REGARDING the 'consultation' recently carried out by Blackburn Council on the closure of Shadsworth local housing office.

On the form sent to tenants, the specific issue about Shadsworth was obscured first by submerging it in a borough-wide restructuring plan and, secondly, by suggesting that there had to be a trade-off between having staff to tackle tenancy agreement enforcement on the one hand and retention of local office facilities on the other. Yet it is obvious from the information given that the restructuring plan was about bringing housing in line with the other services taken on by the unitary authority and not about improving compliance with tenancy agreements.

The latter work has been a demand of tenants, not just for two years, as claimed, but for nearly 20 years that I know of.

It is, of course, a basic function of housing management and not some optional bolt-on extra that can be traded for another part of the service.

None of the three questions on the form put the issue about the local office directly.

The operative question: "Are you in favour of the proposals suggested?" was confusingly sandwiched between "Are you in favour of the review of the current housing service?" -- essentially meaningless, since the leaflet had explained that the service was under 'constant review' and: "Do you think the proposals will result in a better service for tenants?" -- an invitation to futurology that would test the powers of Mystic Meg.

I have not returned my form because it seems less a consultation than a clumsy exercise in the manufacture of 'consent.' I believe the views of Shadsworth tenants were better expressed in the public meeting called by the estate management board, which led to a majority of Shadsworth tenants signing a petition to keep the local office.

Mention of the estate management board (EMB) raises a further important aspect of this affair. The way that the question of Shadsworth local office has been submerged in the more general one of "the future structure of the area housing teams" strongly suggests that the concept of the EMB as the way housing is managed in Shadsworth no longer figures in the future plans of the new unitary authority.

When the EMB was set up in 1988, the eight priority estates project recommendations on which it was based were all about the local management of estates. First and foremost was "a full-time local office, staffed by officers with the power and ability to handle all aspects of day-to-day estate management."

It is clear from all the documents produced at the time that 'local' meant "on the estate." In particular, the report to the housing committee meeting of March 3, 1988, by the housing director and the appended report by PEP consultant Tricia Zipfel expressly made the local office the lynchpin of the EMB project.

If, in 1988, the Shadsworth Ward Labour Party and some individuals such as myself were opposed to the way the EMB was promoted on the estate, one thing on which we were all agreed was that the local office was a great advantage for Shadsworth. In the Shadsworth Neighbourhood News for April that year I quoted Councillor Eric Smith, on behalf of all the ward councillors, as follows: "It was a disaster when estate-based management and maintenance were withdrawn to the town hall and we welcome the return of estate-based services to Shadsworth."

The commonsense reasons for keeping the Shadsworth local office have already been put to the council. In addition, if Shadsworth is not to go the way of Roman Road, it needs every local facility that enhances its own identity as a place where people live, rather than an anonymous space on the planning map.

But if the council is determined to remove the local office, perhaps we should be told if this is also the first step in pulling the plug on the EMB.

NEIL JACKSON, Rothesay Road, Blackburn.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.