So, my birthday is over. There’s only one thing more depressing than contemplating a birthday and seeing another year fly by. And that is contemplating the day after a birthday, and realising that it’s a whole year until the next time anyone gives you cake with candles in it and lots of presents. That is essentially where I am today.

However, I am keeping the howling wolves of Time’s unstoppable force from my door by dabbling in some case work.

Now that we’re out canvassing, it means that rather than ring me up to ask for things to be sorted, local people can just stay at home and wait for me to knock on the door.

I have chased up a couple of things this morning on behalf of local residents who I’ve spoken to on the doorstep in the past couple of weeks.

There is an issue in Rainsough at the moment with the new roofs being put on the leased houses. A lot of the privately owned houses in the rows are being affected by the works, although obviously aren’t getting a new roof. So I have been making sure that the construction workers are considerate in removing the debris and keeping the disruption to home-owners to a minimum. It’s great for the tenants to be receiving home improvements, but the people who own their own home mustn’t be inconvenienced if at all possible.

Also today I have been working with the Council to get a patch of Woodward Road cleaned up. Yesterday a resident of that road pointed out the very bizarre green slime that has accumulated, and is creeping down the road due to what I presume is a drainage issue beneath the pavement. I hope it’s that anyway, or else we have been invaded by a strange alien life-form, which I could do without at this election time. In any event, I have been told that the street care inspectors and the cleaning team will head down to take a look at it later, and take whatever action is needed, such as a mechanical clean or engaging Ghostbusters.

I will keep you informed.

And we’re out again somewhere tonight (I don’t do the organising, and am not told where we’re going to canvass until about half an hour before, like it’s a secret gig of some sort at a dank underground nightclub). So there’ll probably be more issues tonight. Assuming the slime doesn’t get us all first.

Rick

The Lib Dems in parliament voted last night to massively boost investment in Council housing for the neediest in our society. Despite being backed by thirty Labour MPs rebelling against their own government, Lib Dem proposals were defeated.

In one of the biggest revolts since Gordon Brown became prime minister the rebels joined the Lib Dems in calling for more money to “acquire, rehabilitate, and build” more homes.

The rebels included five former ministers, Frank Dobson, Peter Kilfoyle, Michael Meacher, Frank Field, and Kate Hoey.

The amendment to the Housing and Regeneration Bill called for more resources to build and repair council homes - but was rejected. Mr Meacher said the supply of council housing needed to be vastly increased and it was “unrealistic” to rely on the private sector to build the required homes.

Labour’s Austin Mitchell said the changes would prevent the “bribery, bamboozlement and bullying” of councils into privatising housing stock.

Unfortunately the Labour government didn’t agree, and once again sound a worrying call the poorest in society who are finding that privately run housing associations are less effective, less accountable, and less suitable for their needs.

Rick

Last night was a meeting of the Performance and Resources Scrutiny Commission, the body that I sit on comprised of back-bench Councillors scrutinising the Executive’s work on performance and finance.

It was a one item agenda last night, a “call-in” of the Executive decision to award the contract for a Home Improvement Agency to Six Town Housing rather than go for an open tender. This will radically improve the way that disabled facilities grants are dealt with. The “call in” meant that the Scrutiny commission wanted to examine the decision in detail. The Executive (essentially the Council’s “Cabinet” of executive members) are held to account by Scrutiny, and this “call in” system is one way of doing that.

We could decide to accept the decision as it stood, or refer it back to the Executive with comments, or refer it to full Council for debate. 

I have to say that it was an excellent meeting. The debate was thorough and fair, and the meeting really did benefit from a single item agenda allowing for proper scrutiny and giving members the chance to read twenty pages of papers properly, rather than not read 150 pages of papers and struggle through a dozen agenda items like normal.

In addition, there was no split on party lines, as I’d feared.

At the vote, the Commission voted that the original Executive decision was right (there was one abstention) and that no tender was needed. Although the call-in didn’t result in anything changing, it did scrutinise the decision and give reassurance that the Executive were right to proceed as they did. Which is what Scrutiny should be about.

So STH will run the Home Improvement Agency, and this appalling service will hopefully get much better very quickly. Scruiny can’t be held responsible for the performance of the service, but at least we know that the decision to go with STH was fair and proper, and we can scrutinise performance in the future.

A good night, and I felt useful and like I’d really helped decide something positive. Which is a novelty for a Scrutiny system which I think sometimes needs a radical shake-up. And I hope to be able to start talking about that shake up soon to the people who might make it happen.

Rick

The Government’s £100 million scheme to help first-time buyers has sold only 451 homes since it started in 2006, according to figures obtained from the Liberal Democrats.

In a housing policy paper to be debated at the Party’s Spring Conference this weekend, the Liberal Democrats will argue for the multi-million pound scheme to be replaced with Government-backed equity mortgages.

The paper Homes for All: Action to Tackle the Housing Crisis will set out how the Party would build an additional 1.3 million affordable homes to buy and rent over the next decade, whilst equity mortgages would ensure the homes remained affordable after their first resale.

Liberal Democrat research on Government schemes to help first-time buyers shows that between April 2006 and Oct 2007 there were just 451 completions through the First Time Buyers Initiative despite over £100m investment in the scheme.

This is really depressing news for many young people who find themselves nowhere near the first rung of the housing ladder.

The Government’s flagship home ownership schemes are woefully inadequate compared to the real affordability gap faced by first time buyers.

Building a handful of houses to gain headlines has not helped the thousands of people for whom a home of their own is further away than ever. The HomeBuy scheme has failed. We should be building far more homes for first-time buyers and ensuring they remain affordable for future generations.

In Prestwich the problem is as acute as elsewhere in the country. Houses in St Mary’s are too expensive for first time buyers, and planning laws and government planning policy are doing nothing to make it easier for young people to get onto the housing ladder locally.

Rick

Last night’s Sherbourne Court and Warwick Street TRA was a success, I think. A lot of tenants and residents are frustrated at the lack of Six Town Housing response to their maintenance issues, and are considering the possibility of a formal complaint.

I must say that I have a lot of admiration for the residents who put up with what seems to be quite a shoddy service at times from Six Town Housing. But they are not helped by some of the residents who share the block, who seem to be committing crimes and engaging in anti-social behaviour which is driving local people mad – doors smashed in, noise and general misbehaviour which is making the lives of local people all the more difficult.

The Police have been engaged and are working with the community but I often get very frustrated that their action is often too little, too late. Even the local police officers themselves are hugely frustrated with the lack of action they can take over offenders they know all too well. I think it is a case of continuing the hard work and waiting until it pays off. Unfortunately, in the meantime a lot of local people are suffering, and I appeal to local people to pull together and remember that the flats are shared by everyone.

On the plus side, there are plans for another walk about and potentially another clean up day. The last one was a great success, so hopefully this one will be as well. I will let you know when a date has been arranged.

And also, plans have been taken forward for some hanging baskets and extra flowers and greenery for the area, which is another piece of positive news. I have seen these schemes work very well in the past, and hopefully this one will work well here too when it happens.

Tonight I attended my third Council-related meeting of the week, and this time it was the turn of Rainsough Tenants and Residents Association.

It was their first meeting of the year, and it was great to see well over two dozen people in attendance, including representatives from the police, Six Town Housing, Salix Housing (from Salford), and two Councillors including me, as well as lots of tenants and residents of course.

We seem to be making a bit of progress on improving the park on Kersal Road, and I have this evening made further enquiries with the Council to see if they can find the money to give us some play equipment for younger children, as well as more dog waste bins which I think are sorely needed. Hopefully there’ll be some good news there.

The main debate of the evening was around the future of the Chapel Road shops. Councillors from both the main parties in St Mary’s are clearly of the view that this has been a neglected area of the ward for too long now. We have the ideal opportunity to do something about it now, with Children’s Centre outreach facilities an obvious solution, and £20k available for this purpose. Labour-run Salford City Council have neglected Rainsough for decades, but have indicated a willingness to engage with us now, and that’s to be commended if they follow it up with action.

What struck me tonight though was the different viewpoints of so many residents. Some were keen on the idea of an outreach centre, whilst others preferred other options ranging on conversion to domestic use, commercial shops or even just to board them up. There are clearly concerns over security, and these were shared both by us Councillors and the Committee. However, the Police pointed out what I suspect most people in the room knew - that times and people have changed a lot since the last time the shops were open, and that security needn’t be an issue if things are planned correctly.

With such a range of views on display, the Committee has agreed to hold a special meeting with all interested stakeholders including Police, housing managers, residents in the immediate vicinity of the units, and the TRA itself, to see if we can find a sensible solution that will do the best for the whole community. I will be at this meeting, and I will let you know when I have a confirmed date. But it is vital that we move forward here and don’t let a golden opportunity slip through our fingers.

I’ve had a very busy week and haven’t been entirely happy with all the meetings I’ve been at. Sometimes it can be frustrating. But other times I leave meetings feeling hopeful, and tonight was one of those times. The community was out in force, and although there are lots of options on the table and points of view around, everyone in the room tonight was united in wanting to make Rainsough a better place. And that’s to be commended.

Rick

Construction work will begin in the next few days on houses in Rainsough and Carr Clough. There will be a variety of re-roofing works, including new soffits, fascias, rainwater pipes, guttering, renewal of slate tiles and, for some, new roof insulation.

The works will finish by the end of March, and will take place on most of the properties in Carr Clough and Rainsough.

If you’d like more information, please get in touch!

Rick

I have today placed an offer to buy a house in the ward which is both lovely and ludicrously unaffordable. The offer was gleefully accepted by the current owner who, if you find a quiet spot, you will be able to hear cackling like a maniac and jangling with shiny coins as he runs to the bank.

The same bank, no doubt, which delights in charging me not only thrice the price of the house in interest over the next 25 years, but also a four figure “arrangement” fee for the mortgage, and then £300 on top as an “administration” fee whenever I decide to leave their care.

Over the next 2 years I will pay £31,000 to the bank, of which £23,000 will be interest.

It’s absolutely ridiculous, and unfortunately for a blog that depends on my verbosity to continue, I am genuinely lost for words.

And of course we have no alternative. If they asked me to empty out my pockets, stand on an upturned bucket and hum the French national anthem through a kazoo for the mortgage, I’d have to do it.

And yet such is the lure of home ownership that we claw and gouge and spit and scream our way to the front of the queue for this blatant daylight robbery with smiling acceptance, rather than the mass taking-to-the-streets-with-ceremonial-swords violent protests that any right-thinking society would instigate without delay.

Charlatans the lot of them, these bankers. All they have is lots of money that I don’t. And resultantly they have me in an inescapable financial death-hold. The alternative is to pay someone else’s mortgage in rent.

And the government’s HIPs seem to be an absolute joke. I still need a survey, at a cost of £500+, because apparently mortgage companies don’t trust them! So the seller has to get one, and the buyer has to get one too! Anyone involved in property purchasing is just signing away countless hundreds of pounds for nothing! We may as well hand over their bank details to the government and let them take care of it!

I might just post them my bank details now…

Rick

Last week I finally sold my “luxury” apartment, after trying to remove the gigantic millstone from around my neck for the better part of the last year.

Unfortunately that didn’t mark the end of my dalliances in the property market, as I had to go house-hunting over the weekend, stumbling from awful house to awful house thinking that I would have to consign myself to decades of back-breaking penury just to buy one of the crumbling and horrifically furnished shacks put before me.

To be fair, there were some nice ones. But the choice tended to be small-and-nice or big-and-yuck. And the new houses in particular appeared to have been developed with the car-less dwarf in mind.  

I had always been a comfortable distance away from the housing market horror that engulfs the nation at the moment until now. I had wandered past estate agent’s windows seeing increasingly lengthy price-tags with only a vacant shrug and a sigh. I had barely blinked when people lucky enough to have been born before the late 1970s told me how they’d bought their palatial residence for about thirteen pounds only to see it increase in value by forty-thousand times over the past five years.

But now has come the nasty business of actually having to purchase a house myself. And the depressing fact is that houses, even in the Manchester suburbs, are simply out of the reach of most young people.

If I lived alone, I could probably afford to live in a tiny city centre flat, or a bigger one out of town. But, having experienced these developments (and now that I haven’t got one of them to sell), let me say that they are genuinely horrific places to live. The rooms are tiny, the bathrooms don’t have windows, and the fixtures and fittings aren’t fixed or fitted with anything approaching adequacy. The communal areas are dumping grounds, the management companies act like third-world governments, and whilst brochures boast of “concierge services,” you’re more likely to get a guy with a big key-chain working 9-5, and screw you if anything breaks at the weekend.

And if you’re lucky enough to get a parking space, the car parks are patrolled by the biggest bunch of money-grabbing sharks the world has ever known. Where I had mine, a minor violation (such as the wrong space or incorrectly displayed permit) would result in clamping and a £350 fine. £350! To park outside your own flat!

Horrible, horrible things those flats are. And yet there’s millions of them! Manchester’s “Green Quarter,” which should be more accurately re-named “Flat Quarter,” is home to about 1,000 of these things in four or five brand new tower blocks. And they’re selling for hundreds of thousands of pounds! Who is buying them? And why oh why oh why?

Where are these people going to go when they have kids? Or spouses? Or more stuff than can fit in one room? Because I can’t see these flats, with their scuffed communal carpets and fading first-day grandeur, holding value.

We might be lucky. We have a bit of money saved and can probably put a deposit down on somewhere nice-ish. But I simply don’t know how single people my age, or people on lower incomes, or who live anywhere even moderately more pricy than Manchester, will ever afford a house without their parents helping or dying.

And it’s difficult to see how anything can change without causing more problems. If house prices in general come down, then anyone who’s bought recently suffers. If the market stagnates and we wait for wages to catch up, we’ll be waiting years and this whole generation will miss out on home-buying into their middle-age.

Shared-ownership is one idea, and I know people who’ve tried it out. But often there’s rent to be paid on the bit you don’t own, which makes repayment even more difficult. You pay a mortgage on 60% and then rent on the last 40%. And there are some home-buy schemes with slightly better terms - taking a separate loan out on a part of your home and only paying back that bit later on. They are good examples of mortgage lenders and housing associations working together with a good outcome at the end.

But these days so many young people fall into the trap of paying thousands to a management company or rental landlord rubbing his hands together, cackling wildly and flashing his gold tooth at you.

What about involving the housebuilders or the government themselves in non-rental shared ownership? Allowing first time buyers onto the ladder at virtually cost price, and then imposing a sell-on clause whereby the profit missed out on first time round (plus a bit more) is paid back when the house is sold?

So rather than a house costing £100k to build being sold for £150k, it’s sold for £110k, and when it’s sold on ten years later at full market value of, say £165k, the housebuilder gets all of the £40k it missed out on, plus 75% of the £15k profit? The young person has ten years of equity in his house, and the rest of the profit to re-invest.

I don’t know if this is practical, but it’s an idea and it means that young people get a foot on the ladder, whilst housebuilders keep an interest in the property as its value rises.

I am back on the hunt tonight. I wonder what I’ll find…

Rick

This week saw the Annual General Meeting of Bury Lib Dems, which took place at Elton Liberal Club and saw me elected Secretary of the local party. It was lovely to meet up with members I don’t see very often, as well as the familiar faces who I see rather too often… The new Executive Committee of the party has a big job keeping the momentum going over the next twelve months, especially since I failed in my first secretarial duty of recording the minutes of the AGM by completely forgetting to record my predecessor’s annual report. Never mind…

This weekend sees more Focus delivery, as well as me continuing my hunt for a new house in the ward. We recently sold our flat against the backdrop of the impending collapse of the housing market. I think this was quite an achievement, and certainly saved what little was left of my sanity after eleven months of trying to flog it whilst newspapers screamed about imploding property prices each and every day. So this weekend we are gleefully rushing around trying to re-invest in the very same teetering market by viewing about a dozen Prestwich pads.

Maybe by Monday I’ll have found my dream house. And to think, it will only take 25 years of hard slog to pay the bank twice the asking price in interest.

Oh what a joy it is to be alive.

Rick