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Housing is one of the four great basics of the good society. Yet New Labour has boosted Health and Education enormously while the other basics: Housing and Welfare, have been neglected and relegated to penny pinching irrelevance.
You can`t have good health without good housing to warm and protect, or good education without a good home to sustain study in. Nor will we get better welfare or end exclusion if people are trapped in sink estates and relegated to decrepit, damp, miserable housing.
Yet instead of proclaiming a crusade to build and renovate a New Britain, we`ve not only failed to make good the twenty years of under-investment and neglect of social housing under the Tories, but we`ve carried on this divisive penny pinching obfuscation by which they disguised their failure.
Labour was determined not to be viewed as the Party of tax and spend. Yet the long failure to invest in housing can only be made good by more money for the social sector, lower real interest rates for the private. Labour meanness and our craving for “stability” precluded both and removed any prospect of the great drive for more and better housing which transformed Britain in the 1950s with the Tory commitment to half a million new houses, public and private, a year.
Instead, we have had excuses and evasions and divide and rule undermining any overall housing policy with a powerful minister as Housing Tsar to drive it forward. Neither John Prescott nor his sprawling money-starved Department could provide that. Tony wouldn`t make housing the major priority education and health are. The quibbles and candle end saving Treasury likes prevailed and we never opened the flood gates and Tony never talked of “Housing, housing, housing”. Ministers were doing pretty nicely out of rising London house. Perhaps they assumed everyone was as happy as they.
Fragmentation rules. Not OK. Hardest hit are council tenants doing marginally better than under the Tories who made them public enemy number one but still paying the housing benefit of the poorest Council tenants because it is still drained from housing expenditure rather than paid from Social Security as it is far all others. They get a slightly better deal and more money for repairs and renovation but are still less likely to get either. So a declining stock, once the pride of Councils everywhere, is being allowed to decline to force Councils to privatise by penalising their tenants.
A concerted renewal of sink estates is largely ruled out. Councils have their hands tied. Labour has sold more Council houses than Mrs. Thatcher. There`s been no new build or exciting development and no attempt to regenerate central shops and facilities hard hit by bigger shopping centres. Except where financial deals can be stitched together from SRB or European money or by co-operation with building societies.
Housing Associations did slightly better initially but are now being cut back. Yet even the initial boost was inadequate. Housing, like Defence, was squeezed to keep taxes low. So the Associations are unable to tackle the central problem of cities, and particularly London, by providing low cost housing for all those workers who keep the cities going to allow them to live near to their work.
As for private build, the economic driver of the fifties has languished. More households haven`t meant proportionate build. Government refuses to face the problem of planning, supporting more new housing in the South or financing the development of brownfield sites near town centres.
It`s a depressing record based on perverted priorities. Yet social and private should advance together because the first is the only ladder to the second and boosting both together is the key to the economic regeneration and the jobs Britain needs. If we slump towards recession housing is not going to be allowed to give the boost it provided in the Thirties and Fifties. |
