Regulation fees for turkeys
It seems that turkeys will vote for Christmas if they think they’ll get lots of grain to eat. That’s the conclusion I’ve reached following the piece in last week’s Inside Housing by Stuart Macdonald. He reports that in a survey, larger housing associations supported the introduction of charging for regulation, seeing a “clear benefit to their business of a regulator with the resources to effectively regulate their organisation”. In principle, this is a reasonable stance to take as it would enable the regulator to winkle out the problems in the sector and shore up the funders’ confidence in being able [...]
Coregulation – does size matter?
So tenants have at last been given the power to wield the big stick when their landlord is not performing or delivering the services that tenants want. Or have they? The Localism Act 2011 built on the principle of co-regulation espoused by the late, lamented Tenant Services Authority and set out the obligations on a social landlord to enable tenants to effectively scrutinise their performance. So that’s it then, isn’t it? Well, possibly. The last two years has seen a burgeoning of Resident Scrutiny Panels, Mystery Shoppers and Tenant Service Inspectors all trained to the back teeth and tooled up [...]
Memories of Huntcliff
As a young lad, living in Saltburn, it was a short walk to reach the top of Huntcliff and the site of the old signalling station which has been almost completely lost but is marked by an information board. Standing on the top of Huntcliff, buffeted by the wind blowing in from the North, I would look out to sea beyond the ships waiting for the tide to take them into Tees Dock and gaze at the horizon. Feeling the solid mass of Huntcliff beneath my feet, tasting the salt sea air from the cold North wind and smelling the [...]
Training is Essential
If you want to change your life but are not quite sure what it is you want to do, maybe it's time you tried coaching. Coaching is not teaching, mentoring, counselling, therapy or just a way of someone else finding the solutions for you. In coaching, you hold the responsibility for your own life and the results you get from coaching.