i know there has been a post on this already ,butt this is more detailed, and a victory gives us confidence


Blow to council housing transfer campaign

Tenants of Birmingham authority, England's biggest municipal landlord, overwhelmingly reject switch of homes to not-for-profit company

Peter Hetherington, regional affairs editor
Tuesday April 9, 2002
The Guardian

The government's intensifying effort to hive off council housing to social landlords was blown off course yesterday when tenants in Birmingham overwhelmingly rejected plans to transfer 84,000 homes to a not-for-profit company.
The rejection came four days after tenants in Glasgow backed a £5.6m transfer of the city's 80,000 properties to a housing association, a scheme widely considered as the salvation of a local crisis. England's largest municipal landlord is nowpondering its future after only a third of its tenants supported a similar move .

While stunned ministers promised to work with Birmingham to find an alternative for improving many of the city's decaying houses, including some of its 290 tower blocks, the unexpected rejection could force a rethink at Stephen Byers's Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions, which oversees housing.

While in England 152 councils have, so far, transferred 600,000 houses to new landlords, raising £10bn in the process, no big city has yet hived off its stock. Birmingham was seen as a pacesetter for the rest of the country, where 2.8m homes remain in council hands.

With town halls facing a multibillion-pound repairs backlog, the Treasury is keen to transfer as much housing as possible, because associations, unlike councils, can borrow on the open market to fund repairs, using projected income from rents as collateral. Similar loans to councils count as public spending.

John Perry, policy director of the Chartered Institute of Housing, warned last night that government plans to transfer up to 200,000 homes this year - provided tenants vote "yes" in a ballot - would now be "well nigh impossible to meet".

Birmingham devoted tens of thousands of pounds to the campaign for a "yes" vote . Sir Albert Bore, Birmingham's council leader, maintained that the postal ballot, which registered a 65.5% turnout, slightly higher than in Glasgow, confirmed tenants' confidence in the city's housing service.

But Dennis Minnis, Birmingham city council's cabinet member for housing, warned: "Throughout the process we have been honest in saying that existing resources are not enough to deliver the improvements that tenants deserve. We will continue to look for alternative resources to secure decent homes for all Birmingham's tenants."

The department said that the decision had to be respected. It would work with the city council on alternative options.

There are two routes. Councils whose housing departments receive star ratings in audit commission inspections can set up arms length companies as an alternative to a big stock transfer. Under these, houses remain in town hall hands but operational matters are transferred to a semi-detached company. However, any loans negotiated would continue to be classed as public borrowing, and it is not clear if Birmingham would get a star rating.

Alternatively, individual estates and smaller parcels of Birmingham's housing stock could be hived off to associations with the ability to borrow on the open market. But tenants would have to register their approval in a ballot.

Yesterday only 33.2% approved the transfer of Birmingham's entire council stock to an association.

Up to now, ministers have been cautiously confident that the transfer bandwagon was gaining momentum. Early this year tenants in Dudley, another West Midlands borough, rejected it - but in Bradford 26,000 tenants voted by almost two to one in support.