Anne Power - Property before people : the management of twentieth-century council housing

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ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: HOUSING POLICY AND HOME OWNERSHIP

Volume 16

PROPERTY BEFORE PEOPLE

PROPERTY BEFORE PEOPLE

The Management of Twentieth-Century Council Housing

ANNE POWER

First published in 1987 by Allen & Unwin, the academic imprint of Unwin Hyman Ltd

This edition first published in 2021

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

1987 A. Power 2021 New Preface A. Power

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-367-64519-9 (Set)

ISBN: 978-1-00-313856-3 (Set) (ebk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-68450-1 (Volume 16) (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-00-313761-0 (Volume 16) (ebk)

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer

The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

New Preface to the Re-issue of 2021

Anne Power

Last year we celebrated 100 years of council housing in the United Kingdom. It was the golden age of building that many want to recreate, forgetting the lessons of the past. In 1919, within four years of the launch of Homes Fit for Heroes, subsidies were cut and standards lowered. Within 10 years the dream of quality homes for the general population disappeared, to be replaced by much poorer standards and slum clearance. Government quickly realised that housing management was a vital but neglected landlord duty as problems were emerging on council estates, caused more by landlord negligence than tenants misbehaviour. As a result, council housing was already acquiring social stigma.

After the Second World War, an even bigger commitment to build homes was made. It had multi-party support with a blank cheque to councils willing to build big estates, trying out new-fangled high rise architecture which attracted extra subsidy. The post-war estates were a clear break with tradition and very hard to manage. Government made no allowance for the extra maintenance and supervision they required. They wanted numbers of new units. Rents subsidised new infrastructure such as major roads, and bigger numbers of homes, rather than essential maintenance.

By the early 1970s, we had too many council homes and unpopular lettings on the biggest estates were increasingly hard to fill. At the same time, more attractive homes, often on smaller estates of houses with gardens, were generally offered to the best tenants. Poorer tenants, immigrants, unemployed and homeless people were allocated to older and less desirable housing on the large, new concrete complex estates. As a result, there was a constant filtering of the population into more and more concentrated, high poverty areas. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy, which the government recognised in the mid-1970s as the phenomenon of difficult-to-let estates emerged. One third of council estates were classed as difficult to let and manage, mainly flatted estates, but sometimes also so-called cottage estates, built outside town centres in the inter-war period when land was more readily available.

Councils were slow to recognise the problems of both their newer and older stock: but the growth in difficult to let property and the high refusal rates for some estates, even in London, forced them to recognise the unpopular, modernist, alienating design of post-war estates, intensified by mounting debt and out-of-control management problems.

In 1979, a Conservative government was elected, keen to find solutions, following Labours failure to cope with the crisis in council housing. The Priority Estates Project, of which I was part of, worked for 10 years on the most difficult estates all over Britain, under a Conservative government, but with overwhelmingly Labour local councils. This led us to discover just how seemingly intractable the estate-based problems were. Our job was to find ways of tackling them. The lessons we learnt were hard won and transformative:

• It is the landlords duty to maintain decent conditions on estates. Tenants often refuse to live on a difficult estate where they have no control over conditions. This requires on site management.
• Landlords have to work with tenants and win their support if on-site management is to work, for example enforcement of tenancy conditions. This requires a clear structure.
• Constant reinvestment and upgrading are essential to maintaining conditions and preventing decay, leading to demolition. Almost any unpopular estate can be made to work with proper, hands-on management and repairs.
• The local environment of estates makes a huge difference to appearance and the atmosphere. This applies to all common areas and spaces. If shared spaces are well maintained, vandalism and other anti-social behaviour will decline. The estate then becomes more manageable.
• Neighbourhood management at the frontline makes homes both liveable and let-able, if focused on landlord responsibilities, but is also linked to other services such as policing, education, health and transport.

If we fast-forward to today, the landscape of social housing has changed radically.

• Firstly, around two million council homes have been transferred to housing associations, many have become even larger than local authority landlords.
• Secondly, the Right to Buy for sitting tenants has proven extremely popular; and many, or most, of the more attractive property has been bought, amounting to nearly two million properties.
• Thirdly, the government has given councils a major incentive to offer their social housing estates to developers, to knock them down and replace them with more mixed communities. In practice, this means that the supply of social housing shrinks to make room for private sales and higher rents. Therefore, it has gradually become harder and harder for families in need to access low cost, secure renting.
• Fourthly, freeing up private renting from virtually all controls has led to a boom in private landlords, from just 9% of landlords in the early 1980s to 25% now. Many are landlords of former Right to Buy properties.

The biggest changes have happened since 2010. Government introduced drastic cuts to every aspect of council and housing association activity; cuts to housing and other benefits, making social housing tenants poorer, leading to more evictions and homelessness; stigmatisation of social housing tenants as benefit scroungers; serious cut-backs in council services from advice centres, to youth clubs, to senior citizens day centres, social landlords filling the gaps; and massive cuts in capital grants to housing associations and local authorities to build new social housing.

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