Social Housing - TrustNews Sept 15
Earlier this year, the council of the Trust asked me for a brief history of social housing and how we got to be where we are now - which is a subject of immense importance to Winchester. This reduced version has been written for TrustNews, though one has to caution that, inevitably, describing where we are now is like aiming for a moving target.
When it became clear towards the end of the 19th century that philanthropy - by Peabody, Guinness, Rothschild and others - had barely scratched the surface of the problem, mainly just in London, building housing came to be something councils could do, and did well. Still it was not enough. The First World War saw promises made of homes fit for heroes, with a target in 1917 of 300,000 new houses to be built in the first year of peace. However, only 170,000 houses had been built by 1921. Many of these were cottage estates, inspired by the founders of the garden city movement; some of this in?uence can still be seen in the early parts of Stanmore.
The big boost came after the Second World War, when a combination of wartime destruction, a Labour government and a desire for slum clearance led to an enormous building boom. By 1951 when the Conservatives under Harold Macmillan returned to power, about 900,000 new homes had been built. Macmillan increased the subsidy per unit and promised 300,000 new homes a year, a target reached in 1958. Great numbers of these were flats, despite pre-war research by Mass Observation which showed that only one in twenty people wanted a flat.
By 1964 55% of all new local authority housing tenders approved were for flats. The growth of tall blocks peaked at 26% in 1966 - followed not long after by the Ronan Point collapse in 1968. The housing charity, Shelter, was launched in 1966, coincidentally a few days after the BBC showed Ken Loach’s film, Cathy Come Home. (Readers who don't remember the ?lm might like to read Alan Johnson's autobiography, This Boy, about life in Notting Hill in this period.)
The Parker Morris report of 1961, laying out better space standards, requirements for heating and ventilation etc., had been finally adopted by Harold Wilson's Labour government and made mandatory for different categories between 1967 and 1969. The Labour government continued to promote council house building, and some 900,000 new homes, many in tall blocks, were built between 1965 and 1969. Winchester City Council of course never built higher than the eight stories at Winnall.
Right to Buy has been controversial since it was first conceived - by the Labour party in 1959 before an election it lost. It took until 1980 to be promoted hard. By 1987 more than a million homes had been sold nationally. Councils were allowed to keep half the proceeds but not to build, only to pay down debt. Coincidentally or otherwise, between 1980 and 1990 homeless figures rose from 55,000 to 165,000. The Labour government after 1997 modi?ed the RTB scheme but still did not allow councils to build, although receipts could be used for maintenance through the Decent Homes programme.
In 1988 the Conservative government also introduced Large Scale Voluntary Transfer, where councils were encouraged to transfer (in exchange for a receipt) their housing stock to housing associations, which were better funded nationally and locally, to maintain the stock and also to build new. This decision was to be made by tenants; Winchester tenants voted to remain with the council.
The Coalition government’s Spending Review of 2010 cut the social housing budget by more than 60%. At the same time, a target of 150,000 affordable homes was set to be paid for by changing the way councils charge rent.
It’s not clear when the term Affordable Housing was coined (affordability as distinct from need was being discussed in 1991) but it was in the 2010 budget that it eclipsed social housing. An “affordable” rent is likely to be 80% of market rent, which is not, in expensive areas, affordable for most people. Social housing is what remains of council stock, although it has been government policy for 20 years or so to bring housing association and council housing rents closer together.
Probably the main way of funding affordable housing over the last couple of decades, particularly in the south, has been planning gain, known as s106 agreements. This is a mechanism for ensuring social bene?t arises from the pro?ts of developers and landowners. It can be used to fund the percentage of social or affordable housing called for in a local authority’s Local Plan - in the case of Winchester, 40%. The aims are laudable but research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found in 2002 that under 10% was more typically achieved.
Since then the 2013 Growth & Infrastructure Act has allowed developers to renegotiate previously agreed levels of affordable provision if they claim a scheme will otherwise not be viable. This is what underlies the disappearance of social and affordable housing from Silver Hill.
ln summary, there has never been a golden period of house building for the less well off, although some periods have been worse than others. Housing has almost never been built of the right type, in the right place, for the right rent. Good intentions frequently turn out not to work.
I would say that it is incumbent on those involved in any related local community activity to try to ensure that high quality, genuinely mixed, developments are built, to avoid ghettos and to ensure a viable future.