COMMENT
COMMENT
Council housing scandal? O
Fiona Russell-Horne Editor-in-Chief - BMJ
ne hundred years ago Parliament did a really, really great thing. It passed an Act which transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of British people by going them somewhere decent and affordable to live. That Act was the 1919 Addison Act, named for health minister Dr Christopher Addison and it gave local councils the power to build new homes after the First World War; the “Homes For Heroes” scheme. The aim was to make reparation to the thousands of soldiers returning from the battlefield horrors of the Somme and Ypres and Mons and Gallipoli – all those places that are burned into our collective conscience, who would otherwise have gone back to the slums and slum landlords.
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What is our task? To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in.
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Slum landlords didn’t go away, obviously (Peter Rachman in the 1960s springs to mind), but the Act did what it was intended to do, it enabled the building of houses and homes for rent, to the effect that in the 1960s around half the population was living in property that they rented from the local council. That reached its peak in 1980, since when numbers have plummeted, despite the rising population. We now have four million fewer council houses than we did forty years ago, the lowest number we have ever had. And it took another government scheme and Parliamentary Act - the Housing Act 1980- to do it. The Right-To-Buy scheme, though it was well-intentioned and well-received, preceded the sell-off of millions of council-owned homes – at knock-down prices – to their tenants. The trouble was, the councils were not permitted to use the monies gained to build more houses at the same rate that they sold them. The result is that councils are now playing catch-up after decades of under-investment but with far fewer funds than they had before and, with an ageing population, far more pressure on social care than they have ever had.
All this was highlighted in an stonishing TV programme last night (July 31st). George Clarke’s Great
Council House Scandal on C4 saw the campaigning architect, who is passionate about good design and proud of his own council estate roots, aiming to design and build his own council estate in Manchester, to prove what can be done with the right willingness and the right ideas. Also the right money, it has to be said. Some of his findings were shocking. The increasing number of office blocks that are being converted into “homes” for private rent under permitted development, meaning they don’t have to abide by any of the standards we might expect or that would be required with full planning permission. Like space, for example, as a similar investigation by The Times found earlier last month, or even adequate light. These are, ostensibly, for ‘temporary accommodation’, though if insufficient alternatives for moving on are being built, that ‘temporary’ runs the risk of becoming permanent. The National Federation of Builders sent a press release out this morning praising Clarke’s passion and commitment, but pointed out that he didn’t touch on one of the areas that they believe is adding to the shortage, namely, localism and the tortuous local planning system. They probably have a point, though, conversely, Clarke says that too many private developers see the need to provide a social housing element to their developments as onerous and a burden and that if they can negotiate their way out of it with the council planning officers, they will.
There was so much up for discussion about the programme, which will follow Clarke over the next 18 months as he gets going on his own council estate, that I don’t have the space here to really do it justice. However, he did point out that it’s not just about the money, it’s about the political will to do it. “At end of World War 2, the UK was bankrupt but it still managed to build thousands of houses… If you don’t have a safe stable home nothing else can fall into place.” he said. Jamie Oliver’s school-dinners campaigning saw the death of the Turkey Twizzler, maybe Clarke can do the same for sub-standard public housing.
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www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net August 2019
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