David Bookbinder reacts to "personal" criticism of housing associations

Tommy Lusk's personal attack on housing associations really can’t go unchallenged.

His main point was that housing associations subject to regulatory intervention for poor governance still appear to have decent services to tenants, so they must be fiddling the figures.

Membership bodies like GWSF can’t dispute that in a very small minority of cases across Scotland, things sometimes go wrong in housing associations, and the problems are usually governance-related. Unlike many sectors, ours has the benefit of a robust and highly demanding regulatory regime, which sees prompt action taken to root out problems, including rooting out the responsible individuals where this is needed.

Contrary to Mr Lusk's claims, it is actually perfectly possible that a housing association with some governance problems may have a really good team of housing officers and repairs staff who continue to provide tenants with a great service despite issues with the overall running of the association. The statistical returns associations make to the Scottish Housing Regulator have to be capable of being validated - and frequently are - and so the accusation that satisfaction rates are skewed is pure fantasy.

Our members carry out emergency repairs in an average of 2.3 hours, and have an average rent of well under £80 a week. Yes we wish we could house more people than we can, and we’re contributing the majority of the Scottish Government’s current target of 35,000 new social houses over five years.

Housing associations aren't perfect. But at a time when so many younger people in particular are facing sky-high rents and poor or indifferent service from private landlords, it seems that we're the easy target just because information on our activities is publicly available.

Seems we're the easy target just because information on our activities is publicly available

Ill-informed criticism is hard to take. One of our member associations was recently the subject of a campaign relating to the proposed cut in sheltered housing funding from the local Health and Social Care Partnership. The campaign urged the association to pay for the service out of its own funds. A few weeks later the same motley crew of self-appointed campaigners told the association that it should be freezing its rent. Ironic eh?

The campaigners made personal threats to a named housing officer on its Facebook page, and the association had to take legal action when it would rather have focused on doing the job tenants were paying it to do.

It's a sign of the times - nowadays it seems that any keyboard warrior with a personal axe to grind can call themselves a Housing Campaigner and get undeserved media coverage. Social media gives pretty much anyone a platform for polemic, however unresearched it may be. Increasingly, the challenge will be how the more respectable media outlets like TFN differentiate between personal diatribe and properly evidenced arguments.

David Bookbinder is director of the Glasgow and West of Scotland Forum of Housing Associations