MORI brought in to save Edinburgh transfer plans (Inside Housing)

Edinburgh Council has commissioned opinion pollsters MORI to canvass tenant
opinion in an attempt to resurrect its stock transfer plans for the Scottish
capital.MORI is to interview a sample of tenants to find out why the council's December
ballot delivered a resounding no vote, despite previous tests of opinion
indicating support for the move.



The council is expecting to find that controversy over the Glasgow Housing
Association's second stage transfer process at the time of the ballot had
impacted on the result (/Inside Housing/, 18 November).



Sheila Gilmore, executive member for community safety and housing at the
council, said it was now reassessing the potential for stock transfer. 'The
issue that came up about Glasgow is such a technical one and it's about
something we weren't even proposing for Edinburgh,' she said.



'We have to look at all the options again.' As well as reconsidering full stock
transfer, the council is also discussing rolling out a series of partial
transfers, from the council to local housing associations.



'It was not the best option when we looked at it before,' Ms Gilmore said. 'We
have to go back and look at whether it would be a good enough solution.'



The council is to lobby the Scottish Executive to write off housing debt for
partial transfer as the government does in England. Ewan Fraser, chief executive
of Dunedin Canmore Housing Association, which took over 212 homes from Edinburgh
Council last year, said it was keen to take on new stock.



'We have got quite a bit of experience in that now and I think we have got a
good track record on working with tenants' groups,' he said.



But he also warned that unless the executive changed its rules on debt
write-off, partial transfer might not take off.



'I think the Scottish Executive has got to decide what the best interests of
tenants in the long term really are,' he said.



Alistair Berwick, association consultant at Tribal HCH, said if the executive
relaxed its debt write-off rules, it would mark a sea change in the Scottish
transfer programme.



'If [the council] do persuade them to change it then it would completely rewrite
all the rules. It would be the end of the large-scale transfer programme,'



Councils would not bother gathering support for large-scale transfer if they
could work through a series of small-scale transfers with similar financial
benefits, he said.



Tenant representatives, however, feared that the council's deliberations could
make the tenant ballot a meaningless exercise.



Sean Clerkin, campaign co-ordinator for the Scottish Tenants' Organisation which
helped lead Edinbugh's anti-transfer campaign, said: 'I think it's tantamount to
the breakdown of democratic participation.'



/Give your views in Your Forum /

*Published: 27 January 2006*

*by Hannah Fearn *