Closed Circuit
Closed Circuit knew there would be a housing angle as royal baby fever struck the British public this week. Sure enough, the hacks camped outside the Royal Marsden Hospital managed to miss the big baby housing scoop. As retailers across the land stocked up on ‘born to rule’ and ‘princess in training’ baby grows in the expectation of Kate Middleton and Prince William’s triggering a baby boom, the National Housing Federation decided the time was right to issue a press release warning that the last such boom between 2001 and 2011 fuelled the housing crisis for 2020.
Forget ‘born to rule’ - Kate and Wills may have inadvertently made it harder for the next generation of youngsters to be kings and queens of their own modest castles.
Football-loving delegates at Community Housing Cymru’s conference at Cardiff City Stadium last Thursday found a novel way of celebrating the recent promotion of their club to the highest tier of English (and Welsh) football.
Closed Circuit counted six delegates dropping the phrase ‘premier league’ into their speeches. Chris Jones, chief executive of charity organisation Care & Repair Cymru evidently also noticed. ‘I’ve heard the words “premier league” repeated a lot today,’ he said at the start of his speech.
‘I’d just like to add another one. My club Swansea City has already been in the premier league for two years.’
Cuts to the Communities and Local Government department budgets are obviously a sensitive subject at Eland House. When a well-known head of a charity visited recently he immediately noticed the lack of employees in the building. It then so happened that as he was being walked around, the lights went out. He offered 50 pence to put in the meter for the impoverished department to get the lights working again, but the offer was met with a stony silence by unimpressed senior civil servants.
Closed Circuit wonders how many recent policy decisions have been made in the dark at CLG headquarters?
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