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Friday, April 16, 2010

Pointless pointless accreditation!

Here's a perfect case of where government waste money under the guise of 'delivering' public benefit.

In the East Midlands there is a publicly funded organisation funded by EMDA the Regional Development quango.

It employs 3 people at least to do what? Here's DASH's website. Hardly a mine of information.

They probably get 3 visitors a day, this compares to the several thousand landlords Property Hawk gets.

There BIG idea is a landlord accreditation scheme for East Midlands landlords.

Their selling point to landlords is that they will be able to sell the fact that they are an accredited landlord to prospective tenants. HA! Why would a tenant give a damm that their landlord has done a half baked course. Certainly not enough to make a difference when selecting a property to rent.

Their big success is that they have 600 accredited landlords in the East Midlands. I bet that's not even half of 1% of the landlords in this region.

PLEASE PLEASE tell me what is the point of organisations like this?

I've emailed them to see if they can justify themselves. I be amazed if they have the guts to respond. More likely - they'll just keep on milking the public sector cow.

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've been on their course and I think it's actually not bad. It probably doesn't make any difference to potential tenants, but I learned a few things and it was free, so I can't really moan at that.

Anonymous said...

Dear Chris,
 
Thank you for your email and the opportunity to comment on your blog post.  As you can see, I do have the ‘guts to reply’.
 
If you had contacted us prior to the publication of your post rather than after it, we would have gladly discussed the project with you.  This would have allowed you to make a more balanced evaluation of our work and would, I believe, have been far more informative and useful to your readership.
 
If you are interested in writing a more informed piece about the DASH project, I would be pleased to discuss our work with you.  If however, you simply wish to smear a project that has done a lot of good work for landlords and local authorities alike, without researching your subject matter, I see no reason to engage in further debate.

Kind Regards

Linda Selvey
DASH Project Manager

The Editor said...

Hi Linda,

Thanks for your feedback.

Feel free to put forward the case for DASH by posting your justification of what your project does and hopes to achieve.

I'm not the judge or jury.

By posting your views you are speaking to over 40,000 landlords who can evaluate your comments. We have no committees, no policy documents to hide behind. Just simple landlords and tax payers who wait to be convinced.

Please feel free to explain what DASH is all about.

Anonymous said...

With an Alexa rank of 9,500,000 its website get zero traffic. It will lose its funding in the next round of public sector cuts and when you count in the costs of setting up, its cost and effect ratio will be astronomical.
Another case of absurd public spending inefficiency.I would love to see its end of year report, talk about cooking the books. Heh, Linda could you let us know how much the project has cost tax payers and what it has actually achieve other than keep 3 bodies off the dole queue.Waiting in anticipation for a response.