There is a sound economic and social case for a return to the provision of council homes, says David Whyte
GORDON BROWN says he wants to build 100,000 council houses. That’s not enough, but it’s a start and a good idea. Why did it take so long to surface?
The explanation, in part, is the terrible legacy of Margaret Thatcher’s years in power and the notion that the direct involvement of the state in providing homes is a bad thing. It became stuck in the public consciousness that renting the roof over your head from a local authority should be some sort of last resort, while council tenants were out of step with the nation’s aspirations. Everyone should want something better.
When I was growing up after the Second World War, renting a council house was something better. The vocabulary of the right – sink estates, ghettos and an underclass trapped in sub-standard accommodation daubed with graffiti, on streets where litter and burned-out cars are the norm – simply did not exist. Announcements of council house-building were good news and a matter of national pride. Far from being trapped on dispiriting estates of the work-shy, families moved up when they moved there. They were freed from over-crowding in housing stock, much of which – even before the war – had not been fit to live in.
As the youngest in a family of two adults and two children, for three wartime years and two post-war ones, I led a life common to many thousands of Britons. In a tiny rented terrace property, my family inhabited a kitchen (with a range), a scullery (with a sink and a cold tap) and one bedroom, which we all shared. There was another “front” room, which we never used because of the damp, and another bedroom which the landlady kept for her personal belongings. There was no electricity and no hot water. There was an outside lavatory in a dark, flowerless yard. Our lives were lit by gas mantles and our wireless powered by accumulators.
Our new council house – concrete framed, orange-coloured breeze blocks instead of bricks and designed for quick and easy building – wasn’t a trap for us, but a genuine liberation. It had three bedrooms, a bathroom, two lavatories, a dining room, sitting room and kitchen. All seemed huge to us then and they were still a good size by modern standards. There was a coke boiler in the kitchen for the hot water supply, a gas stove and later an electric refrigerator provided for a few pence extra on the rent. There was a brick-built shed with a coal bunker inside it and a gas copper for washing sheets. And there was a garden.
It wasn’t perfect. Some of the materials were defective and the workmanship showed signs of the break-neck speed at which it had been built. But it was a good place in which to grow up and, for my father, in which to grow old.
Although in my teens, I still was aware of a stigma attached to families from council estates. But our street in no sense housed an underclass of the hopeless. It was a street of which to be proud. Yes, it was working class – although a couple of fathers had office jobs and different accents. One or two families didn’t look after their garden. There were a couple of single mothers. One didn’t seem to have any paid work, but was kindly and eccentric. The other, sharing the house with her aunt, worked hard in a laundry, alongside the aunt, to bring up a fine, mixed-race son – the product of a wartime marriage to an American serviceman who had gone home alone.
Unlike them, most of the women didn’t go out to work. My mother occasionally stood in as a dinner lady and later worked as a cleaner in private houses, but primarily she and her neighbours were housewives.
Among the men there was a train driver, a lorry driver for the state-owned British Road Services and a tally man – who sold clothes and household items door-to-door on hire purchase and collected the payments each week. There were factory workers, a brewery worker, one who worked for the Gas Board (another state enterprise), a shop-worker, a bricklayer, a self-employed fell-monger, an insurance agent and my father – who worked as a messenger for a bank in London, a job he had had before his wartime service in the RAF.
This was no underclass. These were hard-working families, in the phrase beloved of the Prime Minister – working-class families, if you prefer. All the men had jobs and every household had children; most had just two. Our street was part of a biggish estate which linked to another council development that, in turn, joined up with another, older council estate from an earlier wave of state building in the 1920s.
We were a long way from the centre of the town and from schools, churches and – for years – from shops. But, although we were something of an outpost, we were not in any sense a ghetto with problems of poverty, crime, depressed aspirations and general under-achievement.
The work ethic was strong and there were plenty of role models: people with skills and lives to admire. There was no visible law-breaking or drunkenness. Houses were clean, gardens were cultivated and most people saved enough for a week’s seaside holiday in the summer. Children played together and went to school together – at least until the age of 11.
There were many who then went to the local secondary modern, but a noticeable minority passed the 11-plus and went to the grammar school in the town (for the girls only) and in other towns for the boys. A handful of the most successful in that awful examination became day boys at a local minor public school in order to boost its exam results. The county council paid for them.
Many of these 11-plus children stayed longer at school to take their exams and went into clerical jobs. Others went to universities, with Oxford and Cambridge being remarkably well represented among this minority, and then onto a “professional” future.
That was all a long time ago. Gordon Brown’s council houses are for the future. I don’t imagine that this gesture – sold to our property-owning democracy as a way of helping the construction industry in a time of recession – will recreate the kind of community in which I grew up, but it gives a different and welcome signal. It associates council houses with something positive and hopeful. It makes them part of a solution and not part of a problem.
It is ironic that super-rich bankers – those arch-champions of unbridled capitalism, personal gain and private profit – have inadvertently given the Prime Minister the lever to create new communities of council tenants, as well as an opportunity to nationalise their own failed enterprises. As the state is repositioning itself on one commanding height of the economy, it is resuming its rightful place as a direct provider of decent homes.
The collapse of the private housing market and the failure of banks are inextricably linked. And with the Government supporting the motor industry, guaranteeing loans for small businesses and striving to rescue the construction industry, perhaps the misguided mantra of “private good, public bad” is finally being undermined. It is also high time the tired old story that council estates are synonymous with dysfunctional families and communities under siege from the disaffected was rewritten.
