XN000022-1976-11-15 — Page 14

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Then we have the Management Committee which handles the biggest volume of papers every year and has so far this year received over 280 papers. It determines management policies for the Authority's 50-odd estates, housing closé on 2 million people, and. I am sure you will agree that this by any standards is an awesome responsibility. There is of course a very wide range of conditions in the Authority's estates and management headaches are concentrated in the older estates where there was little cor.no... provision made for marketing and other essential local facilities and where the flats were allocated at a very tight space standard which was made worse over the years by additions to the families, The answer to these problems is the complete redevelopment of the old estate areas but there are about 250 such blocks, housing up to half a million people, and this process will inevitably take time, perhaps as much as 15 years.

The Management Committee is involved in determining eligibility criteria for public housing and in laying down the rules for allocation of flats to families.. It also keeps an eye on the stock of empty public housing flats to ensure that none are kept vacant unnecessarily; but with so many flats required to house former squatter families who have to leave Crown land to make wa;; for development, it is inevitable that substantial numbers of flats have to be kept in reserve for such clearances, and the timing of these clearances is not under the control of the Housing Authority.

Maintenance is a vital part of estate management and here the Management Committee keeps a watchful eye on the work of the Housing Department's Maintenance Section in the estates. All departmental activities, by this and other sections, are regularly reported to the Management Committee.

It is the Management Committee which determines rents, both domestic and commercial, for new estates on first letting and for rent revisions for existing estates. Domestic rents are of course heavily subsidised and will always be so because the Authority is there to cater for the lower-income groups.

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