A RUSHMOOR councillor has urged tenants in neighbouring Waverley to resist the transfer of council homes to a housing association.
Liberal Democrat councillor Peter Sandy claims that since Rushmoor's council homes, which include the Sandy Hill estate at Hale, were transferred to Pavilion Housing Association, they have deteriorated to the point of becoming "slums".
Mr Sandy is urging Waverley tenants to form an action group to "fight this takeover", offering his support.
In a letter to The Herald, Mr Sandy, who represents the Heronwood ward in Aldershot, wrote: "All we see are deteriorating properties, repairs not done, and ever-rising rents."
Mr Sandy claimed Pavilion was placed second from bottom in an Audit Commission table of housing services across the country.
A spokesman for Pavilion acknowledged that the association received one star (on a scale of 0-3) from the Audit Commission, but refuted Mr Sandy's second-from-bottom claim. They conceded the one star mark was "disappointing", but added that Pavilion had already appointed a new contractor to take on a backlog of repairs before the Audit Commission inspectors arrived in February.
The spokesman added that rents, currently around £75 a week for a three-bedroom house, had gone up by an average of five to six per cent over the last three years.
The commission identified room for improvement in Pavilion's repairs performance, asset management, dealing with nuisance and anti-social behaviour and services to customers.
Four out of five Pavilion homes meet the government's decent homes standard. Less than one in two Waverley homes meet that standard (46 per cent) and the figure will fall to one in ten, says the council, unless it transfers at least the management of its 5,260 homes to a so-called arms-length management organisation.
But the council says that only by going a stage further, and transferring ownership of the homes as well, could the £78 million needed to meet the decent homes standard and pay for other "essential or important" repairs.