Author: Steve Hilditch

Back in 2012 Red Brick dubbed the Government’s ‘Troubled Families’ programme ‘policy-based evidence making’. The newly-released (and sneaked out) evaluation of the billion pound programme proves our point. Despite constant claims by Government that the programme was ‘turning round’ the lives of hundreds of thousands of families – to the point that they massively expanded the scheme after a couple of years – the much-delayed evaluation report says the programme had ‘no measurable impact’.
This is no surprise – if you set something up on a completely false premise you get the wrong outcomes. To justify the policy, Government took a range of statistics that reflected the disadvantage suffered by some families and misrepresented them as showing that the families were dysfunctional – not the victims of economic and social reality, or mental incapacity, or disability, or abuse, or bad housing, or poverty, but to blame for their own social pathology. They were feckless and the Government was going to force more feck on them. It enabled the Tories to stigmatise and demonise a group of families as being responsible for social breakdown and even for the riots.
Much as the media are intrigued by the unusual (for a senior civil servant) personality of the ‘Tsar’ appointed to run the programme, Louise Casey, the Troubled Families policy was another catastrophic failure by David Cameron.
Cameron was an extremely judgemental man, and many of his judgements were plain wrong. ‘You’re talking about blame’, he said, ‘about good behaviour and bad behaviour, about morals.’ He called it the ‘Shameless culture’. His launch speech was full of stereotypes ripped from the pages of the Daily Mail – sink schools, sink estates, choosing to live on the dole, rampaging teenagers. And the big lie: these families had been subjected to ‘compassionate cruelty, swamped with bureaucracy, smothered in welfare yet never able to escape.’
I wrote on Red Brick at the time: ‘Ultimately (it) reads like a script from the loathsome Jeremy Kyle Show: pointing at the Chavs and moralising about their sub-human behaviour.’ And it achieved one of its early aims: good media coverage, with the Daily Mail of course talking about the ‘Criminal culture at the heart of feckless families: Shocking report lifts lid on incest, abuse and spiral of alcohol abuse’.

The fundamental flaw in the analysis – that the government was taking a set of families who were undeniably poor and disadvantaged, and redefining them – without a shred of evidence – as dysfunctional and antisocial.
Jonathan Portes

Of course there were good points about service delivery which will strike a chord with anyone who has been worked with ‘multiply deprived’ families. Too many agencies, too little coordination despite too many meetings, a failure to work with each family holistically, family plans that never get delivered, bizarre rules to access services. And the central solution – a key worker for each family – offered some hope that the system, if not the family, could be turned around.
The failure of the original analysis, and the use and abuse of statistics, was compounded by setting up the project on a ‘payment by results’ basis and an extraordinarily low threshold for allowing councils to say that a family had been ‘turned around’. If a child attends school a bit more often, probably coincidentally to any intervention, and the Government gives a cash-strapped council some money for it, guess what the outcome is? Yes, the headline claim that the Government turned round more than 105,000 troubled families, saving taxpayers an estimated £1.2 billion. And as Jonathan Portes of the NIESR, part of the evaluation team, says: ‘This was untrue: the £1.2 billion is pure, unadulterated fiction.’
Desperate for cash, councils ran rings round a complicit Government, and a programme with no measurable outcomes was deemed a success by all involved. Like Boris Johnson’s Garden Bridge, this was David Cameron’s vanity project designed to sort a problem that was defined by his own prejudice. We all pay and no one benefits. And just like Boris, not one word of apology: in the post-truth world one Government Minister even had the audacity to write an article over the weekend claiming that the programme had worked.
The real failure was that Cameron’s politics and his hubris meant that a large sum of money that could have been used to genuinely help families facing real problems was squandered.
Previous Red Brick pieces as the story unfolded
https://redbrickblog.wordpress.com/2011/10/22/erics-troubled-families/
https://redbrickblog.wordpress.com/2011/12/18/shooting-the-troubled/
https://redbrickblog.wordpress.com/2012/06/11/policy-based-evidence-making/
https://redbrickblog.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/louise-casey-jeremy-kyle-and-the-zombie-statistic/
https://redbrickblog.wordpress.com/2014/08/21/im-troubled-and-i-dont-know-why/
 

It’s always hard to spot the precise moment a tide peaks and turns. But after a year of severe depression about our housing prospects, to the point recently where I considered stopping writing about it, I have had a minor awakening of optimism.
Mind you, my newly emerging view after the major party conferences is not all that positive: just a feeling that things do not have to get worse inexorably year on year. As far as Labour is concerned, there is the flow of plain speaking backed by rigid determination to turn things around coming out of City Hall since Sadiq Khan was elected mayor with James Murray as his deputy mayor responsible for housing. There is also the final banishment of the hostility to council housing in the Party that undermined policy throughout the life of the Labour Government: it is now commonly accepted by all wings that council building is an essential part of the mix needed to solve the housing crisis.
My remaining concern (apart from the limited chances of actually getting elected to deliver anything) is the reported disagreement as to whether the planned 500,000 new social homes should all be council houses or a mix of council and housing association building. I understand the hostility towards some housing associations, but the sector must be part of the plan if we are to build the necessary homes. From a standing start, councils simply could not start producing 100,000 homes a year: it would take years to obtain the capacity and expertise. They would be set up to fail, and that is the last thing anyone wants. Associations do have capacity and, within a framework of clear Government priorities and adequate grant, they could turn the tap on more quickly.
As for the Conservative Party, there are signs that a new broom is being taken to the old housing policy. At last we have ministers and a growing body of opinion in the country accepting that the Cameron/Osborne ‘one tenure’ policy – the exclusive promotion of home ownership – is miles removed from a ‘one nation’ policy designed to provide homes that are suitable and affordable for all. They have realised that the policy of subsidising demand for home ownership in a desperate attempt to reverse its decline was bound to fail because it would add to upward pressure on prices. To stretch the analogy, Cameron and Osborne were like King Canute, but in their case they were failing to stop the tide of home ownership going out.
It is widely claimed that Labour lost in 2015 because it lacked economic credibility. Yet the Conservatives have ended up following a path on deficit reduction which is pretty close to that set out by Alastair Darling in 2010, but with a lot of additional pain. And they are now adopting the language of Ed Miliband and Ed Balls to distinguish between different types of borrowing: with historically low borrowing costs it makes absolute sense to borrow to invest in homes and infrastructure. It all proves, if proof was needed, that austerity was a political choice and that many of the cuts to public services could have been avoided if different choices had been made around tax cuts.
I am not about to get carried away. The U turn is not yet a sharp 180 degree spin. As Rachel Reeves MP wrote on LabourList, the Chancellor’s speech to the Tory Conference was a “a chaotic cocktail of vague promises and u-turns that work for no one.”  Philip Hammond and Sajid Javid have not suddenly been converted to the cause of Keynsian economics. Nor will they adopt a housing policy which promotes social housing as much as I think is needed – despite the growing evidence that it would be a sound bet for the taxpayer as well as for the people needing homes. Social housing only got an occasional mention at their conference, and the Housing Minister, Gavin Barwell, almost ruined the new mood by making an extraordinary comment that building council housing would deepen and entrench inequality. Thinking that moving from an unaffordable private letting or temporary accommodation or a parent’s home into an affordable council house makes life worse is beyond rational reasoning. But at last they are accepting that rented housing matters and that more ‘affordable’ rented housing is essential. It’s a start – and SHOUT’s man on the spot Martin Wheatley has written a perceptive analysis of what was said at the conference fringe meeting on housing.
The best outcome of the shift in thinking that is taking place would be if some of the new or reallocated money being announced comes out in the form of grant to enable the mayor in London and the HCA in the rest of the country to back new programmes of social housebuilding. Sadiq Khan is in a position to make great use of any funding but he will need to have full flexibility in its use and the Government will need to back him in his determination to get more affordable homes in private development.
The historic evidence is absolutely clear that it was the ending of housebuilding by councils, combined with the failure of the private and housing association sectors to replace their contribution, that was the biggest single factor behind the current desperate shortage. It is great that Labour is firmly behind a large new programme of building and it is encouraging that SHOUT’s proposed programme of social housebuilding at least gets a fair hearing at the Tory conference and garners some support amongst liberal conservative groups like Bright Blue. SHOUT’s plan would set us back on the course that we should have been on for the last 40 years.

New research for SHOUT, the campaign for social housing, and a *coalition of agencies, shows that the case for investing in social housing remains very strong despite the decision to leave the European Union.
Last year, SHOUT and others* commissioned analysis from economic researchers Capital Economics to show what would happen to the economy if the Government invested in 100,000 new social rented homes each year. The research showed much better value outcomes for taxpayers in the long term as well as improved living standards for so many households.
The new analysis looks at the outcomes if we have an economically ‘good’ or ‘bad’ Brexit, assessing four different scenarios for what might happen to growth and interest rates. In the initial years of such a programme the incremental housing benefit savings and new tax receipts will be less than that needed to fund the government’s contribution to the new homes – so additional borrowing will be required. But over 50 years it would generate material savings to the Exchequer, ranging from £102 billion to £319 billion (in today’s prices).
Building 100,000 new homes for social rent each year would boost employment and domestic demand at a time when the economy is likely to be weaker. Of the alternative ways of boosting infrastructure investment, housing has the clear advantage of generating income through the rents tenants pay, which at the least cover the costs of management and maintenance of the new assets. In addition to having the direct benefit of 4 million new homes over the next 50 years, the programme would benefit all age groups and lead to significant improvements in wellbeing, health, educational attainment and ability to access work.
The short term increase in borrowing that would be required to fund the programme is estimated to be between £6.5 and £7 billion. This is equivalent to two weeks’ spending on the NHS (or less than a month’s worth of the supposed savings from leaving the EU claimed by the Brexit campaign).
Capital Economics commented:

“Not all borrowing is the same. It would be quite right to be concerned about an increase in public debt in order to fund the day-to-day costs of public services. Borrowing to invest or save, as for this policy, is prudent however and would likely be welcomed rather than met with alarm.”

SHOUT campaigner Martin Wheatley said:

“This research shows that public investment in lower rent rental housing can and should be central to Theresa May’s ambition to help those families who are “just getting by.”  As well as providing a secure home at a rent households can afford, such investment would save the taxpayer billions in the long term. Support for a council house-building renaissance, alongside development by other social landlords and the private sector is critical if the Government is to achieve its ambitions for 200,000 or more new homes per year.”

The full 2015 report can be found here.
The updated 2016 Brexit analysis can be found here.
*The research has been commissioned by ARCH (which represents Councils that have retained their council housing stock), the Local Government Association, the National Federation of ALMOs, and SHOUT.
Follow SHOUT at @4socialhousing

See the complete shortlist here:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/sep/26/turner-prize-2016-review-tate-britain-micheal-dean-anthea-hamilton-helen-marten-josephine-pryde#img-4

With poor timing I suspect I’m about to get on the wrong side of history with this post, coming just a few days before the Leadership ballot result. But here goes anyway.
I’m in Labour because I believe that the Party in Government (national and local) has brought about nearly all the major social and economic advances in this country in the past seventy years. Of course I accept that there have been terrible disappointments and failures. I am also an unapologetic supporter of vigorous extra-parliamentary campaigning. However, I am unshakeable in my belief that the most important thing Labour does is win elections.
My conclusion that Owen Smith stands a better chance of winning a general election than Jeremy Corbyn has dictated my vote in the Leadership election. However I feel alone in not being very tribal about it – I think both candidates have abundant but different qualities – and abhore the attacks that have been made by both sides which have so diminished the standing of the Party as a whole.
The purpose of this post is to comment on an example of why elections matter so much. For the first time in a long time, this week I whooped in delight at a political announcement. It came from the Mayor of London. Generally speaking, the words ‘Boris Johnson’ and ‘Sadiq Khan’ should be enough in themselves to prove that winning an election changes things. But my example is something that most people won’t have heard of and many others will think is of little consequence. It concerns the seemingly obscure policy of ‘converting’ rents for social rented homes when they become empty to so-called ‘affordable rents’.
I have railed on Red Brick, sometimes in an almost incoherent rage, against the travesty of rents that are blatantly unaffordable being termed ‘affordable rents’. They are defined as rents that are up to 80% of market rents, compared to social rents which are historically nearer to 40% of market rents. As the Government and Boris Johnson moved to kill off social rented housing, mayoral grants for building new homes were restricted to supporting ’affordable rent’ homes only. The PR trick was to keep talking about the output of ‘affordable’ homes as if there was some great achievement going on. Last year, the new ‘real Tory’ Government went one step further and removed support for even these  scandalously high rents by putting all the money into home ownership instead.
Back in 2013, because government grant had been cut to the bone, the then Housing Minister Mark Prisk and Mayor Johnson hit on the idea of getting tenants to put in far more money. As I commented at the time on Red Brick, rent is the new grant.
To get hold of some grant, housing providers (mainly housing associations) were required to sign up to selling some of their existing properties (it was called ‘asset management’) and ‘converting’ some of their homes from lower social rents to the much higher ‘affordable rents’ when they became available for letting. Some associations resisted, but others revelled in their freedom, volunteering to convert many or most of their homes when they became vacant.
By 2015 a total of 19,000 homes had been approved for rent conversion in London, making a huge (and largely unnoticed) contribution to the accelerating loss of social rented homes. On the basis of Freedom of Information requests that I submitted, it became clear that as many as 82,000 social rent properties might be affected nationally, a huge share of the ‘void’ properties that come available for letting.
In London, Khan has confirmed that the policy pushed rents up by as much as £5,500 a year, putting homes that were built with your money and mine to be genuinely affordable well out of the reach of people on typical London incomes. In a totally counter-productive way, the policy also pushed up the housing benefit bill. In my view the associations who embraced the policy betrayed their roots, their mission and their communities. (I forgive those who did it reluctantly but at least complained publicly about it).
Now, because he is in power, Sadiq has said he will end this practice.  “He will work with housing associations to ensure it is not necessary to fund new affordable homes by raising rents on social rented properties.” As a result, many more homes available for reletting will be let at social rents which are within the reach of ordinary families. Sadly, I presume the policy in the rest of the country will continue, and if Zac Goldsmith had won it would still apply in London.
Whoever wins on Saturday, this example illustrates for me the vital importance of keeping the political focus in the Labour Party on winning elections – because, as Sadiq shows, Labour administrations actually change people’s lives.

Whenever I’ve met John McTernan, which isn’t often, I’ve found him to be a clever and even charming man. It therefore amuses me to see him make his mark as one of a number of Labour right wing pantomime villains invited onto TV shows to argue with the pantomime villains of the left. The parody of political argument that then takes place only makes sense in a Labour Perty which has been so simplistically divided between ‘Trots’ on the one hand and ‘Red Tories’ on the other.
Of course it suits the media to set up these ‘debates’ which mainly involve the trading of the well-crafted insults and stereotypes that make up the relevant ‘narrative’. Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith are both exceptional people in their own way, and both deserve better than this. It is like mass hysteria: people I have known and respected for many years have been caught up in it all, tweeting the most incredible rubbish about one or other of the candidates. For the vast majority of Labour members like me who exist somewhere in the very large space between Momentum and Progress, despair is the most common emotion the campaign has provoked. I will vote for Owen because I think he is more likely to win an election – for me, the most important criterion – but I am happy to defend Jeremy from the more banal attacks on him.
But I digress from my main purpose. What got my interest was that John has pronounced on the issue of housing in his Financial Times column, ‘A failure of imagination blights Britain’s housing policy‘ and I wanted to take him to task on a couple of points. (NB you can sign up for some free FT articles despite the paywall).
First, where he is right: if Theresa May listened to the public, she would focus her attention on housing. Sadly, many in her Party have concluded that housing is an immigration problem, and then come to wrong conclusions (like leaving the EU). Undoubtedly the Blair Governments encouraged immigration to promote growth and to create what they liked to call a ‘flexible’ labour market, and their failure was that they did not properly consider the policies that were needed to minimise the possibility of social tensions, and in particular housing supply. John is also right about housing becoming an insider/outsider issue: those owning homes like having ever more valuable assets even if it means that the next generation are excluded altogether.
Where John goes wrong starts with the phrase ‘The UK already has a massive stock of social housing…’. He argues that the policies of ‘the left’ are predictable – build more council houses – and not a solution. And then, he falls into superficiality: ‘For all the romanticisation of social housing, modern consumers do not want to live in the massive monocultural housing estates of the past’.
So where has John been for the last 30 years? Social housing has been in serious decline as a tenure, quite deliberately so as Governments have encouraged home ownership and private renting. It is the rapid decline in social renting that is at the heart of the housing crisis facing people on low incomes, and it is about to get much worse if the Housing Act is implemented. The millions on housing waiting lists are also consumers and they want to consume a genuinely affordable rented home from a responsible social landlord. Why should their wishes be discounted?
The systemic bias in favour of private solutions has obscured the catastrophic failings of the market tenures. The ‘private sector smartness’ that John so admires is just not enough: it takes tough public sector operators like Ken Livingstone and Sadiq Khan to encourage, mould, cajole and force the profit-hungry development industry into making a real contribution to tackling the housing crisis. John seems to have missed the fact that the mantra of ‘mixed communities’ has been shared across the housing world for decades now – we just argue about the mix that is required and the overriding need to match the affordability of homes with the incomes of the people who need to live in them. Numbers matter, but what is built and for whom matters a lot as well.
And finally John lauds Michael Heseltine’s London Docklands Development Corporation and ‘the one figure with the breadth of vision’ Lord Andrew Adonis. Despite its many other achievements, LDDC delivered very little for people in housing need in the East End, and Adonis’ support for the redevelopment of council estates in inner London (although I think he has pulled back a bit from his original analysis) would take us on the same path: more homes, but not for the poor.
Sadly, proud true Blairites like John still fail to acknowledge that it was a catastrophic error not to build more social housing in the decade after 1997. The Tories have done even worse, but that’s not the lesson Labour should draw. New Labour was mesmerised by private sector solutions that did not deliver good outcomes. Above all, the hostility towards the very idea of council housing was one of New Labour’s most dreadful blunders – a blunder that must not be repeated.

You need all your fingers and toes to count the number of Ministers of Housing we have had in the last 30 years. The short term nature of occupancy of the job is one of the reasons we have had so few attempts to create an effective long term housing policy, just short-term stunts and attempted quick fixes. Under Labour, people shuffled in and out rapidly and the Tories have made an art of changing the Minister pretty much every year.
Now its Gavin Barwell, MP for Croydon Central, one of Theresa May’s last appointments on Sunday. Are there any grounds for optimism apart from noting he’s not Brandon Lewis or Kris Hopkins or Grant Shapps? Turning to trusty old Wikipaedia, he has at least a little bit of a track record in his new subject, but, worryingly, largely at Conservative Party headquarters and as a Party apparatchik. He worked on housing and was special adviser to John Gummer when he was Secretary of State for the Environment before moving on to wider political duties. He was also a Croydon councillor for 12 years. A genuine achievement as an MP was his sponsorship of the private members’ Bill to outlaw some forms of discrimination against people with a history of mental health problems, which became law in 2013.
Mostly a loyalist, Barwell has gone along with the policies of his predecessors. Some people have seen some hope of a slight change in direction in Theresa May’s speech outside Number 10, where she highlighted the need to unite ‘all our citizens, every one of us, whoever we are and wherever we’re from’. She promised to fight against injustice, and to promote the interests of ‘ordinary working class families’. Regrettably, her only mention of housing was the cost of paying a mortgage. And the cynics amongst us will remember Thatcher’s first words on the steps of No 10, quoting from St Francis of Assisi’s prayer:  ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony……..’ So, Prime Ministerial first words are often the opposite of what follows.
Barwell’s first tweets raised some hope of a more cooperative and considered approach to the job:  ‘Look forward to working with councils, housing associations, developers & investors to ensure we build the homes people need and deserve…’. But they all say that, don’t they?

The Government now has not a One Nation housing policy but a One Tenure housing policy

As Monimbo has showed clearly on Red Brick recently, (here and here), the Government now has not a One Nation housing policy but a One Tenure housing policy, committing vast sums to try to reverse the downward decline in home ownership, largely by boosting subsidies to demand rather than supply.
This short-term, expensive and economically illiterate approach is throwing away the opportunities that exist to use the resources and powers available to create a balanced housing policy which looks to achieve a much faster rate of housebuilding across the board – market homes, intermediate homes including shared ownership, and social rent.
Thinking along those lines is the only way that Theresa May and Gavin Barwell have a hope of tackling the increasingly intense housing injustices that disfigure our country.
Will they rise to the challenge or will it be more of the same? My money, sadly, is on the latter.

We are constantly told that a shortage of developable land is a primary reason for the shortage of homes. It is the biggest part of the case, for example, for building on the green belt. But there are two things about land use, especially in London, that amaze me.
First, there seems to be a perverted principle that, while people have to be stacked on top of each other in multi-storey buildings, motor cars should have their own patch of sky above them. Secondly, that so much of our urban land is used by single-storey structures – look in particular at all of our supermarkets and business parks.
The picture below illustrates a typical scene anywhere in London or indeed any other town or city.
Yes, it’s a large open-to-air car park surrounding a single storey supermarket. There are thousands and thousands of these all over our urban areas. Yet it doesn’t have to be like this.
My first experience of a more radical use of land like this came in Tottenham in the 1970s. There, Tesco and Haringey Council came up with an intensive scheme, pictured below, which essentially had 3 layers: the shop on the ground floor, car parking above, and housing above that. These were council houses provided to local people desperate for a home, around 50 of them from memory. They were built in the form of an inward-looking pedestrianised street: it was only when looking out from a window that you would realise that you were off the ground. Access for residents was separated from access to the shop. The only specific problem I remember emerging from managing the scheme was a tenant letting their bath overflow and water seeping down into the store below – but that is a common-enough problem in any multi-storey development. Haringey was on a good run at the time: I also recall an excellent housing development above and alongside the Wood Green Shopping City, done I believe in conjunction with Metropolitan Housing Trust.
My feeling at the time was that this would become the norm for retail development in London, but it hasn’t. I know of another scheme, also Tesco, in Earls Court (also pictured) which has a brilliantly-designed Notting Hill Housing Trust development on top, with separate access from the rear. Great, intensive use of precious land in a dense urban area. I understand Sainsbury’s also have some similar schemes.
Many of the large chains of retail stores have suffered losses in recent years. Partly this is due to the general economy, partly to growing competition, but there has also been a change in shopping habits. We are now more likely to stop off at our local Tesco or Sainsbury’s each day and less likely to go to a big store in the car for a traditional weekly shop. This combination of economic pressures inevitably means that the big chains are reviewing their holdings of land and buildings. Tesco are closing stores and have abandoned plans for new large stores. Not only do they now have over 100 sites in mainly good locations at their disposal, they should also be looking at their entire holding from the perspective of South Tottenham and Earls Court.
The examples show that retailing and housing could be compatible uses of the same site, especially if the scandalous under-use of land for car parking is taken into account. I can’t see why every large company with single-story plus car park premises, from Tesco to B&Q to PC World, shouldn’t be reviewing its holdings. Personally, I think it would be great to live above one of London’s many garden centres or its car park.
The underlying point is that you can find land if you look for it. It seems not to have attracted much attention before: a search of the GLA website reveals no information at all about the conversion of free air above car parks and retail premises to housing. Maybe someone somewhere has done some research, maybe people in the big retailers are beavering away on it right now. One of the few articles on this topic – a post by Paul Wellman on the excellent ‘The Pint of Milk Test’ blog (from where I borrowed the car park photo) – suggests that the idea is gaining some traction.
Crucially, this is an opportunity where the new pro-active Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, could provide a hefty push rather than wait for the market to take its course. And there might be a strong case for a hefty tax on free-to-the-sky car parks. That might just bring a few forward for development as new homes.

At the recent annual general meeting of the Labour Housing Group, addressed by Shadow Housing Minister John Healey MP, there was a general air of disbelief that housing policy could have become so perverted that the most extraordinarily damaging legislation – the Housing and Planning Act – could be passed into law. We have arrived at a position that even the most alarmist commentator would not have predicted as being possible in 2010. We have regressed so far in this Parliament that it is even possible to begin to feel nostalgic about the reign of Grant Shapps as Housing Minister.
Several people in the meeting praised the sterling opposition put up to the Bill during its passage, in particular by Lord Kerslake and others in the House of Lords. Some amendments were achieved, but the Government pushed the Bill through the Commons without serious fear of defeat, helped by the fact that it was England-only legislation. There was little sign of rebellion on the Tory benches. Yet in recent times the Government has faced defeat on a wide range of other policy issues and has backed down humiliatingly on a significant number of them. Why not housing? The point I made was that, if we want to make the case powerfully for a decent housing policy, we have to start by challenging ourselves: ‘why is the housing sector so weak?’ and ‘why is the progressive housing case so lacking in influence?’
Since then I have been impressed by two brilliant housing blogs that addressed similar and overlapping themes. In a sweeping and comprehensive restatement of the case for genuinely affordable housing, called The Theory of Everything, Colin Wiles wrote: ‘I have a unifying theory that the housing crisis underpins almost every social, political and economic problem of our time.’ He argued that the core solution – investment in social rented housing – is ‘staring us in the face’. Colin concluded that making the case for housing as the fundamental bedrock of a decent society ‘is the challenge for our sector. We have to make the case for change and if we don’t do it, who else will?’
On Shelter’s excellent housing blog, in a very perceptive post Kate Webb asked ‘why was housing such an easy target?’ and pointed out that, despite almost universal condemnation and several rounds of Lords’ defeats, ultimately the Government ‘felt comfortable enough to stand firm with its vision for social housing’ despite U turns on everything from tax credits to forced academisation to the Human Rights Act. We are all influenced by anecdotal evidence and Kate recounts a radio phone discussion in which ‘starter homes’ were seen as a fantastic idea (despite the maths) and social housing was seen as for people on benefits. ‘Bluntly put’, she writes, ‘there was too little political pain attached to squeezing social housing when done in the name of promoting home ownership.’
So why is the case for social housing so weak? I suspect there are a number of inter-linked reasons but if I was forced to sum up my view in one sentence, I would say that we have been losing the battle to control the political narrative around housing for 40 years. The winning side – private housing good, socialised housing bad – has had it mostly its own way and trying to understand this might lead us down a better path.
First I would mention the media. Some people think I am obsessed by media bias, and it has been a hobby horse of mine since I worked at Shelter in the 1980s. Then, there were a similar number of people with mortgages and people who paid rent. Yet changes in mortgage rates were always top item on the news and changes in rents rarely if ever got a mention. Peoples’ views are partly dependent on the information they receive; if that wasn’t true, we wouldn’t have such a huge propaganda and advertising industry. Bias against ‘subsidised’ social housing and in favour of ‘stand on your own feet’ home ownership has been systematic and all-powerful. The confluence of interests between the bulk of the written media and the Conservatives has driven popular political discourse around housing. I am often told that I am ignoring the fact that people get most of their information from TV and radio and the internet these days, as if these were neutral, but as a big BBC fan it is obvious to me that their agenda is strongly driven by what appears in the predominantly right wing papers – and most influential people across the media identify mainly with home ownership, a little with private renting, and not at all with social renting.
Socialised housing pays for itself in the long run but building it needs capital subsidy up front. Social housing investment has been a major victim of the economic policies adopted by Governments since Healey and the IMF crisis in 1976 and the prevailing view that public spending is a drain on the economy. Behind the economics lies the politics: while direct public housing investment has been slashed, there have been waves of very expensive subsidies to homeownership in the form of tax reliefs, discounts on right to buy, and now direct subsidy for starter homes. Demand subsidies like these tend to reinforce prices. The truth is that private housing wealth accumulation makes a significant group of voters feel happier and more secure, even if it is ultimately at the expense of everyone else. Keeping house prices rising and offering more people the chance to jump on what seems to be a gravy train buys votes.
On the ‘progressive’ side we have undermined our own case for more social housing through self-inflicted wounds. It was probably just bad luck that the greatest period of investment in social housing, in the 1960s and 1970s, coincided with the worst period of design and construction, leaving a legacy that is not as bad as it is painted but is very challenging nonetheless – and easy to stereotype, even in the Guardian. Large parts of the sector have gone along with the wider attack on ‘welfare dependency’ and have failed to challenge the ‘scrounger’ narrative which the right has been so keen on. Social housing was frequently condemned as the enemy of aspiration. As a result, the door was opened for the monster Duncan Smith. It took a very long time to reform the paternalistic and bureaucratic mode of housing management (currently making a comeback sadly) and to appreciate that some of the things people liked most about home ownership – security, control, self-determination, mobility – could be replicated in social housing through progressive management models.
If the Conservatives have grabbed their opportunity for ideological purity with both hands, Labour’s approach has been unhelpfully ambivalent. Like trades unions, building council housing was not a ‘New Labour’ thing. Although vast improvements were carried out to the council housing stock under Blair and Brown, a genuinely great achievement, money was only available if you were willing to move away from the traditional council housing model. The role of building new affordable housing was given to housing associations, but on a much reduced scale despite their hubris. A hopelessly inadequate number of new affordable homes were built under Labour – until Brown’s Keynesian response to the financial collapse in 2008 – and in the event many of the biggest developing associations had lost sight of their mission to help the homeless and badly housed, becoming equally ambivalent about social renting and obsessed with home ownership and market-related solutions.
The housing lobby has also failed. It was once a progressive force, building a case based on an assessment of the housing needs of people on low and moderate incomes. There are still many brilliant people working in it, but in terms of raw influence it is a shadow of its former self. Some parts of it, especially the producer lobby the National Housing Federation, have been slowly migrating away from being one of us to becoming one of them. Their well-funded big effort before the 2015 election, Homes for Britain, couldn’t bring itself to make the case for social renting rather than vaguer notions of ‘affordability’. In its 50^th year, and despite a lot of good work, Shelter’s impact now seems very modest. New campaign groups have emerged, often with a burst of publicity, like Generation Rent and a plethora of local groups, but at a national level few voices argue unambiguously for social rented housing. By and large the voices of consumers – by that I mean both existing social tenants and people in housing need who want to be social tenants – are totally unheard.
To get to the point where no Government would dare bring in an Act like this one we will have to climb several mountains. We will have to challenge prejudice and demonization, we will have to contradict the view that all public borrowing and spending is non-productive, we will have to contest the view that housing policy can be reduced to promoting a single tenure. We must stop being embarrassed by council housing and other social renting in the face of grotesque stereotyping. Even if we manage to build more homes in the future, we must shed the ambivalence: because we know that the needs of the homeless and badly housed will only be met by a return to the provision of social rented housing on a large scale.

There are few things that irritate me more (although Boris Johnson and Iain Duncan Smith irritate me the most) than lazy stereotypes about council housing estates and council tenants. Sadly, an article this morning in the Guardian by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett  has got me going.
If I was to write a spoof article about what was wrong with council housing, it would have two elements: the scrounging anti-social occupants and the ‘brutalist’ architecture of post-war estates.
In the section on brutalist architecture I would bring the following sterotypes into play: some of the settings in the film Clockwork Orange, the iconic Trellick Tower in west London (unfortunately the Red Road flats in Glasgow are no more), and I would quote the awful writings of Dominic Sandbrook. More recently the film High Rise could get a mention. I would pull in key phrases, things to do with broken lifts, the smell of urine, and fear of dark corners. The word dystopian would have to appear.
Cosslett ticks all of these boxes in one short piece.
Like the demonization associated with scroungers, the image most people carry of council estates is strong. You just have to look at the estates that appear occasionally on EastEnders to see what I mean about stereotyping (despite the fact that all the real thugs and crooks are owner occupiers in the Square, step forward Phil Mitchell). The conventional wisdom about council housing is extremely damaging to the case for a progressive housing policy. This helps achieve the political objective of making council housing sound and appear unappealing. Council housing has failed, hasn’t it? Time for a free market solution.
The real story is different and I would recommend anyone seeking the truth and a genuinely balanced assessment to follow the extraordinary website of @municipaldreams here. Properly researched histories of estates around the country, warts and all – but a positive picture overall.
I have worked on many council estates over the years. Some have had real problems, usually due to appallingly bad building standards (by construction companies that were never held to account), child occupation densities that were too high, poor amenities in and around them, and atrociously bad housing management done on a shoestring. And some of the estates with the worst problems I encountered comprised houses not ‘high rise blocks’.
But overall my experience of being brought up on a council estate (in Newcastle) and of working on many since has been extremely positive. The homes are generally of a very high standard with generous space and amenities. There are often strong communities – with a lot of mutual support groups – which often only become apparent when demolition plans come along. Best of all, these homes have helped transform the lives of millions of people. The reform of housing management that took place in the 1990s and 2000s, and the rise of tenant involvement, had a very positive impact. And – until 2010 – gradual improvements in pay and in both in-work and out-of-work benefits, especially for the elderly and disabled, reduced poverty. Many of the worst problems have been tackled through better management and social investment, the removal of some of the most badly constructed blocks, and the physical modernisation brought about under Labour’s decent homes programme.
Look around the housing market and see how much people are willing to pay to buy ex-council homes, including high rise. Prices between half a million and a million pounds are not uncommon in London now.
If the Guardian wants to provide decent coverage of the history and quality of social housing, I would propose giving Municipal Dreams a regular column.