Mr anonymous IH50 TUE 16TH FEB

Every year Private Eye nominates local councillors and officials for a ‘Rotten Boroughs’ award, which skewers the venal and the incompetent. 

Now the Eye is, depending on your viewpoint, either the scourge of the Establishment or a pernicious scandal sheet. Whatever you think of it though, it is the highest circulation news magazine in the UK. 

But I worry, when I read so much bad news about local government and hardly ever any good news. I think Private Eye does important work (even if it gets it wrong sometimes) but I am concerned about the impact on honest, hard-working council officials, of this relentless negativity. 

Cynicism is corrosive and has become the social norm in British society. There may be good reasons for that, but public servants deserve better than the automatic put-down they receive. From the left it takes the form of complaints that they ignore the ‘little man’ and defend privilege. From the right comes a critique of the very need for public services. When Chief Executives behave badly even housing officers may shiver in the cold wind of public censure. 

When I look around at our housing teams, this seems grossly unfair. Yes we have a few shirkers and we have experienced some conduct which falls short - letting a councillor off an arrears hook for example, or an allocation that somehow went to ex-boyfriend. But these are rare events, put right when they are exposed.  

In the main our officers will go the extra mile with our tenants, and applicants. That means working late, or going to visit them in their own homes, or taking time to explain how they can solve their housing problems - amongst a hundred other small kindnesses. It isn’t unusual, but the norm in housing organisations. 

For every Council leader squandering money on junkets to the Caribbean, there are tens of thousands of officers, who have barely had a pay rise in years, who love their jobs and demonstrate their devotion to duty by helping vulnerable and struggling citizens. 

Can you name a single media outlet that paints our work in a positive light - with the obvious exception of Inside Housing? I suppose at least we don’t suffer the opprobrium of Social Workers, the favourite kicking post for the tabloids. I read recently a story about a child being taken into care in which the whole focus was on the complaints of the parents, with the welfare of the child featuring nowhere. 

So it often is with us. Our local newspaper trumpeted this week that some applicants had been waiting for housing for 40 years. The implicit complaint was - look at these hopeless Council slackers, they can’t get anyone a house. At least they allowed a Council spokesman to explain that people are housed by need, and anyone waiting for that long clearly doesn’t have one. But you’d only have understood this if you had read to the end of the article. 

I think it is right that the press should investigate when we get things wrong. It is an essential feature of a free society. Too often though, journalists understand little about housing and assume that it must be a simple matter to house someone. It’s just a house isn’t it? What is difficult about that? 

Just for once though, wouldn’t it be nice to read a story headlined, “Council success in bringing down waiting times.” Or “Local Housing Association wins award for quality of service.” Do you see many like these? I don’t. 

Staff doggedly press on, despite the negativity, and all praise to them. But it doesn’t make life any easier when dealing with the public, if they have a preformed notion that we are venal, incompetent, lazy, numpties. I handle a lot of calls passed on from junior officers where the tenant has become too hot to handle. Often as not it isn’t what has been said or done, but their own underpinning assumptions about our attitude, that cause the problems. They ring expecting we will resist solving their problems and act accordingly. 

But we have only ourselves to blame. We don’t spread good news about our work widely enough. Housing staff may talk about our successes amongst other professionals at conferences - and we have some expert political lobbyists. But we don’t make nearly enough effort to court mainstream journalists, and explain the value of our work. In a world where public services are under threat, that could be a very serious mistake. 

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