Tower Hamlets Leaseholder's Association

Tower Hamlets Leaseholders Association exists to defend the interests of public sector leaseholders in the borough of Tower Hamlets.

It provides advice and support for issues such as excessive charges, poor block maintenance, major works procedures and other areas of dispute between the council and leaseholders.

It has a long and successful record of intervention, support and action. Now join us on twitter too: http://twitter.com/thethla

There's a new Freedom of Information link on the left hand side menu to a service called What Do They Know: http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/body/tower_hamlets_homes_limited

With this, you can share you Freedom of Information requests with others in the borough. Please ask for the replies to be returned to the website as email or PDF documents. Normally, THH will try and refuse, if they can, or send by post so that the information remains private.

Of course, if you surf to the top of the site, you can make requests to other organisations including the borough. We'll try and link to some of the best ones. Even the refusals are sometimes interesting too.

There is a resident's conference, right now, by which we mean THH assemble a hand-picked audience of sheeple and try to tell the Audit Commission [by proxy, via the sheeple] how wonderful they are.

Can we expect, like the famous Blair meeting, that anyone questioning the orthodoxy will be thrown out, miss all the sandwiches and [gasp] wise words of Gavin, at the end of this farce? Oh no!

There are 'success stories' about 'football', 'food growing' and 'place shaping', but, of course nothing about the mismanagement, pathological denial, inefficiency, lack of consultation [you didn't say but we did it anyway: hey that rhymes too!], bullying and bad value for money.

Long live 'place shaping'. Long live football!.

Here's the August 2010 newsletter: http://www.thethla.co.uk/files/THLA_Newsletter_August_2010.pdf with news of current campaigns and actions. Enjoy!

Well, THH now has it's own graffiti team with an expensively marked van, to supplement and duplicate the council's failing graffiti team.

So, as with the ASB, we are adding another layer of expense and failure. Of course, the new graffiti team must be managed as well, by expensive but unproductive managers who are re-charged in 'administration' and 'management' charges.

Perhaps. everything in the council can be duplicated?

Incidentally, the ASB team which shows such tremendous commitment also has previous form in the council for commitment to (wait for it) overtime. ASB is not being dealt with at any level but the trough is well-attended and feeding time comes often.

Well, we already pay the Met police precept in our council tax (for police that we never really see), and for the borough ASB team (which takes telephone calls and presumably logs them) in the rest of our council tax.

Now, Tower Hamlet Homes would like us to pay for 'their' ASB team which has 'hit the ground running' (maybe they ran off into a neighbouring borough?) according to a gassy spin-statement by the highly paid (£100K odd straight into our administration charges) Gavin Canfield.

Meanwhile (and this is a pretty good estate) there are addicts, urine and food on the stairs contunually in one of our blocks. Not worth phoning anyone, except maybe 'phone a friend' because no-one, I repeat no-one in the borough will deal with it.

The borough has a duty of care towards its residents and is already paid to fail at this. There all attempts to build up and charge for a private ASB force in the Canfield zero-star empire need to be challenged, if necessary in the LVT.

Our caretaker now has a petrol leaf blower to blow the leaves around (this in a stiff wind) help with global warming/pollution/noise pollution and waste time, money and fuel.

Another idiotic activity 'making a difference' yes, if you mean making bad things worse.

Well, if you get one from here, about £160 for an outside, large version.

If you are Tower Hamlets homes, then the cost, for a simple board is £599, we recently saw one, hanging around in a THH corridor.

But, who cares, we can always add a few vague items to the actuals later, can't we guys? This kind of extravagant procurement is unfortunately true for capital major works items too, that's why the cost is obscured in 'partnership agreements', very unfavourable for both taxpayer and leaseholder.

Can you say that lovely American phrase sweetheart deal?

I met a neighbour as I was starting to run, this morning. Here's what she said:

I've got half a dozen leaflets from THH, some of them are pretty much the same. I don't read any of them because all they do is say how good they are. And half the time, including weekends there's a subcontractor's van hanging around (note: this is EPS) doing I-don't know-what, but we'll be paying for it.

Both of these are the visible part of the enormous waste and intellectual dishonesty in the interior of THH. From the front line, it's not showing any improvement over the council, just finding new ingenious ways of wasting our money (red uniforms, new logo, leaflets, subcontracting a-go-go, wasted energy, overpaid gardeners, overpriced-bad-quality 'partners' you name it).