The Liverpool £62m Kensington Regeneration New Deal for Communities £60, 000 per year chief executive and the executive director of Riverside Housing’s subsidiary Community 7 are really getting pissed off with me. They have just posted a letter to residents in the New Deal zone discrediting my newsletter the “Whistle Blower” and accusing me of being a troublemaker. Of course I put 4,000 Whistle Blowers out discrediting what they said.

Below are the contents of the newsletter.

IS THERE ANY END TO THEIR
MISREPRESENTATIONS
& INTIMIDATIONS?

Did you receive the recent letter dated 23 Feb from the Kensington Regeneration’s New Deal for Communities £60,000 per year chief executive and Community 7’s Executive Director? As far as can be ascertained approximately 4,000 copies of this two page letter was posted to every house in the £62m New Deal area.

The newsletter accuses me of posting a leaflet that contained fascist cartoon caricatures. But the truth is, I did not post this leaflet in your area. Let’s take a closer look at what the letter accuses me of:

Firstly the letter tries to portray me as a person who quote: Upsets local people and causes unnecessary anxiety. What an utter load of rubbish. It is not me who is causing unnecessary anxiety, I’m not the one who is destroying a whole community, I am not the one who is deliberately lying and Keeping homeowners and tenants in the dark as to what is going on around them.

The letter said I trivialised fascism (authoritarian system opposed to democracy). Can you honestly say that you trust Riverside Housing and their subsidiary Community 7, the Kensington New Deal for Communities senior administration staff and Liverpool City Council senior officers? Can you honestly say that these people are democratic?

'Cash down the drain'
Mar 8 2004
Tony Barrett investigates

Did you read the above front page article in the Liverpool Echo? The Liverpool Echo has finally exposed the undemocratic behaviour of the administrators who run the £62m Kensington New Deal for Communities initiative. The Whistle Blower would like to take this opportunity to thank Echo reporter Tony Barrett and local tenant and former New Deal Board member Karen Flynn for speaking out and telling residents what is really going on with the £62m New Deal money.

This three page shocking article proves that the 36 NDC regeneration administrators, as well as being totally undemocratic, are not up to the job and should stand aside and let the wider community dictate what should be done with the New Deal funding.

Karen Flynn claims residents' wishes are being ignored and projects are held up by bureaucracy.

She said: "This whole initiative was supposed to be community-led but the community is being sold out.”
"Not one sustainable job has been created. Every single new job is based on short-term contracts.”
“The board is not listening to people, they are not letting them in. At one stage there was only one resident on the supposedly community-led board."
Last year Ms Flynn resigned, accusing the board of being undemocratic and failing to act in the best interests of the people it serves.
The article goes on to expose what is really happening in the NDC area..
The article goes on to expose what is really happening.

The full article can be observed on the Echo web site:
 http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0100regionalnews/content_objectid=14028754_method=full_siteid=50061_page=1_headline=-%2DCash%2Ddown%2Dthe%2Ddrain%2D-name_page.html


FREEDOM OF SPEECH &
DEMOCRACY RESTRICTED !

In a democracy people should have freedom of speech at local and national level, but at local level it would seem that Riverside’s Community 7 and the Kensington New Deal administrators want to do away with open democratic procedures. Lets Take a closer look at the way the New Deal administration has evolved:

· All NDC board meetings closed to the wider NDC community
· Inadequate resident representation on the NDC board
· Situation of tenure not reflected on the board i.e. 9 homeowners and only I tenant, when tenants are in a 60% majority within the New Deal community
· Too many useless meetings
· Dossier building on people who do not agree with the administrators & the community cronies
· Fear amongst tenants
· Secrecy
· Culture of silence amongst NDC administrators
· Inadequate representation of residents views hopes and aspirations
· No structures put into place to encourage wider community participation
· One of the most ardent tenant activists totally excluded from the New Deal initiative because he is critical
· Undemocratic structures put into place to restrict wider community participation
· Propagating divisions amongst homeowners and tenants
· Absolutely no accountability
The above list could go on and on!

THE ADMINISTRATORS USE AN AMBIGUOUS LANGUAGE!
Riverside’s C7 and the New Deal chief execs said in the letter that quote: There is likely to be “some” demolition in the Edge Hill area of the New Deal zone. Observe the clever use of the word “some” when in reality there will be at least 500 - 600 houses and shops demolished (with probably 1,500 more to follow). This is mass demolition, not “some” demolition. They say the houses in this area are in such poor condition that they cannot be improved, but what they conveniently avoided was the issue of secret proposals by Riverside’s Community 7 to refurbish 200 houses in Thorburn St, Milroy St and Nutall St. These three streets are in the same area. Why is it that these houses can be refurbished and the others can’t? They were all built in the same period. Do you see now how these administrators make it up as they go along to suit their own agenda? It has been proposed that the C7 tenants in these streets, (about 80 to 100 tenants) who leave through natural migration, will not be replaced and that these former RSL houses will be refurbished at a cost of approximately £12,000 and sold to homeowners who’s houses will be demolished in the same area. The latter arrangement is now being called, especially by the demolition homeowners, a key for a key arrangement. In simple language what Riverside intend to do is, steal tenants houses and sell them to homeowners. The situation of tenure in the area due for mass demolition is about 400 tenants and 240 homeowners.

Over 100 tenants have already been quietly moved out of the area, but there are still about 300 left. Most of these tenants will be moved out of the New Deal area altogether and ghettoised in areas which are not important to the city centre regeneration. This is disgraceful behaviour by the service providers because these tenants are supposed to be stakeholders in the New Deal initiative, in other words the £62m New Deal funding belongs to them, yet the service providers, with the full support of Government Office, intend to move hundreds if not thousands of tenants out of the New Deal area thus disenfranchising them from the initiative

HOUSES ARE SO EXPENSIVE THAT THEY ARE BEYOND THE REACH OF MOST TENANTS!

The letter continued with: Some tenants simply don’t want to stay were they now live: This is probably true, but are tenants being encouraged to stay? I am quite sure that most tenants would stay in the area if new houses similar to the ones which have been built on Durning Road were offered to them. But the fact is Riverside’s Community 7 intend to build most of their properties for sale and shared ownership. The letter continued: Tenants may want to move to other parts of the city. To some extent this is true, but what C7 and the New Deal admin don’t say is: Will all the 300 tenants in the area due for demolition be rehoused in new houses similar to the ones on Durning Road?

The letter further continued with: Tenants may even want to become homeowners. Again, to a certain extent this is true, but it is highly unlikely because houses in Liverpool are now so expensive that they are out of the reach of most tenants. Most certainly C7’s new builds for sale will be too expensive for first time buyers at £80 to £90,000 each. What tenants must realise is this: Riverside Housing, who own C7 are now property developers, they have even been involved in selling luxury yuppie flats on the Albert Dock. These people have deviated from their original remit, which was to house the most vulnerable people in our society.

NO TENANT PARTICIPATION!

The letter continued with: We are determined to work with local residents, yet in a recent report compiled by a team of consultants called NAVARRO it was stated that community participation was practically “non-existent” within the New Deal community with only 40 to 50 people being involved out of 13,000 residents. This further proves that the regeneration administrators and Government Office civil servants actively work to discourage community participation by not putting simple open democratic structures into place to encourage participation, especially by tenants.

The New Deal chief executive continued with: Mike Lane feels he is protecting tenants from the sinister intentions of C7. What he fails to accept is C7 is a charity and therefore does not make profit. This assertion by the New Deal chief exec is absolute rubbish. The chief executive of Riverside earns somewhere in the region of £140,000 per year, and this figure is a conservative estimate. RSL’s like Riverside are private sector companies and property developers masquerading as charitable organisations. If these people were charitable organisations why do they build new houses and yuppie flats for sale?

The letter continued with local people will begin to move into 58 “brand new” C7 rented apartments on Laurel Road. Again the administrators are indulging in the clever use of words. In reality these 58 so called “brand new” apartments were once characterless Jerry built prison like former students accommodation, (hardly any stayed there) which has been done up and turned into pensioners flats. The building has been in the area for some years now and was and still is owned by Riverside. How many of the pensioners who move into these flats will actually be local people from the New Deal area is unknown? In their usual undemocratic manner C7 will not answer this question.

The letter tries to make out that I am trying to protect tenants. Whatever that means? Tenants in the this area don’t need any protection from me. These overpaid New Deal administrators never stop twisting language. Spin- doctoring and ‘everything is wonderful’ language is a language they are experts at.