London Borough of Tower Hamlets

The London Borough of Tower Hamlets (LBTH) is our current landlord, and the souce of the Housing Choices programme.

Residents of the Mansford Estate tend to have quite strong feelings about their landlord, the terms "helpful", "co-operative" and "efficient" not generally being the first to come to mind.

These feeling sometimes threaten to get in the way of the Housing Choice programme - which is in principle, a way of not having the problems we have experience in the past affect us in the future.

To an extent LBTH is the victim of two processes beyond its control: past government policy which, having built vast supplies of social housing and had it managed by local authorities, decided against providing the means to maintain and upgrade it, and then the new-look, new-labour, new-smoke-and-mirrors policy of the current governement, which says, effectively:

local authorities have been appalling in their management of their housing stock
something needs to be done about the state of the stock by 2010 at the latest
the something cannot involve the local authority in borrowing (more) money, because that would increase the public sector borrowing requirement
Nor can they raise the money through Council Tax, which is as high as people will tolerate already
Nor can they increase rents beyond a set formula
local authorities cannot be trusted to manage their social housing, but
they must have access to social housing in order to meet their statutory duties
therefore, they need to be deprived of the management of the stock, while still being able to determine who lives in it.

(This is perhaps not quite the official line, but, as an independent body, the ESG has the luxury of not having to toe the party line, and the above is certainly at least as true as the official version)

Tower Hamlets response to this, together was to begin the Housing Choices programme, with the intention of transferring its housing to Registered Social Landlords.

THCH formed part of an earlier study to demonstrate that estates could be transferred in this way, and also that it was possible for local authority staff to make the transition from one working environment to another. It has been their success which has encouraged the further development of the process.

LBTH organised the setting up of the Estate Steering Group, and provides an observer at each meeting of the group.

The department of LBTH which deals with organising Housing Choice is:

Consultation and participation team

The consultation and participation team can be contacted at:

20 Three Colt Street

London E14 8HJ

Tel: 020 7531 0220

Fax: 020 7531 1420

E-mail: cpt.towerhamlets@dial.pipex.com

Please be aware that they cannot deal with issues which you my have with LBTH outside of the Housing Choice Programme.

If you need to deal with any other issues, click here to link to the main Tower Hamlets website. The link on our main menu will take you direct to the Housing Choice section of the site.