London’s council housing got going early in the 20^th Century under the control of the elected borough councils and the London County Council (LCC).   The boroughs had superseded the parochial councils that had since the middle ages carried responsibility for administering to the poor whilst the LCC took over the work of the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) in re-housing the multitude of private tenants who had been displaced by its own projects and those of the railway companies.  Council Housing was the responsibility of the community as a whole and run by its representatives.

By the 1990s, had the proportion of Islington’s councillors matched the proportion of its electorate living in council housing then, there would have been exactly the same proportion of council tenants on the council as there are now on the board of Homes for Islington (HfI) 47%.  But in addition, tenants and leaseholders were able to express their concerns both on management issues and strategic aspects that included homelessness, allocations, land assets, and sheltered housing through a hierarchy of consultative bodies.

For Ann Lucas’s to imply that the creation of HfI did anything to advance residents’ control over their housing simply does not relate to the facts.  (“We’re accountable”, Viewpoints Gazette February 15)

HfI’s board members are instructed that they do not represent any interests other than that of HfI itself and under its Code of Conduct their loyalty is to HfI’s corporate decisions.  HfI works to the agenda set by central government, following guidelines from the Audit Commission that also provides ‘external inspection’.  Soon after its inception it embarked upon the systematic demolition of the consultative system with the scrapping of the signed Tenant Participation Compact along with the Compact Negotiating Committee, the Housing Consultative Panel and now two of the six area housing panels.

A key aspect of Blair’s housing policy has been the separation of the two functions of housing management from housing strategy.  HfI has no responsibility or influence over housing strategy but requests for officers from Islington Council’s residual housing department to attend area housing panels are always met with the response that HfI have been delegated the task of consulting with tenants on housing strategy and so it is that, with regard to sale of housing assets, the creation of HfI “has placed a private company between us and our landlords”.

Ms. Lucas tells us that HfI is improving housing in Islington and that "these improvements have been consistently proven through external assessments and customer surveys."

Here she touches upon a source of growing distrust between providers of "public services" and those who take the longer view.

Great reliance is placed upon focus groups by 21st Century Century Government whilst those taking the longer view look to public meetings. Two systems for assessing public opinion that differ both in method and necessarily in the output that they achieve.

The problem occurs when providers of a public trying to research publ,ic opinion about that service find that the out put from public meetings differs wildly from that obtained from focus groups and satisfaction forms. The reasaon for this are very simple. They are each in the last annalysis infomation systems and as such what you put in as raw information will determin what comes out.

The focus group. Its integrity could be claimed to come from the fact that its subjects are chosen at random.
Random however does not exist. Availablity alone will cause only a certain subset of subjects to be chosen.
The most important affect on the output from a focus group isaffect that the information fed in has. It is difficult for a service provider to bring itself to provide negative input to a focus group and like any system what can come out of it must depend upon what is fed in. Then there are the additional attempts that are aimed at putting the focus group participants at ease and generally giving them a sense of well-being. At worst this the corrupting practice of giving particpants an inducement such as a voucher to spend in a high street store. Lulled into a false sense of security and well-being the participant gives positive answers.

The Public Meeting. A well advertised public meeting will not attract all of any section of the public who are invited, nor a random sample but those who are familiar with these events and, in particular, those who habitually attend public meetings, sit on committees and start pressure groups.
These people make use of a quite different source of information from which they make up their minds. The older they are then the more sceptical they are likely to be concerning new initiatives intended to solve old problems. Some participants might have experience that is greater than any of those putting forward the solutions.
So it is that the two methods for gathering public opinion differ in their output and this should not be wondered at. However there is a tendancy for service providers to label those who adopt a critial tone at at many meeting after meeting first as the usual suspects and then as members of which ever political party is out of favour. It is not unknown for such a public figure to be labelled by some as right wing and by others as a New Labour supporter (come to think of it they are the same) or both a Communist and a Conservative.