Nicholas Timmins - The Five Giants [New Edition] - A Biography of the Welfare State

The still privately-run local railway company was persuaded to build a halt purely to service the central office site, on which fourteen acres of ‘temporary’ buildings were erected. They would ‘no doubt last for a while’, Rhodes predicted drily in 1949 of buildings that were still in use in the 1990s. By 1948, the ministry had combined the work of six government departments and the 6128 approved societies which ran the existing health insurance scheme. But before the national insurance benefits started, the ‘small operation’ of providing family allowances to 2.75 million families by August 1946 had to be achieved. A disused airscrew factory in Gateshead was commandeered and 6500 staff were transferred in April 1945 from the Home, Health and Labour departments to the new ministry.

Of these new staff, 3500 were scattered around Blackpool, working in the bedrooms of 413 different hotels and boarding houses. They had been evacuated from London for the war, and had no desire to go to Newcastle. The new Family Allowance, with a baby printed on the cover of every order book, nearly did not make it. The special security paper needed proved almost unobtainable, and the ministry found it could neither beg, borrow nor steal the 150 addressing machines needed. ‘Almost at the last moment, a considerable number of the machines were flown in from Germany,’ Rhodes recalled.

As national insurance day was contemplated, Griffiths insisted on having 1000 local offices, even if some were part-time, so that every member of the population would be within five miles of one. The Ministry of Works pronounced in July 1946 that that was ‘probably impossible’. Griffiths just went ahead, ordering the 800 National Insurance Inspectors to ‘keep a sharp lookout’ for any likely property, while appealing to MPs and local councillors to join the hunt. Meanwhile the ministry turned its mind to finding 1000 safes for the local offices when lack of steel was holding up factory building. On the Appointed Day, 912 offices opened, after 350 million forms, 45 different leaflets and 25 codes of instruction for the staff had somehow been prepared and printed. Sixteen thousand of what by early 1949 was a 39,000 strong staff had been sent on training courses. Griffiths, determined to break from the atmosphere of the Poor Law, had also insisted on plain English, courteous and friendly service, and ‘as good a standard of decoration as the austerity of the times would permit’. Both these achievements faded as the system became more complex and overburdened, and as breaking from the physical atmosphere of the old poor law took a lower priority in government spending.

Like the creation of the National Health Service, it had been a massive act of faith. ‘Only with an immense effort [were] the lines cleared and the great new vessel of social insurance slid down the slips [on time],’ Rhodes recorded. Those undertaking such an exercise, he added, had to be ‘brave optimists who never take no for an answer’ – displaying a blithe faith in an uncertain future that was not to be seen again until the two Kenneths, Clarke and Baker, revamped health and education in the 1980s. ‘In the earlier stages of a large-scale organisation,’ Rhodes said, in words their critics would happily have applied to the Kens, ‘detail is the deadly nightshade.’

But if social security and health were to prove the biggest of the giant services of the welfare state, they had not been at the top of the public’s list of concerns in 1945. Top priority in the opinion polls during the election had been housing.

CHAPTER 8

‘The Tremendous Tory’ – Housing

Housing … differs from other fields of social administration because the aspect of it which attracts the keenest attention – the building of new houses – is exposed to all the winds that blow in a draughty economic climate.

David Donnison, Housing Policy since the War, 1960, p. 9

If nothing else, I will go down in history as a barrier between the beauty of Britain and the speculative builder who has done so much to destroy it.

Aneurin Bevan, answering a censure debate on housing in 1950

BRITAIN EMERGED from the war with 200,000 houses destroyed, another 250,000 so badly knocked about that they could not be lived in and a similar number severely damaged. Millions of men and women were about to come home, and the marriage and birth rates were rising fast. The pre-war building labour force of a million men had fallen to a third of this number, mainly concentrated in south-east England in the path of the flying bomb and rocket attacks. The rents of privately owned houses had been frozen at their 1939 levels, and in England and Wales 71,000 houses had been requisitioned [for office use] by local authorities.’ 1

Thus David Donnison on the housing position Labour inherited. Over the course of war something like a quarter of Britain’s 12.5 million houses had been damaged. 2There had been much make do and mend when two-thirds of those with building skills were in the armed forces and the remainder were reserved for war work: the building of runways for bombers or camps for the armed forces took priority. The scale of devastation at times has to be reduced to smaller numbers to make it comprehensible. As late as June to September 1944, the V1 flying bombs and then the V2S completely wrote off 25,000 houses and at their peak were damaging 20,000 a day in London alone. 3Late in the year 45,000 building workers were drafted in from the provinces, but many had to sleep in Wembley Stadium precisely because there was no accommodation. The armed forces released some building workers early and by March 1945 nearly 800,000 homes had been repaired after a fashion. Even so ‘many bombed out families were living in huts erected with the help of American troops and former Italian prisoners of war’. 4

It was hardly surprising that housing dominated both the election and the mailbags of the new Parliament’s MPs. Michael Foot, newly elected for Plymouth Devonport, recalled: ‘The housing shortage caused more anguish and frustration than any other of the nation’s manifold problems … every MP and every councillor was being besieged by the endless queue of the homeless.’ 5Amidst the confusion, however, Donnison records, ‘there was determination and high confidence, fortified by an underestimate of long term needs, a war-won capacity for bold decisions, and a strong sense of social priorities’. 6

In March 1945, the coalition government had broken new ground with a White Paper which for the first time accepted the principle of affording ‘a separate dwelling for every family desiring to have one’. 7To achieve this the White Paper suggested that between 3 and 4 million houses would need to be built in the first 10 to 12 years after the war. The lower end of that target was achieved. But it would take six years to build the first million, three more to build the second and three more to complete the third 8– and the White Paper’s estimate of demand proved to be far from accurate. Against the last three years of peace, marriages were 11 per cent up in the first three post-war years, and births up by no less than 33 per cent. 9The post-war baby boom, which was to strain education, the health services and the social security budget as well as housing, was under way. In addition, under the strain of war, divorces in 1945 were 250 per cent up on 1938, splitting households and again increasing housing needs. 10

During the election Labour had appeared to promise the earth. Bevin offered ‘Five million houses in quick time’ while being careful not to specify what ‘quick time’ meant. 11Stafford Cripps allegedly claimed that ‘housing can be dealt with within a fortnight’. Arthur Greenwood dismissed the coalition figures as ‘chicken feed’. 12It was a chicken that came home to roost.