Beam Park Councillors call on Government to support and hold housing providers to account.

Beam Park Councillors Trevor McKeever and Matt Stanton today write in the Havering Daily on the need for the government to not only support housing providers, but hold them to account as well.

The Social Housing (Regulation) Act, given Royal Assent recently, offers Beam Park tenants of Clarion, L&Q, Estuary, or Notting Hill additional support and new means to hold their housing provider to account, along with rolling inspections of social housing stock carried out by the Regulator of Social Housing.

“We are pleased that Clarion, who house over a thousand of our residents, are already working to an improvement plan, which is one of the aspects of this Bill we are most pleased about” said Beam Park Councillor Trevor Mckeever, who for years prior to his election worked alongside Orchard Village residents and Jon Cruddas MP to rectify defects on the estate. “The Regulator can now directly order emergency repairs where necessary, and we look forward to working alongside them to make sure that tenants get the homes they deserve”.

Councillor Matthew Stanton is keen to hear how the Government is going to support Local Authorities and Housing Associations faced with new obligations. He told the Havering Daily: “I think we all recognise the good that will come of making sure that as many staff as possible have appropriate qualifications, but I share the Local Government Association’s concern that asking housing providers to take this on all at once will affect staff recruitment, retention and development, not to mention the financial burden on Local Authorities. Government should undertake, in this and other matters, to financially support councils through changes it imposes.”

Dagenham and Rainham’s Labour Prospective Parliamentary Candidate, Margaret Mullane, would like to see reforms in the social housing sector matched by promised improvements to the private rented sector. She told the Havering Daily: “While the Conservative Government pushes more expense onto councils, it allows its long promised reforms to ‘no-fault evictions’ to sit on the shelf, and it has not made any attempts to provide a decent homes standard for the private rented sector, and still allows private landlords to refuse to rent to those in receipt of housing benefit.”

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