Council house

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For other uses, see Council house (disambiguation).

De Beauvoir Estate, De Beauvoir Town, East London

The council house is a form of public housing found in the United Kingdom. Council houses were built and operated by local councils for the benefit of the local population. As of 2005, approximately 20 per cent of the country's housing stock is owned by local councils or by housing associations. The largest council estate in the country (and one of the largest in the world)^[1] is Becontree, East London, with a population of over 100,000. Building started in the 1920s and took nearly 20 years to finish. The Republic of Ireland has a similar public housing system, Local Authority Accommodation.

1 Design
2 Origins
3 Heyday
4 Decline
5 Examples
6 Criticisms
7 Law
8 Media
9 See also
10 External links
11 References

[edit] Design

Council housing was generally typified by houses with generously sized rooms (compared to the bottom end of the private sector), particularly those built in the 1970s after the Parker Morris standards were introduced. However they also tended to be unimaginatively designed, and rigid council rules often forbade tenants "personalising" their houses. Council tenants also faced problems of mobility, finding it hard to move from one property to another as their families grew or shrank, or to seek work. Despite the building there was a constant demand for housing, and 'waiting lists' are maintained with preference being given to those in greatest need.

[edit] Origins

The pressure for decent housing arose from overcrowding in the large cities in the 19th century, and many social commentators (such as Octavia Hill) reported on the squalour, sickness and perceived morality that arose. Some philanthropists had begun to provide housing in tenement blocks, while some factory owners built entire villages for their workers such as Saltaire (1853), Bournville (1879), Port Sunlight, Stewartby, and Silver End as late as 1925.

It was not until 1885, when a Royal Commission was held, that the state took an interest. This led to the Housing of the Working Classes Act 1890, which encouraged local authorities to improve the housing in their areas. As a consequence the London County Council opened the Boundary Estate in 1900, and many local councils began building flats and houses in the early 20th century. The First World War indirectly provided a new impetus, when the poor physical health and condition of many urban recruits to the army was noted with shock and alarm. This led to a campaign known as Homes fit for heroes and in 1919 the Government first required councils to provide housing, helping them to do so through the provision of subsidies, under the Housing Act 1919. Many houses were built in cottage estates as in Downham Estate as well as in blocks of flats.

While new council housing had been built, little had been done to resolve the problem of inner city slums. This was to change with the Housing Act 1930, which required councils to prepare slum clearance plans, and some progress was made before the Second World War intervened.

[edit] Heyday

Following the Second World War there was a major boom in council house construction, since nearly four million houses had been destroyed or damaged during its course.^[2] As well as this, slum clearance programmes were promoted.

In the immediate post-War years and well into the 1950s council house provision was shaped by the New Towns Act 1946 and the Town and Country Planning Act 1947. Houses were typically semi-detached or in small terraces. A three-bedroom semi-detached council house was typically built on a 7 by 7 yd (6.4 by 6.4 m) grid and at a density of no more than 12 houses per acre (337 m² per house), meaning that most houses had generous space around them. The new towns and many existing towns had countless estates built to this basic model.

For many working class people, this housing model provided the first experience of private garden space (usually front and rear) and the first private and indoor toilets and bathrooms.

Towards the end of the 1950s the influence of modernist architecture and the development of new construction techniques such as system building (a form of prefabrication) led to this model being abandoned in Britain's inner city areas. Instead tower blocks became the preferred model. The argument was that more dwellings could be provided this way (a claim that research at the LSE has cast serious doubt on^[3].

Central government (under both the Conservative and Labour parties) saw the provision of housing as a major part of its policy, and provided subsidies for local authorities to build such housing. System building proved to have serious flaws and flats - which were initially very popular due to their generous space standards - suffered many problems, especially poor protection from damp, weather ingress, but also more serious design defects.

The problem associated with tower blocks were brought into sharp focus after the partial collapse of Ronan Point, a tower block in Newham, east London, as a consequence of a gas explosion, on 16 May 1968.

[edit] Decline

Ackworth Court, Hockwell Ring, Luton

Council housing declined sharply in the Thatcher era, as the Conservative government encouraged aspiration toward home ownership.

Rules restricted councils' investment in housing, preventing them subsidising it from local taxes, but more important, council tenants were given the "right to buy" their council houses on very attractive financial terms. The Right to Buy Scheme allowed tenants to buy their home with a discount of up to 60% of the market price for houses and 70% for flats, depending on the time they had lived there. Councils were prevented from reinvesting the proceeds of these sales in new housing, and the total available stock, particularly of more desirable homes, declined.

The "right-to-buy" was popular with many former Labour voters and, although the Labour government of Tony Blair has tightened the rules (reducing the maximum discount in areas of most housing need), it shows no sign of abandoning right-to-buy. Labour did relax the policy forbidding reinvestment of sales proceeds.

Some councils have now transferred their housing stock to not-for-profit housing associations, who are now also the providers of most new public sector housing. Elsewhere, referenda on changing ownership, in Birmingham for example, have failed.

The current position is that council housing is a more and more marginalised and stigmatised sector, with the term 'council' increasingly used as a pejorative. Whereas in its early years, council housing was an acceptable option for much of the population, it is now increasingly an option only for those reliant on social security.

In some parts of the country, especially northern Britain, some council housing is virtually unlettable. Council housing stock has sometimes been used to house those seeking refugee status ('asylum seekers'), who have no choice in their accommodation. In the south and in London in particular, demand still massively outstrips supply.

The Wakefield district council found itself unable to maintain its supply of council housing and transferred it all to a housing association, in 2004; this represented the second largest stock transfer in British history. Housing rented from the council accounted for about 28% of the district and around 40% of the actual city of Wakefield.

Other than Wakefield, districts that maintain large amounts of council housing include most inner London boroughs with Southwark, Hackney, Islington and Lambeth having the highest proportions/amounts. Also, Barnsley, Corby, Easington, Hull, Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham and Sheffield. Many districts of the country have less than 10% of housing rented from the council; the national average stands at 14%.

[edit] Examples

Seacroft, east Leeds

One large estate is Wythenshawe in the south of Manchester, which was begun before the war.

Other large estates include Seacroft in Leeds, Becontree Housing Estate, Blacon in Chester Dagenham, Parson Cross in Sheffield, Pennywell in Sunderland, Speke in Liverpool, Langley in Middleton, Greater Manchester, Downham in south London, Leigh Park in Havant, Bettws in Newport, Marsh Farm in Luton, and Ely in Cardiff. All of the new towns built after the war were originally made up of council housing. The Yorkshire village of Grimethorpe was almost entirely council housing. Chickenley, a large estate in Dewsbury, is known for having been built without a church to serve its residents, The Red Road Flats in Glasgow, in the north of the city, were for many years the highest residential buildings in Europe. They are now subject to plans for demolition.

[edit] Criticisms

Social policy economists, such as Culyer and Barr, have been critical of the role that council housing plays in attempts to help the poor. One large criticism is that it hurts labour mobility with its system of allocating housing to those in the local area. Working-class people thus face a disincentive for moving across district lines, when they would be further down the waiting list for council housing in the new districts. When Britain witnessed mass immigration after the Second World War, new immigrants could not initially live in council houses and this led to racial segregation in housing. This has improved over time; most large cities have council estates with large Asian and Black communities. The division remains most marked in Dewsbury and Bradford, which both have large Asian communities that remain concentrated outside the council estates.

Another criticism is that the system favours those who already secured tenancy, even after they are no longer in positions of dire need. The subsidised rent encourages overconsumption by council tenants of housing space. Meanwhile, those who are on the waiting list are often in much greater need of this welfare, yet they cannot have it; once a council house has been granted to a tenant, they cannot be evicted except for anti-social behaviour or serious breach of the tenancy conditions, such as rent arrears.

[edit] Law

The legal status and management of council houses, and the social housing sector, has been subject to lobbying and change in recent years. Local Authorities now have new legal powers to enable them to deal with anti-social behaviour and the misuse of council houses by organised gangs. An example is when a gang turns a council house into a crack house. Anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs) were created by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, ASBOs were created by amendments to the Housing Act 1996, enacted by the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003. The proposed Housing Act 2006 will radically alter the way that all social housing is managed. Tony Blair has launched the Respect agenda, aimed at instilling core values in the tenants of council houses. Recently bodies such as the Social Housing Law Association - [1] have been formed to discuss the impact of legislation in the social housing sector and to provide training and lobbying facilities for those who work in that area.

[edit] Media

Some exterior scenes in the British comedy television series Keeping Up Appearances were shot in a council estate in the early 1990s in the Stoke Aldermoor area of Coventry. In several episodes, views of a council estate are shown.

The British soap opera EastEnders features council house dwellers.

The classic British comedy 'Only Fools and Horses' followed the lives of would-be entrepreneur Derek 'Del Boy' Trotter and his less enthusiastic younger brother Rodney. The series was set in Nelson Mandela House in a Peckham housing estate.

The 1986 film Rita, Sue and Bob Too was set in the Buttershaw estate in the south of Bradford. Its portrayal was fairly stereotypical of council estates during the era.

In the revived version of Doctor Who, the Doctor's companion Rose Tyler is from a council estate, known as the Powell Estate, in the early twenty-first century. The show occasionally goes back to visit her mother and ex-boyfriend who live on the estate.

There were also a series of television adverts on the subject of purchasing council houses shown in the late 1990s and early 2000s, using the catchphrase "I've got the right!"

The band Doves made a music video to their song "Black and White Town" filmed in Council Housing in Glasgow.

The band The Jam criticizes council housing (specifically tower blocks such as Ronan Point) with their song "The Planner's Dream Goes Wrong," written by Paul Weller, and released on the 1982 album "The Gift."