Gold-plated nonsense

Poor Ronnie Corbett has told his last joke. One of his best sketches was with the other Ronnie and John Cleese. In order of height they represented the upper-class, the middle-class and the working-class. As you would expect each had a very different take on life. And that’s just how housing works today.

Let’s cast George Osborne as the toff. He should be able to play that part, shouldn’t he? Anyway, George thinks that there are too many associations and they pay their chiefs too much. Housing chiefs are the middle-class so they look up to Mr Osborne for winning the election. What else can they do? But some of them look down on tenants for ordering too many repairs. Well that’s what it seems like from a flurry of recent articles; the most spectacular of which says that tenants get “gold-plated” services. And we must put a stop to this! That’s nonsense.

For many years, Marianne Hood was the top expert on tenant involvement. If I remember correctly she set up TPAS. We were coming back from a conference where somebody had said tenants were asking for gold-plated taps. That’s where the phrase comes from. Between the two of us we’ve been to just about every tenant meeting in the land at some point or another. And no one ever at any stage asked for gold plating on anything. To be honest, both of us felt that tenants asked for too little, not too much, and were far too easy going in the face of poor services.

Let me clear up the big myth. Landlords set service standards. End of. It was landlords that said everything was going to be excellent. These same landlords are going through leaflets and Tipp-Exing the word ‘excellent’ out now. And it’s true that times have changed with less money around. Why don’t we just be honest with people and stop pretending that they are making silly demands or are in some way dependent (whatever that word means)?

Why was it that so many landlords wanted to be excellent? I’ll tell you. It was to jump through some hoops set by the Audit Commission. Why is this changing? What’s with the drop-it-like-hot bricks routine? It’s to keep the government happy. Look George, we can keep going and save a lot of money that we will use to build homes. Just like No10’s housing special advisor Alex Morton told us to do. It might be the right thing to do but it hardly suggests that some of these associations are independent (whatever that word means). As another comedian said: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well I have others.”

So what’s my point here? First of all start thinking of tenants as people. If you go to them with the problems, they will work with you on finding the answer. Well do I remember the ALMO chair that refused point blank to take on full-time staff to sort out Decent Homes. “The peak will pass and we don’t want the pension liability.” Now, she was a tenant. And one helluva lot sharper than the high-paid sheep who always seem to agree on everything.

Returning to the Corbett sketch. After the taller better-offs go on and on about the great things they get out of life, he turns round to look at them and says, “I get a pain in the back of my neck.”

Tenants did not ask for services to cost more. We did that all by ourselves. Year after year. Let’s find a sensible way through this without insulting people.

You could find out that tenants are perfectly happy with one candle rather than the four you promised them last year.

Alistair McIntosh, chief executive, Housing Quality Network