MORI brought in to save Edinburgh transfer plans

Inside Housing

MORI brought in to save Edinburgh transfer plans

Edinburgh Council has commissioned opinion pollsters MORI to canvass tenant opinion in an attempt to resurrect its stock transfer plans for the Scottish capital.

MORI is to interview a sample of tenants to find out why the council's December ballot delivered a resounding no vote, despite previous tests of opinion indicating support for the move.

The council is expecting to find that controversy over the Glasgow Housing Association's second stage transfer process at the time of the ballot had impacted on the result (Inside Housing, 18 November).

Sheila Gilmore, executive member for community safety and housing at the council, said it was now reassessing the potential for stock transfer. 'The issue that came up about Glasgow is such a technical one and it's about something we weren't even proposing for Edinburgh,' she said.

'We have to look at all the options again.' As well as reconsidering full stock transfer, the council is also discussing rolling out a series of partial transfers, from the council to local housing associations.

'It was not the best option when we looked at it before,' Ms Gilmore said. 'We have to go back and look at whether it would be a good enough solution.'

The council is to lobby the Scottish Executive to write off housing debt for partial transfer as the government does in England. Ewan Fraser, chief executive of Dunedin Canmore Housing Association, which took over 212 homes from Edinburgh Council last year, said it was keen to take on new stock.

'We have got quite a bit of experience in that now and I think we have got a good track record on working with tenants' groups,' he said.

But he also warned that unless the executive changed its rules on debt write-off, partial transfer might not take off.

'I think the Scottish Executive has got to decide what the best interests of tenants in the long term really are,' he said.

Alistair Berwick, association consultant at Tribal HCH, said if the executive relaxed its debt write-off rules, it would mark a sea change in the Scottish transfer programme.

'If [the council] do persuade them to change it then it would completely rewrite all the rules. It would be the end of the large-scale transfer programme,'

Councils would not bother gathering support for large-scale transfer if they could work through a series of small-scale transfers with similar financial benefits, he said.

Tenant representatives, however, feared that the council's deliberations could make the tenant ballot a meaningless exercise.

Sean Clerkin, campaign co-ordinator for the Scottish Tenants' Organisation which helped lead Edinbugh's anti-transfer campaign, said: 'I think it's tantamount to the breakdown of democratic participation.'