John Mason

IT is difficult to know why Camden remains relatively silent on the issue of repairs.

Have they failed to grasp the problem or are they merely hiding behind government funding cuts?

Whatever the truth, “dilapidations” is a relatively new term about which Camden’s tenants will hear more. It indicates what happens when a problem is ignored, leading to more serious problems due to neglect.

In a nutshell, the council is ignoring the repairs crisis which predictably is getting worse. As yet we have no adequate measure of its extent or of the rate at which it is growing.

Its roots reach back at least to the Tony Blair government, which withheld £200million of estate regeneration funding when tenants rejected an arm’s length management organisation or ALMO.

The 2010 cuts have not helped. Moreover the issue is now compounded by a chronic shortage of skilled labour. This would not be too bad if we were talking about individual repairs. But the scope of the problem has widened to include cyclical maintenance, retrofit and a skilled labour shortage that affects both councils and housing associations.

Research into a pilot retrofit scheme at Phoenix Court in Somers Town has demonstrated the impracticability of retrofitting any structure without carrying out necessary and long overdue repairs.

The crisis is now at, or fast approaching, a tipping point.

The council is becoming a slum landlord at an unknown but accelerating pace. This is demonstrated by the volume of complaints from tenants and a growing divide between what tenants need and what the council is able and or willing to give them.

What is required is long-term strategic thinking over a time span of 15 to 25 years.

Camden often seems to look on itself as the favoured son of an incoming Labour government. But without a well thought out plan it will get nothing.

In the meantime there are two initial issues on which an immediate start could be made that would give hope, both to tenants and to a demoralised labour force:

— first, an estimate of the both rate of acceleration and extent of dilapidation, based on a comparison between the current (yet to be released) and previous stock condition surveys despite these having received insufficient attention in the past; and

— second, a labour force plan reflecting the wide-ranging nature of the problems, which now requires the higher level of skills necessitated by retrofit.

Logically, flowing from this, an in-house training programme based at Holmes Road.

It should be planned with and managed by councillors, the two trade unions at the depot, Camden’s five district management committees (DMCs) representing tenants, local further education colleges, academic and research interests (not consultants) and the new Euston skills centre.

Holmes Road depot, designed and build by the former St Pancras Metropolitan Borough, is one of the finest works depots in London. It is a recently refurbished, well-equipped hub for the borough’s works department.

Due to labour shortages some of its workshop space is underused, since it was built at a time when the directly employed workforce was much larger than now. There is thus a need to make use of the facilities going spare.

It offers the hope of giving Camden a combined repairs and retrofit programme which, if carefully planned and sensitively carried out, kills two birds with one stone.

The two crucial elements are information and skills.

• John Mason is a Camden-based housing activist and commentator.