‘Bad housing, and not enough of it’

Tower blocks and ageing, large-scale tenement blocks do not work when they are crammed full of young families. The East End has a terrible problem of overcrowding because of its young population, and if it is to transform itself into a liveable borough, then these blocks need to be replaced by multi-bedroomed houses, and low-rise flats for those with older children.

There is no use double-glazing a fifth-floor two-bedroom flat with no lift and claiming that it is now a suitable place for a family of six to live in. It’s not. The desperate pressure on Tower Hamlets’ waiting list for larger homes is currently only being addressed on a piecemeal basis, as each estate goes through the painstakingly slow process of Housing Choice with no guarantee that sufficient funding will be available to rebuild larger homes in the numbers that are needed.

Just as new homes will not work without a better infrastructure, an infrastructure cannot be imposed on poor quality homes with the expectation that it will make them good places to live.

The national supply of social housing is decreasing every year, as a result of the Right to Buy and selective demolition in areas where demand for housing is low. At the same time, virtually every area of the country has seen the market value of its homes treble in the last seven years, pushing potential buyers on low incomes – service-industry incomes, call-centre incomes, which are barely a tenth of the £200,000 it costs to buy an average property in England – towards an ever shrinking pool of affordable rented housing.

Across the country there are 1.5 million people on the waiting list for a council or housing-association home: almost exactly the number of homes that have been sold under the Right to Buy since 1980. Many of them will already be housed by their landlord, but in flats or unsuitable temporary housing, such as bed-and-breakfast accommodation, and have returned to the list in order to wait for a more appropriate home to become available.

Social housing is not being replaced at the rate it is being lost to the private market, despite various small-scale attempts to increase the proportion of social rented homes built by developers on otherwise private estates, and to allow low earners to buy half-shares of newly built homes until they can afford to take out a full mortgage. This has led to an obscene situation in which local authorities – their housing stock declining as demand is rising – pay buy-to-let property investors the full market rental rate for homes which once belonged to them, in order that they can house people who cannot themselves afford to pay for it.

Local authorities now pay buy-to-let property investors the full market rental rate for homes which once belonged to them

While the rate of private homes built every year has remained steady, at around 200,000 to 250,000, since the mid-1980s the rate of new socially rented homes being built has bumped along at under 50,000 since its peak in the mid-1970s. The only periods in which more than 200,000 council homes have been built every year were in the early 1950s, when Macmillan launched his housebuilding crusade, and in the mid-1960s when Richard Crossman loosened the green built and allowed overspill estates such as Chelmsley Wood to be built across the country.

The more expensive houses are to buy, the more affordable houses for rent need to be built. Not only that, but the stock which remains in public hands is disproportionately that which was thrown up in haste, only to rot at leisure. Successive governments have shirked the responsibility of matching quantity with quality, which has given tenants the worst of both worlds: bad housing, and not enough of it.

The need for housing that is both affordable and of good quality cannot be met in a half-hearted way. Everyone who has a shred of influence – housing ministers, town planners, architects, building contractors – and who is involved in meeting the demand for affordable housing must unite in order to muster the will to transform the very idea of what housing is for. A house is not an investment, it is somewhere to live: whether you own or rent your home, it has to be good enough for you to actually enjoy living there.

I have visited one of the new affordable-housing developments along the Thames Gateway, where lashings of cheap housing (in all senses of the phrase) are being built for sale and rent on a large area of reclaimed land to the east of London. I found a clutter of shoeboxes on the very edge of Barking – itself an edge city, without much identity – ringed by electricity pylons. You arrive at Barking Station and wait for a bus, then change for another. This bus takes you to the terminus, which is at the edge of a council estate on the edge of the town, on the edge of which is the new estate. Soon, everybody will be living on the edges of the edges….

The government claims to be doing all the things that need to be done in order to create what it calls “sustainable communities”, but these tiny, flung-out flat-boxes are the very opposite of sustainable. We must build homes that people want to stay in, rather than move away from, preventing roots from forming and adding to the sense that homes are simply places in which to put people according to how much, or little choice they have.