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Broken promise
• ANGRY tenants on the Highbury estate packed a meeting with Homes for Islington (HfI) chief executive Eamon McGoldrick to demand that HfI honour its promise to give them new bathrooms. As work started on individual flats the tenants were told by the contractor, not HfI, that they wouldn’t be getting their new bathroom.
Councillors Anna Berent and Rhodri Jamieson-Ball came to the meeting and were “shocked” by what they heard about HfI’s broken promise.
HfI has blamed an earlier survey for being incomplete and has commissioned a new survey. But is there any point? The issue at stake is over the interpretation of government guidelines for the Decent Homes Standard. HfI has been claiming that the government has set a limit for new bathrooms of 40 years. It turns out that this is not the case.
Government guidelines published in June 2006 quite clearly state that dwellings should have a “reasonably modern bathroom (30 years or less)”. This means that the Highbury estate, where the majority of bathrooms were installed in 1975, now fails one of the key requirements for Decent Homes.
And yet, the new team of surveyors has been told to carry on using the same old 40-year rule. In other words HfI is commissioning a new survey to come up with the same results as the one they say was wrong. This looks as though the whole exercise is an empty public relations stunt to deflect criticism from the fact that HfI has broken its earlier promise to tenants.
To make matters worse, Mr McGoldrick confirmed that funding for the Decent Homes programme is due to run out in 2010. This means that tenants, whose bathrooms already fail the Decent Homes requirement of being modern, will have to put up with sub-standard bathrooms for years to come.
This sorry saga, which has played out on other estates, can only leave residents wondering whether they can trust anything HfI tells them. Tenants on the Highbury estate were promised new bathrooms and will continue to demand them.
LORNA REID
Chairwoman, Highbury Estate Tenants’ Association
SUSAN BOYD
Secretary
RICHARD ROSSER
Treasurer
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