Hope has been drained from Britain’s housing estates

Britain has been in the grip of a housing crisis for over a decade at least. During that time, the cost of a flat or a house has continued to rise while wages have fallen in real terms. The result has been increasing rates of homelessness and housing poverty. In the words of a previous piece I wrote for spiked, the housing crisis is shredding the social contract.

The stakes are incredibly high for working-class people on low incomes and in insecure work. Too many people today are worried about just surviving in ways not seen since before the Second World War. I know families who are eating from food banks so that they have enough money to pay the rent.

As it stands, people’s only hope for affordable housing is social housing, of which there is a severe shortage. Houses have not been built at the rate we need for years. To compound the shortfall, over two million council houses have been sold off since Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy policy was introduced in 1980. Over 40 per cent of those former council houses are now in the hands of private landlords, who are renting them out at the market rate.

A combination of a lack of new homes being built and a rising population, thanks largely to immigration, has meant that social-housing eligibility is increasingly restricted to the most vulnerable and those whom the local authority has a legal duty to house. Even with these restrictions in place, the social-housing waiting list stands at over 1.3million households, many of whom will have to wait years for a home.

Keen to reduce their individual waiting lists, local councils have sought a bureaucratic fix. They have been changing their social-housing eligibility criteria, from setting new income thresholds to raising the age at which children of the same sex are entitled to separate bedrooms. In Mansfield and Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, two economically deprived areas blighted by low-paying work, any single person or a couple whose annual earnings are over £25,000 (or £34,000 for a family) or with £6,000 or more in savings, will no longer be eligible for social housing. Instead, they will need to find private rented accommodation, which in Nottinghamshire can be twice the cost of a council house.

Mass council-house building programmes were undertaken during and especially after the Second World War. Their purpose was to ensure that working-class people had access to safe, secure, good-quality and affordable housing. There was another wave of social-housing construction in the 1960s, when decrepit and unsafe housing, mostly owned by private ‘slum landlords’, was pulled down and replaced by council estates. When these estates were originally built, the houses were modern. They had indoor bathrooms, hot water heating systems and gardens. There have been many books published and films and documentaries made about this remarkable time – a time when working-class people were afforded the dignity of clean and modern homes, from Sheffield’s Park Hill to Thamesmead in south London through to St Ann’s and the Clifton Estate in Nottingham.

Postwar council housing was a source of pride for working-class people and for the country overall. Estates had housing officers who would inspect gardens and give warnings to anyone keeping an untidy home.

This is a far cry from council estates today. They are now places where only the poorest live, and where accommodation is limited to either those with social problems or, as in Mansfield and Ashfield, those who don’t work.

This is a far cry from the council estate on which I grew up in Nottinghamshire. Both of my parents worked, as did everyone else’s parents on my estate. We didn’t have much, but we had the security that a permanent home can give you.

It’s a very different landscape today. Local authorities and governments of all colours have ruined Britain’s social housing. They have turned estates into hopeless places, and left millions at the mercy of private landlords. The policy must change. We need to build far more safe and secure housing. And it needs to be made available not just to the unemployed, but to those who earn a living, too.

The failure to provide plentiful, quality and affordable housing for working people remains a damning indictment of the British state.

Lisa McKenzie is a working-class academic.