buildings bulldozed, neighbourhoods torn apart and families trapped in abandoned streets. “This was wrong,” said Shapps.
So it was. Imagine my surprise, then, when I rang the Dunns last week and found Pathfinder still alive.
This was followed by astonishment when I was shown a breakdown, released under a freedom of information request, of what the £35m “transition fund” money announced by Shapps to wind down Pathfinder would be spent on. The bid for Merseyside, which Shapps approved, goes far beyond rescuing isolated households. Under this “exit strategy”, councils on Merseyside will demolish another 2,369 homes by 2018, on top of the 4,489 destroyed already. There are no proposals for refurbishment.
Incredibly, in Bootle, some £4m of the New Homes Bonus, the coalition’s flagship plan to persuade councils to build affordable homes, will be used to contribute towards the vast sum needed for demolition. That is incredibly cynical. The £10m of transition fund money to be spent, mostly on demolition, in Liverpool includes 300 homes in the Welsh streets, Ringo Starr’s birthplace, which Shapps said last year he would rather see refurbished.
Can Shapps have read what he signed? When I put this to his department, he replied that councils “should not be pursuing large-scale demolition, particularly where refurbishment is an option, and I am reviewing the use councils are making of this money”. Well 2,300 homes on Merseyside and thousands more in Gateshead, Teesside, the Potteries and elsewhere is hardly small scale. And there isn’t much he can do about it, as he has signed off the money.
Shapps and his boss, Eric Pickles, are Conservatives. They should be against out-of-control, self-interested bureaucracies and socialist councils, and in favour of private property. Are they weak, incompetent or conspired against by their civil servants? A bit of each, I would guess. If Shapps and Pickles really want to slay the Pathfinder monster, they need to be tough. They need to destroy its culture — in the civil service, in the quangos and in the housing associations whose grossly over-rewarded executives are paid according to turnover, which goes up with every new scheme of which they are given a percentage.
How can a minister in a coalition that is apparently cash-strapped make available a further £35m (councils will find matching funds to double that) for a scheme that has wasted billions? Shapps’s rhetoric in the Commons was admirable, but it is contradicted by what we find he has done.
