Richard Wilson

Residents of Nelson Road are furious with Haringey Council after a family council home that has been left derelict for almost a year has now been taken over by squatters.   The home was taken over last week after the Council failed to act on promises to start renovating the house, at least 11 months after evicting the last tenants.  One of the neighbours is an elderly lady in her eighties and I’m told she is quite upset by the situation, which will now probably take months more to resolve.

I’ve been demanding action from the Council for 3 months, ever since a local resident complained to local campaigner Katherine Reece about the state of the house back in November 2009 (see post from January).  I was told that the house would be back in use by 26 March at the latest – but Haringey have failed to even start work on renovating the building, so this promise was clearly not going to be kept.

I’ve emailed the Labour cabinet member in charge of housing to express our anger at the Council’s incompatence and to demand action to sort out the squatter situation so the house can be used by a local family.  There is such a long waiting list for larger council homes, and so many families trapped in overcrowded temporary accomodation, that this situation is a real scandal.

Like all Haringey Councillors, I’m regularly contacted by families in desperately overcrowded or temporary accommodation looking for a family Council house.   These families wait for years, and there are over 16,000 families on Haringey’s housing waiting list – with 566 looking for a home with more than 3 bedrooms.

So when residents alerted local Lib Dem activist Katherine Reece to a large 3-storey empty council house in Nelson Road (N8) I was determined to investigate why it wasn’t being used.  I’ve now got a response which shows the house has been left empty and boarded up since April 2009, and will not be returned to use until March 2010 at the earliest.

Unsuprsingly the house now looks like a dump and the neighbours must be furious.  But what is really scandalous is that Haringey Council is happy to let this house, which could be a wonderful family home, lie empty for nearly a year.   No wonder we have such long housing waiting lists in Haringey, when our Labour-run Council is so wasteful with its own housing stock.

Co-incidentially, the national Lib Dems have just announced proposals to bring 250,000 empty homes back into use, to boost jobs and tackle our housing crisis.  Ideas like this are clearly badly needed in Haringey.

For a number of months I’ve been trying to help an elderly resident who lives near Stapleton Hall Road get his home heated properly.  He is in his 70s and is a widower living alone.  His central heating broke down years ago, but he has no money to pay for new heating.

The Government provide Warm Front grants for older people in his situation.  I thought everything would be sorted when the Council arranged for a Warm Front engineer to visit.  However, it turns out  there is a £3,500 cap on support, which is £800 less than what the engineer thinks it will take.

The resident contacted me again to see what I could do – as he couldn’t pay the £800 himself.  I was worried we might have to arrange for the heating to only go in certain rooms, but a few days ago Haringey Council got back to me saying they would make up the £800 gap.  This is excellent news – and I think it will save the Council money in the long run, if it keeps him healthy and in his own home.

I’m so pleased to have been able to help this guy.  Its not very often you can make such an obvious difference.  If you know of anyone in a similar position, please do look into what help might be available.

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!

Question:  Who fixes your leaking roof if you rent a flat from the Council, in a Council block, which the Council leases from a landlord who in turn is a leaseholder of Haringey Council?

Answer:  Nobody, it seems.

This weekend I had a distressed call from a Stroud Green resident who can’t get anyone to fix her roof, which has been leaking for 2 months now.  The damp is spreading throughout the flat, which can’t be nice with Christmas approaching.   I’ve put in an urgent request to Homes for Haringey, but it all turns out to be much more complicated than I expected.  The flat is ‘temporary’ accommodation leased from a leaseholder of Haringey Council.  So the Council is leasing a flat it owns the freehold on.

A Homes for Haringey officer has got straight back to me – but they haven’t worked out yet whether it is the landlord’s or their responsibility to fix it.

I’ll try to keep up the pressure for someone to take responsibility - the poor tenant must be completely confused by all this.