There was a triumphal note to the official report of the “Yes” vote (quoted here by Labour’s Anthony Taylor). My feeling was one of relief that the council was not going to be penalised by the Welsh Assembly Government for having the tenants make the “wrong” choice. If the housing stock were left with the council, certain housing allowances would have been jeopardised, and we would have had to find the money to uplift the dwellings to Welsh Housing Quality Standard on more restricted terms than the private or mutual sector would be allowed. In turn, this would have affected the council’s capital programme.

This bullying of councils by central government to get rid of public housing is a policy initiated by Mrs Thatcher and virtually unamended by Labour, both in Westminster and in Cardiff. Why did New Labour accept so much of Thatcher’s dogma without question?  Some public money has been put into housing in England by Gordon Brown’s government in the last twelve months, but it is little more than tinkering at the fringes, and nothing similar has occurred in Wales. If Unite really did own the Labour Party, as the Conservatives and the majority of the press would have us believe, the union would have done better to engineer a change in central government policy than to bankroll the “Defend Council Housing” campaign which has done little more than to embarrass Labour-controlled councils and to put LibDem-run Swansea and Wrexham, where there were “no” votes, under financial pressure.

The embarrassment to Neath Port Talbot was the fact that the “Yes” majority was not overwhelming. The rumours I hear from the “No” camp suggest that they are going to mount a challenge, based on the assertion that not every tenant entitled to vote received a ballot form. My sense is that, even if such cases are identified, they are not going to be sufficient to affect the result. However, a legacy of distrust has been left which will have repercussions the first time that NPT Homes has a failure (inevitable, even in the best-run organisations) which hits the headlines.

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