Rummaging for gossip in a pit of plague-infested corpses
Eat your heart out, Time Team
Ann Santry, chief executive of Sovereign Housing Association, has a degree in archaeology, which she claims helps her when assessing the risks to a development.

Her training came in very handy indeed for former employer Newlon Housing Group when it had a nasty surprise on the ancient Spitalfields site in east London: it uncovered a plague pit and had to wait while workers in protective clothing removed all the decomposing corpses.

Don't mention the way
They launched the third way so, the theory goes, why shouldn't New Labour endorse a "fourth way" for council housing? But for ODPM new bug Richard McCarthy, it seems nothing is further from his mind.

At last week's crunch meeting on the comprehensive spending review with top brass from the social housing sector, McCarthy fired off a warning shot: "Ask me whatever you want, just don't mention the fourth way!" Could someone be getting a tad peeved after just weeks in the job?

You can bet the house on this one …
The rumour mill normally throws up a variety of names when it comes to the top jobs in social housing, but for the chief executive's job at Notting Hill Housing Group there's only really one runner.

According to sources at the group's west London nerve centre, Ingrid Reynolds – acting chief exec and Notting Hill stalwart – is "a shoo-in". "There's no one else," said my snout, "and if there were, they'd have to go a long way to beat Ingrid."

Social Animal has been slightly wide of the mark on such issues before but this is as solid a bet as there being a new housing minister before the year is out.

Anyone got a kissable baby?
When charity Thames Reach Bondway took David "Two Brains" Willetts, the Tories' head of policy coordination and shadow secretary for work and pensions, out for the night to meet London's rough sleepers, there was no knowing how he'd take it. With a reputation as an intellectual, could he handle life on the street? But Two Brains, a true politician, soon had crowds around him and was orating away as if standing on the hustings. Now, if the Tories could just find these people homes and therefore access to the electoral register, who knows what could happen at the next general election.

The Northern Wahey
Will Alsop, architecture's enfant terrible and the man who is, according to his blurb, "literally about to reshape the North-west", is to follow in the footsteps of former sultan of spin Alastair Campbell with an evening lecture. The topic: Alsop's "unique concept of the coast-to-coast super city" – plans he has already revealed in Housing Today. They include banning cars from the M62 and turning Barnsley into a Tuscan-style hill town.

No sex please, we’re landlords

The Residential Landlords Association – not backward in coming forward to complain about the Housing Bill and the “burden” it places on private landlords– has found the new law’s ultimate “outrage”: £20,000 fines because of students shagging. Under the law, any property occupied by five or more people would have to be licensed; the fine for not having the licence would be £20,000. The RLA contends that, as students often share flats in groups of four or five, if two or more of them “entertain their partners” over the course of a weekend this £20,000 fine could be levied.

Source

Housing Today