Housing minister insists TSA’s days are numbered as body carries on regardless
Shapps: cabinet will back decision to scrap housing regulator
The housing minister is adamant that the Tenant Services Authority will definitely be abolished, despite concern from the Treasury about the potential impact.
Grant Shapps told Inside Housing this week that plans to ‘delete’ the regulator in the 2010 Decentralisation and Localism Bill have full cabinet approval.
He insisted that the review of regulation taking place which he announced at June’s Chartered Institute of Housing conference would simply determine where economic regulation would move to. He insisted the review would not look at whether the quango should remain, as suggested by some Whitehall sources.
Last week Inside Housing reported that the Treasury was unhappy with Mr Shapps’ plans for the TSA and had insisted on a full review covering all options for regulation of social housing. But Mr Shapps dismissed these reports as ‘nonsense’, and said the cabinet was fully behind him.
Repeating his earlier assertion that the ‘TSA is toast’, Mr Shapps said: ‘The TSA is going. The review is just about the economic regulation.’
Last week, he had answered a parliamentary question about the TSA which said ‘the government is reviewing the role and purpose of the Tenant Services Authority and the framework for social housing regulation’.
He also acknowledged Danny Alexander, chief secretary to the Treasury, had sent a letter to ministers about the TSA. The letter is understood to have warned about the potential risk scrapping the body could pose to lender confidence. Mr Shapps refused to comment on this, claiming it was an ‘internal document’.
The housing minister spoke out as TSA chief executive Peter Marsh wrote to all housing associations telling them they must continue to meet the regulator’s standards, stressing that the 2008 Housing and Regeneration Act remains in force.
He wrote: ‘We will continue to regulate on the basis of the TSA’s regulatory framework and expect all registered providers to operate on this basis.’
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Readers' comments (13)
Sidney Webb | 09/07/2010 9:50 am
Shapps is categorical - must be Friday!
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Dave Hollins | 09/07/2010 12:24 pm
Ah - it's an internal document so we're not allowed to see it or to know its contents despite the fact it has major implications for tenants and for housing investment. So much for the new politics and transparency - if it's embarrassing for Ministers, it's secret!
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kass | 09/07/2010 12:26 pm
How can the libdem go on supporting such a coalition governemnt who has an incompetnet minister like this?
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Anonymous | 09/07/2010 12:52 pm
I think that they are right to do this and whilst I am no conservative fan, this lot are no more incompetent than the last lot.
And I wonder how well the commentators above would be at running a country especially as the team in place are new.
Rather money lost here than from frontline service. The real test will be if things get any better for residents under this lot.
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john bull | 09/07/2010 12:59 pm
I hope Mr Marsh was listening and will stop wasting money, our money, running his now defunct organisation.
If this had been a private business Shapps would have called him in sacked him, told him his private suff at the office would be posted to him and collected the keys to his no doubt taxpayer paid for car.
Then appointed one of the undoubted many mandarins in the TSA to wind it all up with immediate effect. The 2008 Act may still be on the statue books but so are thousands of others which have never been repealed and are not enforced.
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Anonymous | 09/07/2010 2:13 pm
No matter what happens to the TSA, its Regulatory Framework should remain intact. There has to be some form of regulation in place to ensure that tenants continue to thrive, and that high standards of social housing are maintained.
In retrospect, we may well find that the approx. £30,000,000 annual cost of the TSA was money well spent. With no regulator in place, who will lend money to housing associations? When tenants can no longer afford to pay rent because their housing benefit has evaporated, where will social landlords find their incomes?
Money wisely spent is not money wasted - there is plenty to go around, despite what Eric Pickles tells you. The idea that democracy and localism can be used in place of a well thought out regulatory framework is frankly banal. Wait and see: you'll wish you hadn't.
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sutcada | 09/07/2010 2:54 pm
Despite cost the TSA has become a saviour for a large number of tenants/residents (voters) which if axed could leave us without a valuable source of advice. Grant Shapps should examine The Big Conversation which took place some time ago which expresses the areas of concerns for the majority of tenants/residents in the UK.
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sihrah | 09/07/2010 6:28 pm
I am beginning to think that Mr Shapps has some hidden agenda he is not revealing. He is on a one man crusade to Squash the TSA without any thought to the tenants/residents. How can he know what tenants want when he is well fixed financially?
Get yourself to the TPAS Conference and face people you are going to hurt.
If there is to be a review, then everything has to be taken into account and with the input from Tenant/Resident groups as those are the people it is going to effect, not what he wants to see he was voted in and he will be voted out if he continues with this crusade and trying to affect the outcome of the review before it has happened. We are in need of help from somebody with some clout against this man.
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Anonymous | 10/07/2010 7:34 am
I think that the regulatory framework should be dismantled brick by non working and expensive brick. It was never going to work, and was totally the wrong approach.
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| 11/07/2010 9:44 am
"Despite cost the TSA has become a saviour for a large number of tenants/residents (voters) which if axed could leave us without a valuable source of advice"
Are you an employee of the TSA by any chance? That's just laughable. Tenants have no direct line to the TSA, they still only have the hopeless ombudsman service. Tenants have no recourse to complain directly to a regulator. There is still is no watchdog. TSA was all about "self regulation" and we can all see how well that worked with the banks. What little standards for performance that the old HC established for HA's were all scrapped by the TSA. It was joke from the start and needs to go.
The only player in the room who has a say on the future of regulation is the CML which is why the Treasury are making noises. So long as the CML are satisfied that there are adequate provisions for bank debt to be secured in the event of HA failure (which has never happened) then the path is clear for abolition. The HCA can easily pick up these elements of financial regulation that CML is concerned about. TSA was all about letting poor performing HA's off the hook. Get rid of it now.
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