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Housing is one of those glass half empty or half full issues. Labour can claim to have improved things. It has certainly spent more money. Yet nothing like enough to prevent the backlog of repairs and renovations building up or to satisfy the growing demand for social housing from those unable to buy their own. We haven`t had an adequate level of total building - down thirty percent since 1979 - making this the first Labour government to fail at housing, an issue relegated to benign neglect, lacking the high priority it once had and still needs.
As for council housing, once our pride and joy, that`s a disaster area. More houses privatised than under Mrs. Thatcher. Only 171 built in the last available year. Councils precluded from tackling the problems, the tenants punished as victims of Labour`s war on its own councils.
Why the failure? Unwillingness to spend money on the scale necessary to reverse the spending and investment drought inflicted on housing as on so many areas of public spending, from Education to Local Government. This government has concentrated on the sexy areas, specifically Health and Education (though neither can really be boosted if bad housing drags the people down) and now, because of its disasters, Transport. These priorities don`t leave much for housing or local government. So the long failure to invest has been dragged out and , government doesn`t trust local authorities, even Labour councils, while Whitehall has long been jealous of the power and strength which huge housing stocks gave councils. So the pressure to privatise has been kept up and Council housing has been starved to pressure councils to go private and tenants into feeling that they`ll only get a fair deal if they vote for privatisation.
Privatisations are now flowing fast, though tenants are beginning to say “No”. Councils and tenants are bullied to ballot. Tenants are told that their repairs will only get done if they vote for transfer. The council is told its debts can only be paid off if it gets shot of stock. The result is lavish persuasion campaigns to con the council dwellers. Birmingham is spending £130,000 of tenants` own money to send each one a video detailing the joys of the private sector. Three out of four ballots go for sale though the lavish prospects aren`t always fulfilled. Yet the pace may show, especially in the South, for most councils have not yet decided what to do, and the belated relaxation of the rules on council borrowing has given many pause to think of Arms Length Management Organisations rather than shrugging off a responsibility they really want to keep to other organisations.
The consequences of all this fall mainly on council tenants. Once long ago portrayed as pampered wastrels keeping coal in the bath and chopping floorboards for firewood, they are being reduced to the undesirables and untouchables of housing. The backlog of repairs was estimated at a massive £19 billion in 2000. Then just over three million council houses remained so each faced an average repair bill of £6,300. Some in a much worse state than others. Neglect and the numbers of sales to tenants since 1980 have led to sink estates which become dumping grounds for urgent need cases, neighbours from hell, junkies, and the poor. This drives out the respectable, brings in the rough and creates hell for those who`ve bought and can`t sell out. So estates are set on a downward spiral of decline and disintegration, with empty houses vandalised or boarded up, roads pot-holed, crime rampant and any sense of community of the type which once flourished on older estates, killed by neglect.
The Tories required the housing benefit of council tenants to be paid out of the housing revenue accounts, a principle which applied to no other tenants. Those of private landlords and housing associations were paid by social security. It made council rents higher than they would otherwise be for the rest. Forcing the poor, those who need social housing, to pay the housing benefit of the poorest. After resisting the pressure to remedy this anomaly for all sorts of specious reasons which basically meant that Housing Ministers couldn`t get the money from Treasury, Labour has at last acted on the anomaly. Council tenants will still pay the housing benefit of poorer tenants. But it won`t come out of the Housing Revenue Account. Instead it`s paid from reduced expenditure on repairs and renovations.
Housing associations are now the only social housing alternative for those in need, though their rents are higher than council housing and they aren`t accountable in the same way. Yet they, too, have had a raw deal. They`ve not only been denied the finance through the Housing Corporation to replace council build, but what they do build is steadily declining in number. In 1995 under the Tories, 38,400 houses were built by social landlords, a figure rising ever since 1987. In 1999-2000 it was down to 21,592 and is still shrinking.
As house prices rise rapidly, particularly in London, and the South East, the low paid, the poor, the single parent families, those on low wages, find it increasingly difficult to bridge the gap and get onto the house price escalator which benefits those on it so richly. So there is a greater need for social housing. Yet not only has a sizeable proportion, higher in the South where house price prospects were better, been sold off to tenants, but far less of any type of it is built. The total of social build was 104,000 in 1979, 21,763 in 1999-2000, a pathetic performance in the light of the growing need.
We say we`ve grappled with homelessness. I know large claims are made that it`s been reduced by this proportion or that, but I see more in Victoria Street as I walk home every night, though they could have been moved out from elsewhere. What we haven`t done is cope with social needs which lead to homelessness, particularly in respect of London`s housing stock. Nor have we used housing as the lever of economic regeneration it should be to stimulate local economy and generate jobs at a time of emerging economic difficulties and in areas of decline. In the areas of high unemployment nothing could do more to stimulate the local economy and put people back to work than a programme of new house building coupled with active and extensive regeneration. Yet the private sector won`t come to these areas unless there`s a rise in house prices and in areas where there is, it can`t find land for building. Improvement grants are becoming as rare as rocking horse droppings in large parts of the country.
The net result is an emerging wealth gap between North and South and disaster for those on low pay or providing valuable services, like teachers, nurses, bus drivers, underground workers, and other vital service sectors who can`t get jobs near their work. In the North the problem is physical: a surplus of poor quality housing in areas of the North which can neither be repaired nor pulled down, becoming dumping grounds which no-one else will take on and councils can`t cope with. There are growing areas of declining private sector housing, the old terraces where the poor and undesirable are moving in because it`s cheap, but living next to older people who`ve lived their lives in what used to be respectable neighbourhoods but now can`t get out because house prices are so low. In any case, the rising tide of vandalism, teenage hooliganism, and simple unpleasantness which makes their lives hell also makes houses in the area unsaleable. Every Labour government since 1945 can be proud of its record in housing. Not this. |
