Recently, I was looking through a comparison of efficiency in public sector housing management. Brent Council will soon have to decide what to do with Brent Housing Partnership, which is the company that manages all the Council Housing in Brent. BHP was originally set up to take advantage of the investment that the previous Labour government made in housing after many years of neglect. The money allowed Brent to bring all its housing stock outside South Kilburn and Barham Park to "Decent Homes" standard by the end of 2007.
It is an unusual decision in that there is not a strong financial pressure to go in any direction. We need to decide whether we want to continue to be a housing provider, and if so how to do it.
It reminds me of the desperate debates in Camden, which rejected a similar injection of money because they thought that Arms Length Management Organisations like BHP were a form of privatisation. In fact BHP and any other ALMO is wholly owned by the Council. Nevertheless Camden Council, after balloting its tenants, rejected the idea of forming an ALMO and as a result lost £283 million of funding for Camden Council properties. Of course, there is no prospect of them getting that money back.
Incidentally, the study I was looking at said that there is no significant efficiency difference between ALMO and non-ALMO management, which makes both the previous government's insistence on ALMOs and Camden's rejection of them look even more tragic.
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