THE news of £1.5 million being made available by the Government to help Redditch Council improve its housing stock is excellent, if it actually materialises (Advertiser, January 21).

But it does need to be seen in context.

From next April, the council will be able to keep less and less of the proceeds of its right-to-buy sales to invest in its housing stock.

Since becoming debt-free, which was achieved when the council was Labour-led, like other similar councils ours has been able to spend all the money obtained from right-to-buy on improving its remaining properties.

But no longer. There's a sliding scale but because of a decision by the present Government, four years from now Redditch will only be able to keep 25 per cent of its right-to-buy money and 75 per cent will be distributed to other authorities which the Government judges to be more needy.

This is bound to have a bad effect on our renewal programme in the longer term.

Secondly, the five-year renewal programme could not include all the work identified in the stock condition survey of 2001. Specifically, kitchen replacements to the value of £5,120,000 and bathroom renewals to the value of £3,387,000 were not included.

This was one reason why I voted for the cheaper option for repairing rather than replacing double glazed uPVC windows in Lodge Park, Greenlands and Batchley and also, I may say, in properties in two roads in the ward Councillor Mike Chalk and I represent.

If it was possible to do a proper, if slightly less beautiful, job in this way, then it was a good idea to choose this option as it could allow us to do some work that would otherwise be excluded from the renewal programme.

I very much hope the proposed working group will take a really close look at these windows and make a well-informed and not an unnecessarily extravagant decision, bearing in mind the amount of work that remains to be done outside the five-year programme on the housing stock.

Hopefully, a good part of the £1.5 million windfall, if it materialises, can be used to reduce this but there will be no spare money to splash around.

Councillor ANTONIA PULSFORD

High Street

Feckenham