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

The target was reached in 1953 when 318,000 houses were built and was comfortably exceeded in 1954 when another 357,000 were added. Moreover, more than a quarter of these new homes, against 15 per cent in 1952, were in the private sector. 24What had been a trickle of private homes was becoming a stream ‘to augment or even to some extent replace the rising river of subsidised housing,’ Macmillan noted. 25New housing, however, was only part of the problem. With the numbers rolling in, he turned his attention to the slums and the linked problem of rent which he described as ‘the most intricate and politically dangerous’ of the housing issues. 26

In July 1952 a report from the Sanitary Inspectors’ Association had pointed out that houses were falling out of use as fast as they were being built, or faster. 27A key reason was rent levels. In 1951 in England, 53 per cent of houses remained privately rented and less than 30 per cent were owner-occupied. 28Many rents, however, had been controlled since 1939, some of them at levels set in the 1920s. The mesh of controls meant that rents could vary two-and-a-half-fold for identical houses in the same street with the same amenities. 29Frequently rent income was too small for landlords to finance repairs. Homes that had once been good were becoming slums, and slum clearance, the Luftwaffe’s contribution aside, had been halted by the war. Anything between 280,000 and 500,000 homes were calculated to need clearance, against the 140,000 slum dwellings whose demolition had been halted in 1939.

Macmillan therefore prepared to switch the programme’s emphasis to include repair, conversion and slum clearance. In 1953 he proposed that councils would be able to take over slums for their site value only, turning local authorities into slum landlords but ones charged with clearing them and able to set realistic rent levels for the replacement housing. Aside from the New Towns, which were taking overspill from the cities, councils were given bigger subsidies for slum clearance than for other forms of new building. And as part of this ‘Operation Rescue’ a limited rent increase, a ‘repairs increase’, was allowed in the private sector where landlords could demonstrate by certification that they had put homes into good repair in the past three years – this last to protect tenants who in despair had undertaken repairs themselves. In addition, all new private houses and flats would be free of rent control. ‘The opposition to this [the easing of rent restrictions] was considerable,’ Macmillan recorded. ‘But I felt it was another move to freedom.’ 30

Macmillan faced Bevan at his stormiest. Labour was into the leftward shift that, from the end of the war at least up to 1983, it took each time it went into opposition – at least in terms of its policy as passed by annual conferences. The Tories equally were to move right when not in power, whatever finally happened when they returned to government. Bevan argued that all rent-controlled private property should be taken over by the councils, municipalising, though not nationalising, some five to six million homes. Landlords could not be trusted to spend rent increases on repairs, he argued. Only local authorities could find the cash and therefore they should take over the homes.

Morrison, among others, wanted nothing to do with that, but in 1956 the Labour Party conference endorsed the policy. Arthur Greenwood, in recommending this ‘full-blooded Socialism’ to the conference, commented accurately that it was ‘probably the biggest socialization project that has yet been attempted in the democratic world’. 31Its object was to ‘take the profit out of private landlordism’ and ‘make housing a social service’. Had such a policy ever been implemented, housing would indeed have become just that, with well over 60 per cent of homes council controlled. This policy of mass municipalisation was balanced by the promise of more generous local authority mortgages for home owners. But even Greenwood could see that ‘entirely new problems’ would be created if the local authority was ‘virtually the only landlord in the area’. 32Needless to say this never happened, although the idea survived into the 1959 manifesto, hedged with let-out qualifications about timing. Nothing, however, could better illustrate the real differences that would remain over the public sector/private sector divide in the welfare state. Where Bevan was right, as Macmillan much later conceded, was that the ‘repairs increase’ he allowed in rent was too small to have much effect. (Bevan, having his cake and eating it, had dismissed the increase as ‘a mouldy turnip’.)

If Macmillan hit his targets by relaxing controls on the private sector and by cutting standards in the face of overwhelming demand, his immediate successors Duncan Sandys, Henry Brooke, Charles Hill, Sir Keith Joseph and then Labour’s Dick Crossman all helped grow the bitter harvest that became the real disaster of post-war housing – system build, the high-rise towers and the great slab blocks of deck-access flats. It started almost by accident. Up to the mid-1950s traditional houses dominated. In 1953 just 23 per cent of public sector housing approvals were for flats, and only 3 per cent of those were for high-rise: blocks of six storeys and above. But from 1956, Sandys started paying higher subsidies for high-rise blocks. Up to then, he told the House of Commons, all flats had received the same subsidy.

Since construction, in practice, costs more as you go higher, the result has been that flats in low blocks have been more heavily subsidised in relation to costs than flats in high blocks. Apart from being inequitable, this has unintentionally influenced local authorities to concentrate on building blocks of three, four and five storeys, which, I believe, many honourable members will agree are most monotonous. 33

No one dissented. From then on, the taller the block the bigger the subsidy in order to eliminate the financial advantages of erecting low-rise buildings. On such wonderfully egalitarian and aesthetic grounds, the explosion in high-rise was, almost unintentionally, launched. Within four years, the proportion of high-rise had risen five-fold to 15 per cent of the construction programme, and by 1966 it accounted for 26 per cent of all homes started. 34

The guilty men – they were almost all men – were not just those in government. An unintended conspiracy of town planners, builders, engineers and architects, together with local councillors who believed they were doing their best but frequently failed to consult those they were rehousing, produced what became a costly and alienating fiasco. ‘Tower blocks were part of architectural and municipal prestige,’ the architectural historian Patrick Nuttgens has recorded, ‘– a desire to make a mark on the landscape, to display technical proficiency and to announce the arrival of a new age.’ 35In Birmingham, Harry Watton, the Labour leader known as ‘little Caesar’, was taken to see one of Bryant’s new system-build blocks at Kidderminster. Sheppard Fidler, the city architect recalled:

To get to the block we passed through a marquee which was rolling in whisky, brandy and so on, so by the time they got to the block they thought it was marvellous – they wanted to change over the whole [housing] programme [to these]. As we were leaving, Harry Watton suddenly said: ‘Right! We’ll take five blocks’ – just as if he was buying bags of sweets. ‘We’ll have five of them and stick them on X’ – some site he’d remembered we were just starting on. 36

Rod Hackney, an architecture student in Manchester in the early 1960s, has caught the flavour of the time as well as anyone in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, his autobiographical account of the road to community architecture. The road ran from the 1930s and Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, via the Modern movement to Le Corbusier’s ‘cities in the sky’. In 1946, Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture was published in Britain with its ringing declaration that ‘we must create the mass-production spirit. The spirit of constructing mass-production houses. The spirit of living in mass-production houses. The spirit of conceiving mass-production houses.’ In well under a decade, the spirit had turned into a flood of buildings. ‘By the mid-fifties traditional building methods were considered slow, cumbersome and a hindrance,’ Hackney records. ‘The only way to build new homes on a massive scale was unrestrained use of the standardized mass-produced materials advocated by the Modernists. A vast proportion of these systems had to be imported from France, Denmark and – ironically – West Germany. Entire rooms were shipped over and were then slotted together like Lego on site.’ There was ‘blind faith in “hip” modern building materials – off-the-peg panels, concrete, glass, metal, plastics and aluminium … if one dared question the long-term performance of the new, the reply was swift: in the same way that technology had developed the materials, it would also develop solutions to problems as and when they were required.’ 37