The housing minister's announcement last Thursday that he's allocated £8 million over the next four years to the Department for Communities and Local Government's Tenants Empowerment Programme (TEP) has been welcomed as a coalition "green light" by the Gibbs Green and West Kensington estates' residents' campaign to break away from Tory flagship Hammersmith and Fulham Council, which would like to demolish their dwellings as part of a big regeneration scheme. The TEP is described by the Department as follows:
It provides information, training, and capacity building to enable social housing tenants to challenge, influence or control how housing services are delivered to their communities, in order to improve the quality of life for residents.
But my understanding is that as well as equipping tenants to exercise the "right to manage" it will also enable them to assert the even bigger "right to transfer" ownership of their homes from their local authorities to themselves under Section 34A of the Housing Act (1985) once the regulations required to bring it into effect are activated.
I reported on those here and here, when it was expected that the draft regulations would be published for consultation this month. That schedule has slipped into March but Jonathan Rosenberg, a spokesperson for the Gibbs Green and West Kensington campaign, considers Shapps's decision to restore funding for the TEP - which had halted under the previous government - shows that this is one aspect of David Cameron's under-fire Big Society agenda where money is being put where mouths are.
In preparation for speaking on housing issues at Saturday's Progressive London conference, I've just scribbled on the back of a metaphorical envelope that vigorously encouraging tenant self-ownership of social housing estates could be a very progressive policy for a progressive London Mayor to adopt - and unlike several other things a progressive London Mayor might like to do, he or she would apparently have government support for it. Imagine that.
