Whilst l was chairing the Housing Committee at the London Assembly during the political year 2020/21 l was inundated with complaint of Housing Association’s and their housing management, particularly of the largest ones operating in Greater London.

Indeed l found myself writing a letter of compliant on behave of many Londoners living in these poorly managed homes for a particularly large Housing Association across the whole of Greater London to the regulator of social housing. But they dropped the case, that their consumer standards have not been breached! 

“We have carefully considered the information you provided, and we have concluded that our consumer standards have not been breached. For that reason, we are unable to take regulatory action in this case. ” 

Since then there has been a lot of coverage of how bad some of this management is in London by the mainstream media both on TV on ITV News and also the papers. In the Observer they covered these issues over consecutive weekends thus following up their exposure of the issues with one particular Housing Association in London. 

So l feel vindicated in my pursuit of the poor housing management standards of many large Housing Associations as it appears at least some like L&Q have acknowledged those concerns and have began addressing these matter. 

I did of course raise the matter with the Mayor of London before my departure of City Hall at one of my last MQT, and he raised the prospect of appointing a social housing residents Ambassador. 

But l thing he needs to go much further than that. He needs to take on board these poor housing management considerations of tenants and resident of their social landlord when allocating them huge monies from the annual Affordable Housing Programme. For instance one large Housing Association was given £240 million programme whilst having major complaints on how they run some of their Estates in South London on television! So all credit to ITN News for making this a main news item, something that would usually be ignored by main stream news channels.  Let us hope the Mayor responds to my suggestion in a future round of allocations of capital funding that it should be a condition of funding that good quality maintenance of existing homes is proven. Otherwise we just storing up more problems in the future for our London residents of new social housing!