Paper by SA for discussion on 6th September 2007
(see also write-up of group discussion)

Since Gordon Brown took office as prime minister we have seen a wave of press releases by the national pressure group, Shelter, and by the popular press, highlighting the current housing crisis. Shelter also launched a nationwide campaign earlier this summer.

Peter Terry, chairman of the B.M.A. in Scotland explained why his organisation had joined the twenty-four strong coalition: ‘The link between poor housing and ill health was first established almost two centuries ago, yet today in Scotland one in six families are living in damp homes.’ Recognising that decent housing is vital to the physical and psychological wellbeing of all – and as Shelter have campaigned for almost forty years – this should be a basic human right for all.

Throughout the nineteenth century, alongside the pressure for sanitary reforms and improvement for working conditions, we saw the development of early charitable housing trusts and friendly societies. There are many reasons for their emergence. Firstly, although the 1840s produced many reports and accounts of the conditions of the working class which were damning, the push for reforms was neither value free nor philanthropic. One only has to read about the treatment of and attitudes towards the so-called ‘undeserving poor’ (paupers, the criminal classes, the residue) to understand the extent of ignorance, prejudice and fear attached to paternalistic forms of social control and the determination of the State to quell any uprising. Indeed, Shaftsbury in 1848 addressed a meeting of his organisation about their work to provide working class housing thus: ‘This is the way to stifle Chartism.’

Housing reforms throughout the nineteenth century proved to be wholly inadequate when left to the market and charitable landlords, as the London Trades Council reported to the ruling class on the housing of the working class of 1884-5. The final decades of the nineteenth century arguably left the State with little choice but to embark upon a campaign of publicly provided housing for the working class. Laissez faire might have been an ideal of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but although the Labour party Manifesto of 1900 proposed the nationalisation of land as well as railways etc., the turn of the century was sometimes referred to as the dawn of reluctant collectivism.

The severe shortage of housing which accompanied the near and very real threat of public unrest led to the 1919 Addison Act and the building of 170,000 new council houses, with the promise to provide ‘Homes Fit for Heroes’. The 1930 Housing Act laid out the details of housing subsidies for municipal housing, thus ushering in a new era of housing policy.

Prior to 1914, 90% of households rented from the private rented sector, with the remaining 10% in owner occupation.

Housing Stock by Tenure 1914-83 in England and Wales

Between 1981 and 2005, the number of owner occupied dwellings increased to three quarters of the entire housing stock.

Thatcher began her crusade to create her vision of an owner occupying democracy with the 1980 Housing Act and the provisions for council house tenants to buy their own homes at knock down prices. This in combination with a decline in house building in the public sector inevitably meant a decline in the stock of local authority housing.

The 1980s, with the implementation of the 1988 Housing Act represented a watershed in UK housing policy. In addition to the Right to Buy policy and Welfare Reforms of the mid-eighties, the 1988 Act was the final nail in the coffin. The Act also created the HAT which would, unless tenants voted otherwise, enable run down local authority estates to be taken over for private management. Tenants would also see a reform of their security of tenure, supposedly freeing up and encouraging private landlords to invest in the rented market. Council tenants would also lose the right to succession. On implementation there would be no further ‘protected’ (or so-called ‘sitting’) tenants.

Arguably, the current political crisis is nothing new, as has been claimed in the popular press in recent weeks, although the disparity between average incomes and affordability vis-à-vis the first time buyers market in particular, and to a lesser extent owner occupation in general, is far greater (at 185/40) and there has been an increase in mortgage repossessions.

CC Mortgage Repossession Actions

Claims Issues (1000s)

Clearly there are regional variations in housing prices, cost of living, earnings, infrastructural considerations. In the south west, for example, the cost of living, including housing, for many on low incomes in the service sector, public sector, often means that access to affordable housing is very hard for those on the lowest incomes, and access to the market for would-be first time buyers is impossible. The result of these trends has been a significant increase in those threatened with homelessness and also the number of households struggling with debt and hardship.

Shelter and other campaigning organisations (DCH, CHAR) have been campaigning for a house building programme focussing on access to affordable homes which Brown’s government appears to be paying lip service to, but, as others in the socialist movement have recently emphasised, it would also be essential to address related issues, like public sector pay, regional development, attention to regional infrastructures (transport, employment, environment).

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