What Price a Cheap Kitchen?

I'm sitting here watching the birds feeding in the garden, first the starlings, next a blackbird, a robin and then the collar doves and the wood pigeon. The blue tits, chaffinches and house sparrows, along with other, less frequent, visitors have yet to arrive or perhaps I missed them earlier.

Our gardens, our back garden in particular, have special significance for us, my now frail, elderly husband and me, younger and disabled. We created them from nothing, a long, hard labour of love. The front an expanse of grass, the back another expanse of grass with large, overgrown lilac trees at the bottom, have evolved into places of sanctuary and providers of fresh fruit and vegetables. We live beside farmland and they also attract a wide range of wildlife. For people who can only rarely leave their homes their gardens can take on a significance beyond the norm, they are their access to the world outside their walls.

Our back garden in its current state is now under threat, admittedly merely a rumour but one we take seriously. 15 feet of the back gardens of the four housing association properties backing onto the access road to what are now garages but are about to be demolished to make way for a similar number of parking bays, according to the rumour, are to be sacrificed to expand the single lane access road to a two-lane access road. Ours is one of the four properties.

Rumours are, like gossip, rarely pleasant and invariably untrue, but since our home was what was euphemistically termed "transferred", i.e. sold, to a housing association by the local council we've learned to listen to rumours, they have a nasty habit of proving true, the demolition of the garages started as one such rumour.

When we were given the keys to this property we were told that we had a home for life, we had a secure tenancy and a two-page tenancy agreement. When tenants voted for stock transfer in response to promises of improved housing conditions if they voted for the proposed transfer and dire threats of the deterioration of the housing stock if they voted against, they not only gave up their security of tenure but they also gave up their voice in influencing the future of their homes and local area, local politicians are accountable, distant management boards are not. They also found themselves in possession of a 39-page tenancy agreement, one-and-a-half pages detailing the landlord's responsibilities the remainder detailing the tenant's. They had sold their security and say in how their housing was provided in exchange for promises of cheap replacement kitchens and double glazing.

Since the transfer of the housing stock to the original housing association the association has grown; it has increased its housing portfolio through the transfer of additional council-owned stock; it has engaged in a merger becoming the one of the largest housing associations in the country; it has refinanced and, more recently, properties that, due to borrowing restrictions imposed on local authorities, were owned outright by councils now provide security for the largest loan made to a housing association in social housing history; "excess" stock in areas of high housing demand and low availability have been sold off; the association operates a commercial arm with property for market sale and market rent; staff refer to it as "the company".

This blog is about the privatisation of social housing, the removal of yet another building block of the Welfare State. It's about the personal experience of changing from a local, accountable housing provider to a distant, unapproachable and unaccountable bureaucracy that appears to put profits before people and doesn't appear to have the word "consult" in its vocabulary; it's about dealing with the preconceptions and stereotypes attributed to social housing tenants not least by their landlords and their staff; it's about fighting for services, failing services and, most of all, the experience of being voiceless, powerless and feeling that you are of no consequence, merely, as in the words of a neighbour, "treated like dirt" by an organisation that appears to have forgotten where its core purpose lies: in the provision of decent affordable housing for low-income individuals and families.


What price a cheap kitchen? All the above and perhaps the loss of a third of a garden beyond price to those who created it.