Argyll and Bute councillors are due to meet senior officials from Argyll Community Housing Association (ACHA) at council HQ in Lochgilphead on Thursday - and while it seems unlikely that a solution will be found at this stage, those present will be in no doubt about the strength of the feelings held by sheltered housing tenants, and their families, about the importance of the warden service.

Police and councillors joined an ACHA director and local MP Alan Reid at a meeting of concerned Ferfadd Court tenants on Monday evening - and those in authority were left in no doubt at all about how crucial the warden service is to residents there, and at 11 other sheltered housing complexes across Argyll and Bute facing an identical funding crisis.

As island councillor Isobel Strong and several others put it during the course of the hour-long meeting: "There's no point in calling it 'sheltered housing' if you don't have a warden service."

After the councillors and ACHA's finance and IT director Nick Pollard each told the story as their respective sides saw it, Cllr Strong explained that when Ferfadd Court was owned by the council, tenants' rents were used to pay for sheltered housing wardens.

And it was Alan Reid who put his finger on the issue when he asked Mr Pollard - deputising for chief executive Alastair MacGregor, who was on annual leave at the time - why ACHA, which has owned the complex since the council's housing stock was transferred in November 2006, couldn't do the same.

Mr Pollard's response was that ACHA's own business plan, accepted by the council and voted for by tenants, stated that rents had to be used to improve all ACHA's properties throughout Argyll and Bute, not just sheltered housing.

Unsurprisingly that did not appease many of the worried residents and their families, several of whom wasted no time in spelling out the implications of the complete lack of a warden service at Ferfadd Court.

Indeed, the very first person to speak summed the situation up succinctly when she said: "It's essential to have wardens. That's why we all came here, because we felt we needed that extra care.
"If they take away the warden service, we're just going to go back to being on our own again, aren't we?"

Mr Pollard did at least promise to report the tenants' concerns at the next ACHA board meeting, on Thursday, May 8, which will also take place against a backdrop of demands from Mr Reid that the board make a firm commitment to retaining the warden service.

Mr Reid was in no mood to spare the ACHA board, of whom he suggested - possibly only partly in jest - that they had known there was going to be a problem with funding the warden service, "and they just ignored it and hoped it would go away", though Mr Pollard made it known he was less than impressed by those sentiments.

From the statements made by all parties on Monday night it was clear that just ignoring the situation, if that ever was considered, was no longer an option - Cllr Robert Macintyre stated that it was "unthinkable that this place might not have a warden - it would just be chaos."

As the meeting wound up with both ACHA and the councillors pledging to work together to find a solution, while at the same time writing to the Scottish Government to appeal for help in solving what is a national problem, it was left to tenants' committee chair Margaret Currie to sum up the feelings of the Ferfadd Court residents.

"Tonight has made me feel an awful lot better," she said. "When we got the letter from ACHA telling us the warden service was under threat we just didn't know where to turn.

"We knew we had to act collectively to do something about this - and now we've done it."