Last week I attended a Council meeting that Haringey Lib Dems had called to try to halt the Council’s plans to waste vast sums of money on ridiculously overpriced TV aerials (you can see a webcast of the meeting here). The Labour-run Council have decided to install very high-specification digital TV systems in all their Council housing – at a cost often exceeding £1,000 per flat. According to leaked reports, this is 7 times more expensive than systems being installed in some other London boroughs.
The cost to the taxpayer of installing these aerials in tenants homes will come to £8.6 million – but local Council leaseholders will have to pay these £1,000 bills themselves. I’ve been contacted by angry leaseholders in Stroud Green, who are outraged at the levels of the charges for a system they didn’t ask for, and didn’t need - as they already had access to cable!
I was really pleased to put the taxpayers’ and leaseholders’ case to the committee, and that a local Stroud Green leaseholder – Anne Crellin from Carlton Lodge - was able to speak to the committee herself (see the picture of the leaseholder protest before the meeting). Thanks to these efforts the committee decided to recommend that the Council explore ways of allowing leaseholders to opt out of this fiasco in future.
However, I was very disappointed that the Labour councillors on the committee blocked our attempts to review the whole misconceived programme. Have they not noticed there is a recession on and that there are much more pressing priorities on Council resources? What’s bad value for leaseholders is bad value for tenants and the taxpayer – they should have halted the whole thing!