The Rise and Fall of Council Housing

To some extent, this replicates the agenda of Conservatives in the 1930s and, with Harold Macmillan’s abolition of the ‘General Needs’ subsidy in 1954, it represents in its present form something deeper and more dangerous. In the years after 1945, we talked first of ‘social security’ – a universalist provision protecting all sections of the populace.

Now we use the language of ‘welfare’ adopted from the US and with it all the freighted notions of the scrounging underclass popularised by TV exposés of those on benefits.

From this perspective, those who need social security – I would say ‘depend’ on it but for the political use of the term ‘dependency’ to signify some failure of will and character – are placed on society’s margins and stigmatised.

‘Council estates’ – the preferred term for the negative connotations it carries despite the huge changes in the social housing sector – take their place in this dystopic pantheon. The practice of welfarisation has taken a number of forms.

“Now we use the language of ‘welfare’ adopted from the US and with it all the freighted notions of the scrounging underclass popularised by TV exposés of those on benefits.”

The practice of welfarisation has taken a number of forms in recent years, but perhaps the most powerful has been the attempt to end lifetime security of tenure for those living in social housing, made first by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government in office from 2010 to 2015 and latterly by the Conservatives alone.

Technically, lifetime security only came into place in 1980 – a by-product of Right to Buy. The understanding was always that tenants who paid their rent, and otherwise behaved responsibly, enjoyed a home for life though they have, of course, always been subject to eviction for breaches of their conditions of tenancy.

This in itself, to ideologues of the Right, was a form of dependency, inhibiting the ambition and social and geographical mobility appropriate to citizens of a free market.

To others, and I remember the late social scientist and geographer Doreen Massey, raised on the Wythenshawe Estate, making this point eloquently at a housing conference, it has offered precisely the security which has enabled their lives to flourish.

In presenting the 2011 Localism Act which empowered social landlords to offer ‘flexible’, fixed-term tenancies of two to five years in duration, however, ministers offered apparently more pragmatic arguments. (Housing associations already had the right to offer assured short-term shorthold tenancies but this was hedged by the requirement that they also ‘offer and issue the most secure form of tenancy compatible with the purpose of the housing and the sustainability of the community’.)

It was, the then housing minister Grant Shapps suggested, ‘no longer right to require that every social tenancy should be for life – regardless of the household’s particular circumstances’.

Critics pointed to the irony that the threat of losing a council tenancy through an advantageous change of circumstance (new-found employment or a better-paid job, for example) might be a disincentive to precisely the enterprise the legislation was supposed to encourage.

“The practice of welfarisation has taken a number of forms in recent years, but perhaps the most powerful has been the attempt to end lifetime security of tenure for those living in social housing.”

Shapps claimed too that the bill gave councils and housing associations more freedom in managing their housing stock and would allow them, in particular, to address the problem of under-occupancy – the fact that some tenants had more bedrooms than their needs apparently warranted. The latter was not something viewed as a problem in owner-occupied homes, but in the case of social housing the stated aim, as Shapps argued, was to ‘create a more flexible system so that scarce public resources can be focused on those who need it most’.

The thinly veiled implications of this – that the homes of social housing tenants were regarded as a gift to be granted or withdrawn according to higher interests and that the sector as a whole be reserved to the neediest – hardly need highlighting.

Some of the more aggressively proactive housing associations welcomed the scheme, those labelled by the housing academics Suzanne Fitzpatrick and Beth Watts as either ‘interventionists’ (keen to ‘improve’ their tenants and move them on and up) or as ‘utility maximisers’ (wanting to manage their stock as efficiently and as commercially as possible).

More traditional housing associations and Labour-controlled local authorities were generally hostile, while flagship Tory councils such as Wandsworth and Barnet embraced the legislation and its underlying ethos.

Overall, however, by 2015 only some 15 per cent of new general needs tenancies were being offered on a fixed-term basis.

This was clearly the wrong sort of ‘localism’ and, after the 2015 general election, a newly unfettered single-party Conservative government proposed in its 2015 Housing and Planning Bill to compel the use of fixed-term, two-to-five-year tenancies for nearly all new council house lettings. Powerful opposition in the Lords forced concessions.

For certain groups such as older and disabled people, the maximum tenancy period was raised to ten years and it was also accepted that secure tenancies should cover the full period of a child’s schooling to the age of nineteen.

These were concessions which, although confined to those judged ‘vulnerable’, confirmed practically the arguments made by those who opposed short-term tenancies more broadly: that it was precisely the security and stability of so-called tenancies for life which enabled individuals and communities to grow.

“Critics pointed to the irony that the threat of losing a council tenancy through an advantageous change of circumstance (new-found employment or a better-paid job, for example) might be a disincentive to precisely the enterprise the legislation was supposed to encourage.”

Another component in the Conservatives’ welfarisation agenda came with ‘Pay to Stay’.

Again, it came with a ‘common sense’ proposition – that it was ‘simply not fair that hard-working people [were] subsidising the lifestyles of those on higher than average incomes’.

Even better, it came with a suitably (in government terms) ugly face – the late Bob Crow who, as the ‘union boss’ of RMT, was making life difficult for commuters while earning a six-figure, executive salary and living in a council house.

The Telegraph reckoned there were 5,000 others earning over £100,000 similarly placed – an impressive example of council homes promoting social mobility, you might think, though in truth the figures are dubious.

The initial plan, announced by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne in the July 2015 Budget, was straightforward: social housing households earning over £40,000 in London and over £31,000 elsewhere in the country would be required to pay the equivalent of local private sector rents.

The Tory-controlled Local Government Association – alongside most working in the housing field – provided the obvious retort: first, that such incomes (particularly where there was more than one breadwinner or a number of dependent children) couldn’t properly be considered high-earning; and second, that the proposed rules disincentivised ‘hard-working people’ and those aspiring to earn more.

A study commissioned by the association concluded that the policy would hit 214,000 households across England and that up to 70,000 – unable to afford the new rent levels – would be forced to leave the homes and areas in which they lived.

By October, the new Housing Minister Gavin Barwell was suggesting that a tapered system (in which rents rose more gradually in line with incomes) might operate to offset the undeniably drastic effects of the original ill-conceived proposal.

One year later, the scheme was scrapped; councils and housing associations were to be given discretion.

The government had listened, Barwell claimed. In reality, practicalities had, for once, outweighed ideology.”

Municipal Dreams: the rise and fall of council housing by John Boughton is published by Verso Books and is available now on hardback.