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!
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