Section: Yesterday's News
Five Years Ago
In October 2003 we were reporting:
- The Government announced a £125 million grant to revitalise communities in Manchester and Salford blighted by collapsing housing demand. Manchester-Salford is the first of nine pathfinder projects to secure long term funding from the Government’s £500 million Housing Market Renewal Fund, which has been made available to help parts of the North and Midlands most acutely affected by low demand housing and abandonment........
- A guide was released, which both offers guidance on developing new neighbourhood warden schemes and assists projects already in existence. Landlords' Guide to Costing Neighbourhood Warden Schemes covers generic best practice that warden schemes should employ if they want to effectively monitor, evaluate and provide a sustainable scheme that is justified by costed benefits. It also provides a simple software management tool (on CD), with guidance on how and why to implement it.......
- The Government launched the Neighbourhood Renewal Private Sector Panel, which aims to advise on ways to encourage business investment in deprived communities. The Panel comprises 15 business leaders, tasked with identifying opportunities for private sector activity in disadvantaged areas and suggesting how to overcome any barriers. They will visit deprived neighbourhoods across the country, offering their skills and expertise to Local Strategic Partnerships seeking to work better with business to regenerate their areas.......
- The Government proposed an amendment to the Antisocial Behaviour Bill, to tackle the misery caused by high hedges.
Existing common law rights do little to prevent the problems high hedges cause. They entitle people to cut overhanging branches back to the property boundary line but they do nothing about hedge height. At present local authorities are powerless to act on high hedge disputes but under the proposed legislation they could issue formal notices instructing the reduction of a hedge's height and its long-term maintenance........
- Greenwich Council added a new e-initiative to its recently launched Members' Intranet site, which co-ordinates information for all council members. The interactive electronic information bulletin was launched during October, providing links to the information on the Members' Intranet site and to other sites of interest on the web.......
- The Housing Corporation launched a new site for the Bank of Good Practice for Continuous Improvement, which has been set up to support and promote continuous improvement in housing associations. The site contains some essential guides and good practice notes, all designed to help associations to comply with the new Regulatory Code. These include publications and examples of good practice that will help associations meet the minimum standards contained in the code and guidance.......
- The Government announced funding of £1.8 billion in 2003-04 for the Supporting People programme in England. The programme, which commenced on 1 April 2003, provides services for more than one million vulnerable people to live independently in their accommodation. These include the homeless, women fleeing domestic violence and older people. Overall, the provision of housing related support, excluding sheltered and community alarms, has increased in the last three years, from under 100,000 units to more than 250,000 units.......
- A council has employed the services of two private debt collecting firms to tackle a £16 million rent arrears problem. The total includes £5.2 million owed by former tenants and Legal and the company has been contracted to work on recovering this element of the arrears. Another firm will work on arrears of current tenants.......
One Year Ago
In October 2007 we were reporting:
- Housing Minister Yvette Cooper announced that a new social housing watchdog that will crack down on registered social landlords in England who are giving tenants a poor service, such as long waits for repairs, is being established as an independent, standalone body. The new organisation - the Office for Tenants and Social Landlords - will have the powers to back up tenants of registered social landlords when they report poor service........
- The London Boroughs of Croydon and Havering are the latest areas that have agreed to take part in a Housing Corporation pilot project looking at whether stock rationalisations will achieve improved services for tenants who live in their area.
They join a list that includes Manchester and South Hampshire to examine property management.
The projects forms part of an initiative of the Housing Corporation, that aims to get housing associations in England to explore the potential for rationalisation.......
- Students from 23 universities were set to gather in central London to celebrate the success and expansion of the Foyer/UNIAID accommodation bursary scheme. The scheme is supporting 63 students facing hardship during the 2007/8 academic year, providing them with a year's free accommodation.......
- The social housing sector came up trumps in the finals of the prestigious North of England Business Excellence Awards 2007, with five housing organisations amongst the 15 finalists.
Often described as the 'Business Oscars', the awards are open to private, public and non-profit organisations of all sizes........
- HM Treasury will shortly lay draft regulations before Parliament, setting out definition of a zero carbon home for stamp duty land tax purposes. The Budget 2007 stated that from 1 October 2007 all new homes meeting the zero carbon standard costing up to £500,000 will pay no stamp duty, and zero-carbon homes costing in excess of £500,000 will receive a reduction in their stamp duty bill of £15,000.......
- New statistics supplied by the three Tenancy Deposit Protection schemes show that almost 500,000 deposits have been protected at a rate of over 3,300 per day in the six months since launch. This means that over £450 million worth of deposits are now protected by the schemes, safeguarding one in four tenants living in privately rented houses and flats.......
- Housing officers are often the key to promoting neighbourhoods where people from different backgrounds are accepted and share similar opportunities. A newly-revised guide from the Chartered Institute of Housing and the Housing Corporation shows how housing professionals can use their regular contact with members of different communities to promote interaction and diffuse tensions. Community Cohesion and Housing A Good Practice Guide was published at a seminar in London.......
- Nottingham Community Housing Association (NCHA) and design agency Purple Circle scooped the Roses Design Silver Award in Corporate Literature for NCHA's A Housing Manifesto for the East Midlands. It was written to mark the 40th anniversary of Cathy Come Home - the groundbreaking drama that highlighted the lack of affordable homes in the 60s.......
