2nd June 2015

Tendring Topics………on line

Dwellers in ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’?

The NHS.

          I sometimes wonder if I live in the same world as today’s top politicians.  Here in Clacton-on-Sea there is an acute shortage of general medical practitioners (family doctors).   I have been served by the same medical practice since my family and I moved to Clacton in 1956 fifty-eight years ago.  In those distant days there were just two doctors. They were Dr Craig and Dr Geddes, both Scotsmen and not dissimilar to the Dr Cameron and Dr Finlay of the tv soap ‘Dr Finlay’s casebook’.  They behaved similarly too.   I remember several occasions when one or other of them visited my home late at night or early in the morning when one of my two then-young sons, or my wife or I, needed urgent medical attention.   There were no appointments.  Patients just turned up at the surgery.  They might have a longish wait to see a doctor but see one of the two doctors they always did.  And that doctor was always familiar with their medical history and could refresh his memory from written notes.

            Lots of changes have taken place since 1956.  Clacton has almost doubled in size and my doctors’ surgery, now renamed a ‘medical centre’ has doubled in size too. There are several practice nurses and a practice manager.  Both Dr Craig and Dr Geddes died many years ago.  At one point there were as many as six medical practitioners, two of them women.  There were, I think, appointments but most people just turned up at the medical centre and saw either their preferred doctor or whichever doctor was available.

            Now, there are only three doctors and one of them is only part-time.  They see patients only by appointment and it’s very difficult to make an appointment. ‘Phone just after 8.00 am’, you’ll be told by the receptionist – but the line is always engaged.  By the time you manage to get through all the doctors are booked.  I have found from experience that the only way I can make almost sure of seeing the doctor of my choice is to turn up at the medical centre fifteen minutes before they open at 8.00 am and ask the receptionist for an appointment then.  There’s usually a queue so I may need to get there before 7.45 am to be at the right end of that queue!   As I am now 94 I rarely bother!  The service provided for patients by our local doctors (the ‘front line’ of the NHS) is clearly not nearly as good as it was as recently as five years ago.   If it were much better than it had been when the coalition government took over, I am quite sure that it would be trumpeted as one of the government’s successes.  As it is, I’m not quite so partisan as to proclaim that ‘It’s all the government’s fault’.  I don’t suppose that it is – but the government, with its continual ‘targets’ and its reorganisation of the NHS so as to increase the field of local GP responsibility, has certainly played a major role in this deterioration.

            We need to attract many more qualified doctors to the Tendring Area – and this can’t be done just by offering them more money.  For goodness sake – our coast has the lowest annual rainfall in the British Isles and more than the average amount of sunshine.   It’s a lovely place to bring up children (my late wife and I have done it and I write from personal experience!) and it’s only about an hour and a half from London by road or rail.  It really shouldn’t be difficult to attract young doctors here.

            Is the new all-Conservative government taking any steps to encourage this?  Not as far as I know but, of course, they’ve only been in office a few weeks.  During those few weeks though, Prime Minister David Cameron has found time to promise that within a couple of years we should be able to consult a doctor any day of the week and all hours of the day!  Can David Cameron really inhabit the world that I do?  I, and I suspect a great many other local people, would be happier if he were to concentrate his efforts on the – surely much more easily achieved – objective of making it possible for us to see the doctor of our choice between 8.00 am and 5.00 pm on Monday through to Friday in every week!  That surely shouldn’t be too much to ask

 Home Ownership

            So the Government plans to go ahead with its determination to ‘buy votes with other people’s money’ by extending their ‘right to buy’ scheme from council house tenants to the tenants of housing associations.  They justify this by the alleged fact that 86 percent of the public have aspirations (that’s the OK word just now) to become homeowners.  Presumably this claim follows a public opinion poll on the subject conducted among those not owning or buying their own home.  If they were just asked Would you like to own your own home? I’d have expected that even more than 86 percent would have answered positively.  No-one particularly likes paying rent, having to observe tenancy rules and never knowing when and why they may be given notice to quit.  Neither do adults, particularly with young children, like being homeless or having to share with ‘mum and dad’.   Of course they’d much prefer having their own home.

            But that’s not what they are being offered.  What they are being offered is the possibility of home ownership (you’re not ‘the owner’ till you hold the deeds of the home) after repaying a large loan month by month over a period of twenty years or more.  During that period you’ll be responsible for paying council tax and for carrying out all repairs and internal and external decoration.  If you default in making those regular monthly payments (and who knows what’s going to happen in twenty years?) you’ll run the risk of homelessness for yourself and family, and the loss of much – even perhaps all – of the money you’ve already paid. That prospect might, I think, considerably reduce the number of potential home buyers on whose aspirations the government claims to base its policies.

            As a former local government Housing Manager I have always objected to council tenants being treated as second class citizens.  But I don’t think they should be given special privileges or financial benefits either.  Most Council tenants were happy to remain as tenants until the possibility of buying their homes ‘on the cheap’ was offered them. Under former governments they enjoyed payable rents, security and reasonable tenancy conditions.  All structural repairs and maintenance was the council’s responsibility. I am sure that Housing Association tenants are the same.

            The sale to Housing Association tenants of their homes at discounted prices is  still only one of the 'intentions' of the government.  I think that they may find themselves facing a few expensive legal challenges on the way to its fulfilment.  To David Cameron and his pals in Westminster, Housing Associations and local authorities are much the same thing.  They both owned lots of rented houses in which not-well-off people enjoyed secure tenancies ‘for life’ or at least for as long as they paid their rent and observed their not-usually-very-onerous tenancy conditions.  Both provided ‘social housing’ which they had a responsibility to keep ‘fit for habitation’ and neither made a substantial profit from their house ownership.

            In fact there is one crucial difference between Council Houses and those owned by Housing Associations.   Council Houses were built with public money – from the rates and from central government grants.  It could be claimed that a more than usually stupid government had every right to require local authorities to sell them off at bargain-basement prices.  A similar case can not be made for the compulsory sale of Housing Association property. Those homes were not provided from the rates and taxes of earlier, more responsible, governments and local councils.  They were provided by charitable giving, mainly from the generosity of very wealthy and benevolent 19^th century business men, for the purpose of providing the ‘working classes’ with comfortable, secure and healthy homes at affordable rents.

            George Cadbury and George Peabody must be among many wealthy Victorian philanthropists who are turning in their graves at the thought that, for electoral advantage, the homes that they provided for the poor may be compulsorily sold off at bargain basement prices.  They probably would have had sufficient foresight to see that such homes would eventually fall into the hands of profiteering landlords – and be let at ridiculously high rents to tenants who would only be able to pay them by means of Housing Benefit from their local authority!

            If, of course, it is found that the government can legally compel Housing Associations to sell off their properties with a substantial discount, there can be no reason why they should not extend the ‘right to buy’ to many thousands of tenants who are charged unreasonably high rents, have no security of tenure, and who fear that asking the landlord to carry out repairs will only lead to their losing their homes.  They are the tenants of private landlords.  Surely the ‘right to buy at a discount’ should be extended to them to them before it is offered to Housing Association tenants who are already satisfactorily housed?

Week 33 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

It wasn’t ‘too good to be true’

          Regular blog readers will know that I have been concerned about the fate of Meriem Ibrahim, the young North Sudanese mother who had been convicted of the ‘heinous crime’ of abandoning Islam for Christianity (she had, in fact, been brought up by her Christian mother and had never been a Muslim) and sentenced to death by hanging.  Before being hanged she was to be flogged with 100 lashes for marrying a Christian and having a child by him.  Such marriages are forbidden by Sharia law and are condemned as ‘adulterous’! At the time of her condemnation she was heavily pregnant with her second child – a baby girl who was born while her mother was shackled to the floor of her cell.

            Following world-wide protests an appeal against the sentence was successful but she was prevented from flying with her family to her husband’s home in the USA on the pretext of a faulty passport. A fortnight ago a report on BBC tv announced that the whole family had been allowed to fly to Italy where they had met the Pope who had congratulated Meriem on her steadfast refusal to abandon her Christian faith, a course of action that could have earned her freedom.  Sadly this report was never confirmed or taken up by the media – and a search on line by Google discovered no news of Meriem later than her re-arrest at Khartoum airport when she had tried to leave the country.  I concluded that the news of the family’s flight to Italy was ‘too good to be true’ and this gloomy opinion was reinforced by a news report that the family had taken refuge in the United States Embassy in Khartoum and that her father (who had left her mother to bring up her baby alone!) was urging the reinstatement of the death sentence.

 Home – at last.  The Ibrahim family re-united in the USA.  Baby Maya, born in a Sudanese prison cell, is in her mother’s arms and her toddler son in the care of his Grandpa.   

 It has now become clear that that early BBC report was true.  The whole family had clandestinely flown to Italy with an Italian government minister.  They had met the Pope and Meriem had been congratulated on her refusal to renounce her faith despite the dire consequences that could have followed that refusal.  It seems too that that hasty departure from the American Embassy and from North Sudan, was not a moment too soon.  A lynch mob had been threatening to storm the Embassy and seize its prey!  At a time of bloodshed and violence and of the persecution of Christians throughout much of the Middle East and large areas of northern Africa, the Meriem Ibrahim story is one that has a happy ending!  Latest news reports confirm that Meriem, her husband and two children have flown to her husband’s home in the USA where they have been given a heroes’ welcome.  It was one story that wasn’t too good to be true!

Still living with Mum at 21? - and 31?

          Members and supporters of the present government never tire of complaining about the ‘terrible mess that the previous Labour government left us to clear up’. Well, I was never an enthusiast for New Labour but the Governor of the Bank of England who has recently retired always insisted that it was the Bankers and money-lenders, not the politicians, who were to blame for that mess.

            One of the messes that the New Labour government inherited from the Thatcher years – and failed to address – was the iniquitous right to buy legislation that compelled local authorities, but not private landlords, to sell their council owned houses at a fraction of their market value to sitting tenants  Inevitably council houses in pleasant rural areas were quickly bought up and sold on - often at an enormous profit – directly this legally became possible.  Equally inevitably, since councils were unable to build houses for letting ­to replace them, there were no properties for letting at reasonable rents in many rural villages.   Young couples, whose forbears had lived in that village for generations, found themselves compelled to move away.  Many villages consequently became ‘dormitories’, with their inhabitants commuting daily to the nearest town, doing much of their shopping there, and taking no interest in local life and local affairs.

            Mrs Thatcher and her successors, in pursuit of their dream of home ownership for all changed public attitudes so that, as Paul Honeywood, Tendring Council’s ‘housing boss’ told a Clacton Gazette reporter ‘Council homes are often looked at as a last resort for the unemployed and people in financial trouble but’ he added, ‘we are trying to change that perception and offer it as an alternative for those wanting to set up on their own or start a family’. What Mr Honeywood is urging is in fact, a return to the system that existed and worked satisfactorily for a century before the advent of Thatcherism – when local authorities, without interference from national politicians, built houses for letting and allocated them to those in need.  There was then no stigma attached to ‘living in a council house’.  When I was appointed as a Public Health Inspector by Clacton Council in 1956, my family and I were happy to live in a Council House in Holland-on-Sea until, after a few months, we purchased and moved into the bungalow in which I am living today.

            Clacton, and the Tendring District generally, is particularly in need of social housing available for letting at a reasonable rent.  The housing charity Shelter has discovered that one third of Tendring’s 20 to 34 year olds, despite being in work, continue to live in the family home with mum and dad.   They simply can’t afford ‘to get their feet on the housing ladder’ with house properties at their present level – and there are no longer, as there once were, council houses available for letting.

            Tendring’s position is worse than that of other neighbouring local authority areas.   In Colchester 6,064 (22 percent) of 20 to 34 year old are still living in the family home, in Braintree 5,770 (28 percent) and in Tendring 4,801 (37 percent) Typical of such a ‘stay-at-home’ is 22 year old Natasha Fuller of St Osyth who works full-time as a hairdresser.  She told a Gazette reporter, ‘I still live at home with my parents even though I have a full-time job.  I don’t earn enough to save for a mortgage or rent on my own home while running a car at the same time’.

Shelter representative Campbell Robb told the Gazette ’The clipped-wing generation are finding themselves with no choice but to remain living with mum and dad well into adulthood.  And those who aren’t lucky enough to have this option face a lifetime of unstable, expensive, private renting.  The government knows that the only way to turn the tide of the housing shortage is to fill the gap between the homes we have and the homes we need’.

And the only effective way of doing that is to repeal the ‘right to buy’ legislation and – as in the pre-Thatcher past – encourage local authorities to build the homes their district needs, and to let them to local people who need a home, without interference from ‘Nanny knows best, dear’ politicians!
 .       
ISIS is still with us!

          The blood bath in Gaza, the downing of the Malaysian air liner over eastern Ukraine and the centenary commemoration of World War I have driven ISIS and its determination to establish an extremist Islamic Caliphate throughout Syria and Iraq (and that’s just for a start!) from the news headlines during the past week or so.  They’re still there though and although they don’t seem to have made any progress towards taking Baghdad, they’re consolidating their strict Islamic rule over the territories that they have taken and are edging forward whenever they have the opportunity to do so.

            A recent effect of this has been to drive tens of thousands of Christian Iraqis from their homes in areas where the Christian faith has flourished for centuries.  Many in northern Iraq had been protected by the semi-independent Kurds but their protectors have now been driven out and the new extreme Islamic regime has offered the choice of death, conversion to their own extreme version of Islam, or a crippling tax payable by all non-Muslims. nearly one hundred thousand have fled and are now trapped on a barren mountain without shelter, food or water..  They urgently need the help of their Christian brothers and sisters in Europe and elsewhere. ISIS has changed its name and now likes to be called simply IS, standing for Islamic State.  Its members haven’t changed their nature though.

            Successive British governments’ no-doubt-well-intentioned meddling in Iraq, Libya and Syria has prepared the ground and earned recruits for extremists like IS and Al Qaeda.The Christian faith is being eradicated from the very area that gave it birth, and the whole of the Middle East and large areas of Africa, are now areas in which Britons visit, live and work in danger of their lives!  

            I wonder if Tony Blair and his successors are proud of the results of their activities?

Later News

         Since I wrote the above, only a day or two ago, events have moved quickly.  The USA and the UK governments have heeded the call for help of the thousands of Christian Iraqi civilians in their barren mountain refuge.   We are co-operating with the Americans in dropping water, food and the means of providing shelter to those refugees and the USA is also carrying out air strikes on the IS forces, though both governments insist that there will be no ground forces involved.

I applaud wholeheartedly the provision of humanitarian aid though, quite apart from the morality of the action, I doubt very much whether air strikes alone can be expected either to make it possible for the refugees to go peacefully to their former home free from persecution, or to pass through territory IS holds to a place of safety. Obviously the present situation cannot continue.  We can't supply those refugees indefinitely - and winter is approaching.  I wish that I could envisage a happy non-violent ending to the present situation.  I can't and, if I'm to be absolutely honest, I can't  imagine a violent one either.

I hope and pray that someone can! 

           

Week 30 2013

Tendring Topics………on line

Helping the taxpayers! (but, who are the Taxpayers?)

         

Last week I heard Work and Pensions Minister Iain Duncan Smith defending the Government’s cuts in benefits for the needy and, in particular, the £20,000 ‘cap’ on benefits to any family.   It is clearly unfair, he said, that anyone on benefit should be financially better off than those who are working. He also claimed (without any firm evidence, as a BBC interviewer pointed out) that in pilot areas where the benefit cap had already been introduced, thousands of folk who had been living on benefit had been encouraged back to work.

Obviously, everybody who is able to work should be encouraged to do so – but where are they to find a job when, as in this area for instance, there are twenty applicants for every job vacancy?  Does Iain Duncan Smith really believe that anything other than a tiny minority of the two and a half million unemployed people in the UK prefer to live on ‘benefit’.  Like the tax avoiders and tax evaders, that tiny minority should be exposed and penalised.  Whatever the feature writers of the tabloid press may say, their lives must be pretty miserable, especially when much of that ‘benefit’ isn’t retained by the recipient but is handed over directly to a rapacious private landlord..  But you’d hardly expect a government that includes seventeen millionaires to appreciate that!

Over and over again Mr Iain Duncan Smith claimed that he had to balance the reasonable interests of ‘the taxpayers’ against the cost to the nation of benefit payments.  By the taxpayers he clearly meant those (like me!) who are fortunate enough to have an income high enough to be liable for income tax. But we are by no means the only taxpayers, nor is income tax the only way in which we contribute to the government’s finances   During the Thatcher years (‘the avaricious eighties') there was a deliberate policy of reducing ‘direct taxation’ such as income tax, corporation tax and death duties, and compensating for this by increasing ‘indirect taxation’  (referred to as ‘stealth taxes’ by the tabloid press when imposed by a government that they oppose!) These are VAT, taxes on insurance, gambling and air travel, and customs and excise charges – on, for instance, fuel oil, tobacco products and alcoholic drinks.

This policy was continued by New Labour under Tony Blair and his successors. Indirect taxes are levied equally on rich and poor alike (we’re all in this together’) but, of course, they have a much bigger impact on the incomes of the poor than they do on the rich.

The poor make a contribution to Government’s Inland Revenue whenever they have their cars or motor bikes (often vital for their work or seeking work) repaired, serviced or filled with petrol or diesel; every time they buy a packet of cigarettes or a pint of beer, and every time they buy a lottery ticket in the hope (almost certainly in vain!) of escaping from a life of poverty.

In the Biblical parable ‘the widow’s mite’ was one hundred percent of her wealth, a far greater personal contribution than even hundreds of the shekels of a wealthy Pharisee. Today, as a result of indirect taxation, the working and unemployed poor pay a higher percentage of their income to the Inland Revenue than those in the highest income brackets.

  Pay rises to public servants and to many employees in the private sector are

 always a percentage of their existing income.   When, for instance, all the staff of a local authority get a 2 percent pay rise, Chief Executive Officers can claim that they get exactly the same pay increase as the humblest clerical officer, despite the fact that the CEO is getting 2 percent of perhaps £150,000 and the junior employee 2 percent of less than £20,000!  I wonder if they would continue to equate their loss with that of junior officers if they were compelled to suffer a ten percent pay reduction!

           

I believe, very strongly, that the government’s principal source of revenue should be an income tax consisting, just like those pay rises, on an equal percentage of every adult’s existing income.  I believe too, that every British adult and everyone who lives and works in Britain, should pay that percentage of his or her income as an annual membership fee of the Society of British Citizenship – and that they should be proud and pleased to do so.    

 ‘The Lady’s not for Turning’

          That phrase,  parodying the title of a play of the late 1940s by Christopher Fry, is one of Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher’s best remembered sound-bites.  It was true too.  Mrs Thatcher was very strong-minded (opponents might have said ‘stubborn’ or even ‘pig headed’) and rarely, if ever, changed her mind on a matter of policy.

            The same can hardly be said about her successors in government today..  Their path is littered with the torn-up remains of policies that have either been abandoned or changed out of all recognition. Particularly blatant is their recent U-turn on a minimum price for alcoholic drinks, and the plain packaging of cigarettes.   It seems but yesterday that Prime Minister was making impassioned speeches about the benefits to public health that would result from both these policies and how preventing the sale of cheap alcohol would reduce anti-social behaviour.

            Now, so it seems, the imposition of plain packaging for cigarettes is to await the result of a similar experiment on the other side of the world in Australia (and I thought the coalition government claimed that Britain led the world!) and the imposition of minimum prices for alcohol has been shelved indefinitely.  It is now being claimed that no-one will be discouraged by plain packaging from having ‘that first smoke’ that can begin an addiction.  If the tobacco manufacturers really believe that, then why do they oppose plain packaging.  It must surely be cheaper to produce than packaging currently in use.  This government U-turn will without question result in continued growth in alcohol fuelled  antisocial behaviour, additional cost to the NHS for the treatment of tobacco and alcohol related diseases, and the premature termination of thousands of promising young lives.

            Does the hope of a few extra votes in the no-longer-distant next general election or a few extra thousand pounds in the party war-chest really make all that worthwhile?

‘Council takes stock and turns clock back 30 years’

            That, last week, was the Clacton Gazette’s headline over a news story that gave me real satisfaction and raised by several notches my opinion of the present Tendring District Council.   For years now I have urged that the best solution to Britain’s housing problem – and the best way to get the building industry onto its feet and busy again – was to encourage local authorities to build or purchase houses for letting as they had done successfully for a century prior to Mrs Thatcher’s Right to Buy legislation of 1980.   This had compelled local authorities and Housing Associations (but not private landlords) to sell, at bargain basement prices, the homes that earlier generations had built to solve as they thought their community’s future housing problems.  Right to Buy was, in fact, a very effective means of buying votes with other people’s money.  Better still, those ‘other people’ were no longer around to protest!  They were those of earlier generations who had thought that they were building homes to ensure that no-one in their areas need ever be homeless, overcrowded or living in sub-standard conditions.

            Last year the coalition government made a bad situation even worse by compelling housing authorities to give tenants wishing to buy their homes even bigger discounts.   They also prevented ‘social housing’ from being offered to anyone other than the poorest of the poor, and required that all tenancies should be short term and should be terminated if the tenant’s income rose above the poverty level.  This they compounded with the ‘bedroom tax’ that charges social housing tenants extra rent for any spare bedroom!

            I was therefore delighted to see that, despite all the obstacles, Tendring Council was to go ahead and, for the first time in thirty years, buy homes for letting to needy housing applicants in our area.  They have set aside a million pounds for this purpose.  Their first purchase is to be of six flats in Victoria Road, Walton-on-the-Naze at a cost believed to be about £525,000.   They also have plans to build two council houses in Brightlingsea, and it is expected that more homes for letteing will be built in other towns.   They hope that they will thus raise the council’s existing housing stock to 3,227 homes.  It will, of course, take many years to rectify the effect of three decades of inaction.

              

            Council Leader Peter Halliday is reported as saying, ‘It is fair to say that most people don’t think a Conservative council would want council houses, let alone building or buying to add to housing stock………..We are determined to get local housing for local people, and the only way to do that is to do it ourselves’.

            Good for Councillor Halliday! It wasn’t always the case though that Conservative Councils didn’t want Council Houses.  I was Clacton Urban District Council’s Housing Manager in the early 1970s.  The council owned about 1,000 houses, bungalows and flats and had a building programme adding a few housing units every year.  Clacton Council had a Conservative Majority (though they certainly weren’t run on the parliamentary political lines that central government has forced on councils today) but resolutely refused to sell any of their council properties, though they encouraged and offered support to tenants who bought a house or bungalow in the private sector thereby releasing a council house for letting.

           

Myself as Clacton’s Housing Manager in 1973 or thereabouts. Oh dear, don’t I look every inch the Town Hall Bureaucrat!!

           

The Council's members, of all parties, were proud of their housing estates – and so was I.  Tenants were encouraged to cultivate their gardens and to keep the interiors of their homes spic and span. The knowledge that, provided they paid their rent regularly and complied with the other tenancy conditions, they had homes ‘for life’ encouraged this.   We had two and three bedroom houses and flats for families, specially adaptable bungalows for the disabled or elderly, and a few one-bedroom flats for singletons.   Thanks to the building programme and casual vacancies arising from deaths or tenants moving away, during my time as housing manager no family or individual ever, to my knowledge, ‘slept rough’ within the Clacton Urban District.  Nor did we ever have to resort to ‘bed and breakfast’ accommodation for homeless families.

        Later, when I was Tendring Council's Public Relations Officer, I remember showing with pride a visiting American studying British local government, round one of our Clacton housing estates.  He was deeply impressed.  ‘You wouldn’t find social housing like this in the States’, he told me. That was nearly forty years ago. I haven’t visited any of those estates recently but I have a feeling that nowadays he would find himself to be more ‘at home’.  

           

Week 48 30th Nov. 2010

Tendring Topics………on Line

Council Housing – once upon a time!

A job that I thoroughly enjoyed during my long local government career was that of Housing Manager. It was a position that I held in rural Suffolk and later in Clacton-on-Sea. Both Clacton Urban District Council and Gipping Rural District Council (just north of Ipswich) owned and controlled nearly a thousand council properties. I helped the Council with tenants’ selection, oversaw the general management of the housing estates including their maintenance, and tried to keep rent arrears down to a reasonable level. In Clacton, though not in Gipping, rent collection, the only regular direct contact with the tenants, was my direct responsibility

It was a satisfying role. I came to know personally all the housing applicants and a great many of the tenants. I went very thoroughly into the circumstances of every housing applicant so that his or her circumstances could be reported to the Council’s Tenants Selection Committee. Were they overcrowded? Were they compelled to live with in-laws? And what sort of relationship was there between them? Were the premises that they were living in at present damp, or otherwise unfit for habitation or, in the case of a sick or disabled applicant, unsuitable for that particular person? Did they have roots in the area where the houses were becoming available (particularly important in rural communities)? How long had they been trying to get more suitable accommodation?

Neither Clacton nor Gipping had a ‘points system’ of allocation. Had they had such a system it would have made life easier for me – but both Councils felt that no points system could adequately measure housing need. One question that I never asked applicants, and I am glad that I was never required to, was their income. Both Councils allocated houses on the basis of need for housing, neither wealth nor poverty being considered. Obviously it was those on the lower incomes who were most likely to be in need of accommodation – but not exclusively so. The son or daughter of a middle class family might be thoroughly miserable as a result of having to live with their spouse in an in-laws home, and might have a job with a great future – but still be unable to purchase a home, and unable to find anywhere private to let.


Both authorities for which I worked had modest, but steady, annual house building programmes. There were also ‘casual vacancies’ as tenants died, moved away or bought their own homes. This meant that, at least during my period of office both in Gipping and Clacton no-one and no family was ever left completely homeless, nor did we ever have to resort to bed-and-breakfast accommodation to prevent this.

Councils could attract key staff for themselves or for newly establishing enterprises by offering them council accommodation until they were in a position to buy a home in the area. My wife and I lived for a year in a Council House in Thorpe le Soken, and our younger son was born there. We then lived briefly in a Council House in The Chase, Holland-on-Sea before buying the bungalow in Dudley Road, Clacton, where I am typing these words today. There was no question of Council House provision being a ‘social service’, only available to the really needy. There was no stigma – or at least Heather and I never felt one, in being a ‘council tenant’.

39 Byng Crescent, Thorpe-le-Soken. The Council House in which Heather and I lived for a year and in which our younger son Andy was born.

The Council, and I as their agent, encouraged tenants to be proud of their homes. Tenants who wished to carry out, often quite expensive, structural alterations were usually permitted – even encouraged - to do so. We liked them to cultivate and to be proud of their gardens, front and rear. In the Gipping Rural District there was an annual Council house gardens competition which concluded with the Chairman of the Council and the Judges visiting each group of Council Houses and, at a subsequent ceremony, presenting the tenant with the best garden, and the runner up, with prizes. A number of other tenants would receive honourable mentions – all of which would be reported, with pictures, in the local press.

The result was that our Council houses, and our Council estates were a source of pride. A couple of years after I had progressed from being Clacton’s last Housing Manager to Tendring Council’s first Public Relations Officer, I escorted an American visitor, studying British local administration, round the Clacton’s Percy King Estate. He was deeply impressed. ‘Public Housing’ in the USA was not a bit like that, he assured me.

A Post-Shakespearean Sonnet!

It may be thought that I have painted rather too idyllic a picture of Council Houses and Council House Management in the pre-1980s. There were tenants who defaulted on their rent, had quarrels with their neighbours, had late-night parties, lit smoky garden bonfires or otherwise behaved in an antisocial way. There were, no doubt, some local government officials who were cold-hearted, unbending bureaucrats. I hope that I was not among them

Myself as Housing Manager in 1972. I have to concede that I do look like a smooth-tongued bureaucrat as the lady who inspired my sonnet suggested – rather more forcibly!

Certainly, after every meeting of the Council’s Tenants Selection Committee there were bitterly disappointed people with whom I had to deal. An overheard snatch of conversation after just such a difficult interview inspired me to compose a sonnet that I thought might, forty years on, interest blog readers. It represents my first and only attempt at real poetry (as distinct from doggerel to entertain the grandchildren) and it did, many years ago, earn me an ‘honourable mention’ in a regional amateur poetry competition.

After the Interview

‘No, nothing doing yet, “A thousand on the list”,
He says, “Come back in early May”.
Our application “missed
The last committee”. It’s “coming up next time”.
I answered all his questions; gave him proof
We paid the rent, and still had got to quit.
The smooth-tongued sod! He’s never lacked a roof
Over his head! I stripped our marriage bare,
Told him we fight; how Craig and Tracy yell.
Told him about the dampness on the stair,
And in the bedroom. It was wasted breath.
I’d like to see all Council men in Hell!

And that blonde bimbo with her bawling brat,
That lives above the pub – she’s got a flat!’

There was a ‘happy ending’. I am sure that the lady’s opinion of me changed a little two months later, when I was able to offer her husband, her two children (whose names, incidentally, were not Craig and Tracy) and herself, the tenancy of a new three bed-roomed council house.

The Future – Rubbish homes for Rubbish People?

All the above was between forty and sixty years ago. While I was in their employ, both Gipping Rural District Council and Clacton Urban District Council had Conservative majorities, though in those days no councillor was ever expected to follow blindly a ‘party line’ contrary to his or her conscience or common sense. Neither council ever agreed to sell any of their council houses either to their occupiers or to anyone else – although both were asked to do so on a number of occasions.

They both believed that their housing stock was a sacred trust passed on to them by their far-sighted predecessors who were determined that, in their district at least, the aim would always be to have no-one homeless, overcrowded or badly housed – and that there would always been a home, in their local community, for those growing up there. They were determined to expand that legacy and pass it on to their successors.

Right to buy ended all that! In this blog I have already denounced, probably ad nauseum, this 1980s legislation that compelled local authorities to sell off their houses at bargain basement prices - the chicanery of the government that introduced it, (‘buying votes with other people’s money) the cowardice and myopia of the New Labour Government that failed to repeal it.

It is really impossible though to exaggerate its malign effects, some of which have only become evident in recent years. Few, for instance, could have realized at the time of its passing the way in which it would help destroy village communities that had existed for generations. Their council houses were sold on – as second homes or as weekend residences for businessmen and women commuting to the nearest city daily. At the same time, Right to Buy was playing a part in the house price inflation that put new homes beyond the means of ordinary villagers. It also, of course, played a part in the nation-wide borrowing spree that culminated in the financial crisis we are currently struggling to overcome.

The best council houses have long since been sold off to ‘the best’ – or at least the better off – tenants, many of whom have since sold them on at a comfortable profit. There are, as had been eminently predictable – long waiting lists for Council and Housing Association property that show no sign of shortening. The present government’s solution will complete the destruction of ‘social housing’ begun by its predecessors. Council (and presumably Housing Association?) tenancies will, in the future, be of two years duration only. At the end of that period tenants will have their incomes assessed and, if they are deemed to be high enough to permit them to buy or to rent privately, they will be expected to do so. Social housing in the future is to be for the very poor only!

Can you imagine any situation less likely to encourage tenants to cultivate their gardens, decorate their rooms or to take a pride in their homes? All Council Estates will become unredeemable slums. In less than half a century we will have progressed from properties and estates of which local communities could be proud, through second class homes for second class tenants, to rubbish homes for those perceived as rubbish people! There’s progress for you!


We Brits are a rum owd lot!

Only a week, or was it two weeks, ago I was suggesting that our Prime Minister should take a little more care in choosing his advisers. One of them, needless to say someone whom Lady Thatcher would have unhesitating accepted as being ‘one of us’, had announced that despite all the much-publicised cut-backs, most people (I suppose he meant most of the people who really mattered) ‘had never had it so good’.

He resigned his honorary position but I don’t suppose for a moment that he has changed his opinion. Now we have another protégé of the Prime Minister – one destined, on his recommendation, for the House of Lords – assuring us that the exclusion of those paying the higher rate of income tax from child benefit would simply prevent ‘Middle England’ ‘from breeding’, while all those terrible oiks on unemployment benefit would continue to breed like rabbits!

We Brits really are a run owd lot! Wealthy people have to be bribed with millions of pounds to persuade them to give of their best. Poor people have to be threatened with the loss of the little that they have, to persuade them to work at all. Now, it seems, the loss of a few quid threatens the reproductive capacity of the very-comfortably-off!