Results of the tenant satisfaction survey are now available.
Our customer satisfaction survey is underway to find out what Council tenants think of the major works and to see if changes to Partners work practices are working for us. We are very keen to build up a solid picture of what's happening - particularly amongst those of you who have experienced works this year (since February).
Ann-Marie and Sally have been carrying out interviews with many of you and we would like to thank everybody who has taken part to-date. There will be more visits over the next week or two - we are aiming to maximise the number of surveys before Friday 21 October. Results will be compared with Partners' own survey - has anyone even seen one of their survey questionnaires?! - and presented at a general meeting in autumn.
We will also be seeking leaseholders opinion in the near future.
The 2005 newsletter has yet to be published. Until then ...
Dear Residents, This is a double edition of NEETARA News the newsletter of Northchurch Road, Elmore Street and Ecclesbourne Road Tenants and Residents Association. The Association has been active since October 2001, with a particular focus on issues relevant to council tenants and leaseholders. We planned last year to publish a newsletter once each season, but winter was long and we had a short hibernation patch. The spring this year has seen a flurry of activity - lots of meetings, and lots of interesting news to report. Read on...
Ann-Marie Greensmith - NEETARA Chair
It is almost a year since 'Partners' took on the management, maintenance and major works for street properties in our area (along with many in Highbury and Mildmay). The good news is that the long-overdue major works to neglected Islington council properties has started - the work began in Englefield Road and is currently in Northchurch Road. Elmore Street residents can expect works to start in late summer/autumn this year. So far so good?
But what about Partners performance on standard repairs? Especially over the winter period, when damp, leaks and heating systems are much more vulnerable. I have had personal experience of major frustration on this front; my boiler stopped functioning (and leaked carbon monoxide) at the end of December and I had no central heating or hot water for over a month. It took Partners 3 visits even to condemn the boiler and decide what needed to be done. This included a visit from the Chairman of United House (?) Strangely, things happened quite quickly after this particular visit! The work eventually happened at the end of January 04 and seemed fine until I had mains water flooding into my home from a badly connected pipe 3 weeks after installation; until the work was inspected and it was found that the boiler had no electric isolator switch [this is potentially illegal and unsafe].
Enough of my personal moan - it may have been painful, and costly to me in terms of time off work, but at least the work got done. According to Partners, a total of 28 households have had their boilers replaced by being referred to rehab [i.e. urgent works prior to the planned works period] - central heating systems has been a headache for Partners in this first winter of the contract. But many tenants have boilers that seem to be in a no-mans land - they are not 'condemned', but they are massively costly in terms of countless visits to get them fixed after the latest breakdown. This hiatus is happening because the major works are planned - in effect anything that can wait has got to wait. Cold comfort for some long-suffering residents!
I have recently become involved in Partners' resident participation panel, which meets monthly to discuss issues surrounding the contract. A group of 7 people from the PFI area has in fact been meeting with Partners every month for the past 2 and a half years, helping them to be as responsive to residents needs as possible. I would urge any tenant who has had a problem with Partners to contact NEETARA so that we can start to get a proper overview of how Partners is really performing, and start feeding back our major issues at these meetings, and ensuring they are put on the agenda if necessary.
Partners are of course monitoring our 'satisfaction' through a combination of leaving cards at the end of repair work for tenants to complete and return, and also phone calls to follow up completed work if insufficient cards are returned. However, it was interesting to note at the last Residents Panel meeting that not one of the panel members had received a 'Satisfaction Card' on completion of work at their home. Partners tops up the satisfaction card feedback with telephone calls to those who have had work done, to achieve their target of feedback on 10% of works carried out in each month but the card system has got to be a more representative way to collect information. The residents panel will be pushing at our next meeting to get this system working as it should - a card should be left automatically by all workmen when a job is finished. If you have work done, ASK FOR A CARD.
The next Residents Panel meeting is on 13th April - please contact me if there are issues you want me to raise.
What does this mean for street property tenants and leaseholders? Aren't we covered by
Partners instead?
Many of you will have heard of the
ALMO - but how many realise what a major change this is for Council
tenants and leaseholders? The ALMO goes live in April 2004. It is a private not-for-profit company, with a Board
made up of 7 tenant/leaseholder representatives, 5 Council members and 5 independents. It will be responsible
for the management of ALL council housing - the PFI contract that covers our street properties and is run by
Partners will be overseen by the ALMO as well.
The council's Housing Services Department staff will all be transferred and will become employees of the new
private company Islington Homes.
So what's wrong with that?
Hopefully, nothing! At best, Islington Homes will
bring great improvements to the management of estates, and the ALMO funding will enable a lot of major works that
have not been possible due to lack of funds to be carried out at last. The magic words new kitchens and
bathrooms seem to have been mostly responsible for the 80% vote in favour of the ALMO.
At worst, the ALMO funding could be rather like the windfall benefits that happened when many building societies turned into banks. First of all, the funding available to Islington's ALMO - £153 million - already falls well short of what Islington Council estimate we need for ALL council homes to reach the Government's Decent Homes Standard by 2010 [overall funding gap estimated figure]. Politics being what they are, there is no guarantee that more substantial funding will follow. The Government wants to get council housing off its balance sheet, and many opponents of the ALMO suspect that in reality it is just a way to prepare tenants and leaseholders for an eventual sell-off of council housing to a housing association or other RSL (registered social landlord). Maybe that's not such a bad thing in itself, except that housing association rents tend to be higher than local authority rents, tenants have fewer rights, and the same problems with poor quality of works and repairs are often typical of housing associations in the same way as they are of council housing.
In setting up an ALMO, Islington Council could easily have set us up for an expensive change for little gain - and have weakened the link with government funding into the bargain. And many tenants in real need of renovated kitchens and bathrooms (as well as a lot of other major works on the blocks and estates where they live) may find themselves disappointed. We have to hope that it does not happen, and trust in the new Board to ensure that priority works happen before the more cosmetic improvements do.
Leaseholders have to pay for all external/structural works to their property carried out by Islington Council, and this will also be true under the ALMO. Under PFI, leaseholders currently have a cap of £10,000 maximum payment over a period of 5 years - hefty in itself. However, leaseholders governed by the ALMO will have no capping - there is no limit to what they can be charged for works to their property or block.
One of the most worrying aspect about the ALMO so far is the change in the way the contractors who will actually do the work are being chosen. The ALMO Board has been asked to shortlist contractors that will be used for the next 4 years, from a shortlist that the council has already established. The contractors on this list have quoted for work on the basis that they will inspect their own work - this will no longer be the responsibility of the councils' surveyors. Perhaps even more worrying is the fact that contractors have been told they will receive bonuses if work is completed under budget. The combination of these 2 issues is likely to mean that contractors can take every short-cut possible, with Islington Council carrying no responsibility in checking the actual work done - there is a positive incentive for contractors to take these short-cuts! At the meeting of the Islington Leaseholders Forum in March there was much discussion of this issue, and the Forum is looking into the possibility of hiring a 'Clerk of Works' (i.e. a private surveyor) to inspect any work done by ALMO contractors on behalf of leaseholders - to ensure that work is done properly and that leaseholders get value for money. Tenants do not pay directly for works to their homes, but it is a worrying possibility that lack of inspection could mean that the ALMO sees work quality deteriorate and value for money decrease rather than increase - for the whole borough.
If you are a leaseholder, it would be a very good time to get involved in NEETARA; we would like to form an informal Leaseholder sub-committee, to address leasehold matters more directly. We are not directly represented on the Leaseholders Forum, as this is a panel formed from recognised Leaseholder Associations (as opposed to tenants and residents groups). However, any member of the public can attend Forum meetings (they take place every 2 months at the moment) to hear the issues under discussion - the next meeting will be on 19th May at Islington Town Hall.
Currently, the tenant and leaseholder members of the Board and the sub-boards of the ALMO have been forwarded by various tenant and Leaseholder bodies, rather than being elected by all concerned. The Boards themselves will be discussing how people should be elected and/or selected to carry out the management duties within the ALMO. If you are either a tenant or a leaseholder and you want to know more about what is happening, or about how you can get involved, please contact NEETARA. Meetings will at least be taking place in public from May this year; until this time there has been no public scrutiny.
NEETARA's most recent general meeting (1st March) was devoted to this subject. The area we cover is hardly a crime black-spot, but of course there are some issues. PC Ed Stevens, one of the two community policemen from Islington Police covering Canonbury, gave an update of reported crimes in the area (details below) and talked to us about the types of crime covered by community policing. One question we asked received a reassuring answer - yes, there are community police on the beat in our area quite a lot of the time but we may not be aware of them for 2 reasons - firstly, they are often in plain clothes, and secondly, they are often on mountain bikes! This is a new and perhaps very effective way for police to patrol an area, and has the added advantage of being environmentally friendly!
PC Stevens explained to the meeting the types of crimes he and his colleague deal with and gave a telephone number that all residents can use to report crimes or concerns of this nature - 020 7421 0260. Please note this number, and keep it to hand. Obviously, any emergency calls (if a crime is happening or has happened, and the police need to come urgently) should be reported on 999.
Bike ownership has risen enormously in Islington in the past couple of years and so has bike theft; in 2002 there were 867 reported thefts, which rose to 2,300 in 2003! PC Stevens informed the meeting of a new scheme being piloted in Islington called Alphadotting. Bike owners need to get a special pen from a participating bike shop. The closest is Mosquito Bikes on Essex Road [tel: 020 7226 8765 - call before you visit]. You need to take some proof of identity (utilities bill, etc) to get a pen, which you then use to put loads of tiny invisible dots all over your bike. If the bike is stolen and somebody attempts to sell it through an illegal bike seller, police are able to detect these tiny dots of varnish anywhere on a bike by shining an ultra-violet light onto it - if the dots show up, there is also a unique code identifying a bike or part of a bike to the original owner. Of course, this does not stop somebody from stealing a bike - but it does make it a lot harder for them to sell stolen bikes or bike parts. Please contact PC Stevens for more details of the scheme on the above number.
Burglary in the area is one of the statistics that has not reduced, but PC Stevens advised the meeting that security lights can be purchased very cheaply (for as little as £5, from retailers like Homebase), and can be wired quite easily to a plug socket. A light outside a house is a major deterrent to burglars, most of whom are opportunists. At the next residents meeting with Partners, we will explore the possibility of getting Partners' operatives to fit these for residents who cannot do it for themselves.
Our Controlled Parking Zone ("CPZ") has been in place for some time now, and has had the desired effect of thinning out the number of cars using these residential streets. As well as the parking scheme, nobody can have failed to notice that a number of traffic reduction/speed restriction measures have been put in place - Elmore Street has speed bumps and cushions, as does Ecclesbourne Road, and Northchurch Road has had much-needed width restrictions put in place at either end of the road, cutting out all heavy vehicles and putting an end to the nose-to-nose stand-offs that often took place. These measures have been funded through Islington Council by Transport for London, to address the increased traffic in areas outside the Congestion Charge zone.
There are plans for a second wave of speed/traffic reduction measures in the area, and Sally Ingrey (NEETARA Secretary) has been involved in resident meetings with the Transport & Planning Dept over the last year. We have recently taken a sounding of local opinion about the measures that have been put in place so far in the 3 streets of our catchment, and we will be reporting back to the next residents meeting on 31st March. Please get in touch if you have ideas for future schemes or if you want to express your opinions about the measures in place. Traffic is a quality of life issue affecting all residents; it would be nice see our residential streets made as safe as possible for pedestrians and road users alike. One idea under discussion is further promotion of cycle lanes in the area.