Cartrefi Cymunedol Gwynedd – Jac o' the North

The Privatisation of Welsh Housing Associations

Jac — Mon, 20 Aug 2018 14:45:57 +0000

THE GREAT MYSTERY OF HOUSING ASSOCIATIONS I have written about housing associations dozens of times. One of the many things that intrigued me was their legal status – were they public bodies or private companies? For on the one hand they enjoyed the benefit of public funding (and lots of it), yet were exempt from …

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Housing Associations: Secret or Public?

Jac — Mon, 02 Jan 2017 22:22:54 +0000

It’s difficult to know where to start with this rather complex story. Maybe we should go back to 2008 and the Welsh Housing Quality Standard, presented as an attempt to improve the standard of social housing. The WHQS was in fact nothing more than the Decent Homes Standard that operated in England. Another example of ‘Welsh’ …

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Housing Associations – The Great Deception

Jac — Tue, 17 Nov 2015 23:52:19 +0000

REMEMBERING BUDDY HOLLY Back in January I posted a piece, Let’s Be Honest About Housing Associations, that began in nostalgic-humorous mood before going on to make more serious points about the provision of rented accommodation. The fundamental point I tried to make was that up until about a century ago rented accommodation was provided by …

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Let’s Be Honest About Housing Associations

Jac — Wed, 07 Jan 2015 13:58:19 +0000

This post is a revised version of an article that recently appeared in Cambria magazine When I was growing up in Swansea in the 1950s most of the people I knew lived in terraced houses owned by people we didn’t know. For our house, the rent was collected by a chain-smoking bottle blonde from Mumbles …

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The Impoverishment of Wales

Jac — Tue, 26 Aug 2014 10:35:43 +0000

The more I learn about how Wales is administered the more I realise that it is not run in the interests of the Welsh. Whether it’s social housing, grant funding, top jobs, higher education, the more you dig the more it’s brought home to you that Wales is a colonial possession of England, organised along …

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Social Housing: Led up the Pendre Gardens Path

Jac — Thu, 08 May 2014 19:44:54 +0000

Regular followers of this blog may recall that back in 2012 (on the old Google blog, now, sadly, demised) I was able to give out some good news. Which was . . . that for properties to be built by Cymdeithas Tai Clwyd on a new development in Tywyn, “Prospective tenants must have lived and …

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Rural Housing: Take a Truth . . .

Jac — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 15:06:45 +0000

Using the population density map to the right you’ll see that what I choose to call ‘rural Wales’ is those areas with fewer than one hundred persons per square kilometre, though I would make two adjustments. If the coastal strip – Rhyl, etc – is removed then the rest of Denbighshire qualifies as rural, and …

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Housing (Wales) Bill, My Response

Jac — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 12:49:51 +0000

Following on from the previous post, here is my response to the Welsh Government’s Department for Communities and Local Government’s Housing (Wales) Bill. The deadline for responses is Friday, so if you want to make a point then do it now, and send it to CELGCommittee@wales.gov.uk. In case the PDF version below should disappear (as …

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Social Housing: One Step Forward(?), One Step Back

Jac — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 13:30:59 +0000

I am indebted to Dennis Morris of Plaid Glyndwr (south Pembrokeshire and nationalist) for bringing to my attention a recent snippet about one of my favourite subjects – social housing. It’s not easy to make sense of the report on the BBC website, for the headline talks of a ‘Post’ while the article (click to …

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