Internal issues

Not so now, says a new survey of 2,000 people by Circle Anglia. Seven per cent told the housing association they would flog one of their internal organs voluntarily for the chance to get on the property ladder.

One in four said they would sign up to clinical trial while a quarter of the more squeamish Scots said they were gambling their way to homeownership.

Hopes for a sunny outlook to this year’s party conferences were quickly eclipsed as the Liberal Democrats kicked off with their jamboree in Bournemouth.

Party leader Nick Clegg predicted ‘brave’ and ‘savage’ cuts. Closed Circuit assumes it will be the politicians who take on the role of the savage while expecting public sector workers to put on the brave face.

Surely a brighter outlook was on the cards for the housing world, what with all that extra cash flowing in? Not so said Lib Dem peer Baroness Kishwer Falkner. ”The good times are over in this sector,’ she lamented at a fringe session organised by Hyde Housing Association.

Tough questions tax the minds of the luminaries who are the board members of the Tenant Services Authority. Minutes from a July meeting spied by Closed Circuit this week, reveal that they are scratching their heads over whether they should be allowed to travel first class.

Mercifully, the byzantine civil service machine kicked in to ease their pain. An official advised that a report would be prepared for the board on the thorny issue for publication in October. Glad to see the tenants’ champion has got its priorities right.

Few of you can likely lay claim to recording three singles, being played on Radio 1 and recording a session for London’s Capital Radio. But as Inside Housing prepares its first ever music issue - out on 2 October - it has emerged that Hyde boss David Eastgate has done all three.

‘We don’t play anymore,’ Eastgate says of his former band, The Larks, ‘But I still see them [his bandmates] and the more we drink the more we think about getting back together.’ With conference-season in full swing, perhaps that could be sooner than he thinks.