When it comes to enduring poverty in disgusting, dangerous, unhealthy conditions, grovelling apologies to sufferers don’t quite cut it. But at the moment in England, that’s what’s being served up, thanks to an itvNEWS investigation into living conditions in social housing.
Gosh, the National Housing Federation is darn sorry for those conditions. The conditions are described by ITV, reporting on its own investigation. Though things in one social housing project were so bad that words failed ITV correspondents, one has rallied to produce a disgusting picture both in words and images. Read more here at itvNEWS: ‘The worst I’ve ever seen’: The appalling and ‘unliveable’ council housing conditions some have endured during lockdown
The National Housing Federation represents some 800 housing authorities in England. These are the management companies that allow these intolerable conditions to develop. They also manage the dysfunctional complaints systems that never seem to get problems resolved. As a result, complaints have been rising and rising, along with the salaries of the CEOs of these association corporations.
What’s gone wrong here? These members are all non-profits, theoretically focused on nothing more important than decent management of their buildings and tenants. Alas, pulling the strings behind the curtain are the national government along with local government councils. They are presumably skulking about, heads down, hoping they are not noticed to be the true architects of a profitable non-profit system. It is one that allows supposedly non-profit companies to act like free enterprise builders if that yields profit to offset/reduce the public commitment to social housing.
The scope of the problem is enough to suggest a serious look at an article that finds neither for-profit, nor non-profit companies suitable for the building and management of social housing. Try: Better Public Housing: And You Thought NGOs Were The Good Guys
While not taking away from the gravity of the itvNEWS investigation, here’s something else to consider. Overall, conditions in public housing rated better than housing in the private rental sector and privately owned housing in the most recent English Housing Survey (December 2020). It certainly suggests that industry and government propaganda extolling the “industry-leading” example of private enterprise is a faulty basis for deciding who most successfully builds and manages any kind of housing, whether free market, or social. Try: England: Social Rent Housing Deserves A Better Rep
Meanwhile it is worth an exploration of the National Housing Federation’s grovelling. The question to bring to the following article: do the apologies, excuses and explanations add up to any sense that profit-making non-profits have any kind of useful future for healthy, affordable low and no-income housing? Never mind just in England, anywhere? Read more at itvNEWS: National Housing Federation sorry for ‘unacceptable’ living conditions exposed by ITV News
