Subject: Manchester Housings Future Plans for Hattersley - Beware
Author:
iced_ms
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Date Posted:16:05:34 03/19/02 Tue
Today tenants and residents who have been involved in the discussions with Manchester Council about the proposed transfer of Hattersley met with Sally Hinton of the Governments Housing Task Force. Sally attended the tenant/resident meeting to feedback from a meeting she attended recently with officers of Manchester City Council and officers from Government Office to look at the collapse of the transfer.
After only 30 minutes of listening to her I had a clearer understanding of what the possible plans are for Hattersley than I had after attending untold meetings over the last 2 years. Sally explained what Manchester's proposals are now that the transfer to Harvest has collapsed.
ONE OPTION – PFI (PRIVATE FINANCE INITIATIVE)
This would mean that Manchester would retain ownership of the houses but would draw up a deal with private developers who would raise the money for the refurbishment of homes on the estate.
The technicalities of how this works is not clear but one message that came over load and clear was that if this was the option taken up there would be demolition of 40% of houses currently owned by Manchester on the estate.
Sally did add that Manchester was committed to keeping people in this community. When asked how this could be done she responded that it might be possible to raise money from the Housing Corporation for some new build. As you can imagine people have little faith in Manchester’s commitment to this area.
Another thing that people need to realise - there is not a vote in the PFI option.
OPTION TWO - TRANSFER TO PORTICO HOUSING ASSOCIATION
Portico and Harvest were the only Housing Associations left of those invited by Manchester to look at acquiring Hattersley when the time came to choose the preferred partner landlord.
The reason why local people chose Harvest at that time and not Portico was that there were problems with Portico's business plan. Tenants and residents at the meeting asked that if Harvest couldn’t pull together a business plan how would it be possible for Portico, as they are a much smaller Housing Association.
OPTION THREE – SMALL SCALE HOUSING TRANSFER
This would involve clearly defining an area of Hattersley of 400 to 500 homes and transferring that to a Housing Association and demolishing the rest.
As you can see two of these three options seen extremely drastic and the other no doubt would involve a lot of demolition. When asked about the fate of houses that were privately owned on the estate Sally said they could be bought through compulsory purchase order or people would be offered refurbished houses on the estate. What local people wanted to know was that if they were demolishing lots of houses there wouldn’t be enough left for people who wanted to stay here.
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Manchester Housings Future Plans for Hattersley - Beware