Cathy and me

If you are younger than 50, the TV play Cathy Come Home probably means little more to you than folklore from a past era. You have probably seen it; you will have heard the news earlier this month of the death of its author, Jeremy Sandford; and you may even know that last year it was selected as the most outstanding TV play ever. But you will not have experienced the incredible effect that it had on those of us old enough to have watched it when it was first screened.

It was broadcast in the autumn of 1966, and I watched it from the house in west London where I had just become active in a local community project. I can recall, as if it were yesterday, the impact on me of the powerful and moving portrayal of a young family broken up by the experience of becoming homeless. I watched spellbound as each cruel step unfolded. The closing shots of two social workers forcibly taking the young children from their mother, Cathy, must be one of the most unforgettable scenes in TV drama.

What gave the programme its extraordinary power was the combination of Ken Loach's direction, Jeremy Sandford's writing and Carol White's performance in the role of Cathy. Critical to that was the rigour of Sandford's research – seeing at first hand the homelessness hostel where husbands were barred and the brutality of the council's regime – building up, over months, an unrivalled understanding of what could happen to homeless families.

A few months later I came home from work one Friday evening and found that the young woman and her small daughter who lived next door to me had been evicted from their one furnished room and all their belongings piled out on the street. Fortunately, we were able to convince the landlord to hand the flat back – but it made me aware that the story of Cathy was more than fiction.

In 1966 Britain faced huge housing problems, with millions of people living in homes that had been declared unfit. In the inner cities, the poorest tenants were crammed into overcrowded multi-occupied flats. Yet housing was not a forgotten political issue; it had been a major battleground in the 1964 general election, and prime minister Harold Wilson had promised the largest housebuilding programme ever. So it was not the fact of a housing crisis that was so shocking. It was more the revelation that a homeless family could be treated with such brutality, and by public officials. Post-war Britain had been built on the vision of a caring welfare state that would banish forever the Beveridge Report's "four great evils" with a free national health service, welfare benefits for the old, the sick and the unemployed and a huge programme of public housing.

But by the early 1960s, different events were laying bare the limits of the "affluent society", the Conservative promise that "you've never had it so good" and Labour's promise of an all-caring welfare state. The scandals of notorious landlord Peter Rachman had shown how private tenants experienced harassment and brutal eviction. The research of Peter Townsend had laid bare the shocking scale of child poverty. But it was Cathy Come Home that shattered that complacency more than any other event. It was a defining moment in our post-war political and social history.

It is almost universally believed that the showing of Cathy was linked with the launch of Shelter. In fact, the almost simultaneous timing of the two events was a coincidence. The founder of Shelter, Reverend Bruce Kenrick, had been planning the launch with its first director, Des Wilson, through the autumn of 1966. Not only had they absolutely no idea that the BBC was about to show a shocking drama about homelessness, Wilson did not even see it on the evening it was first shown. But when Shelter was launched on 1 December, it received the kind of publicity of which most charities can only dream: front-page stories in the national press, huge TV coverage and questions in parliament.

Actually, there were marked differences in the messages of the two events. Shelter's purpose was to support the newly formed housing associations seeking to help families forced to live overcrowded, multi-occupied rooms in inner cities. The message was "Give us £25 and we can house a family", with money coming through loans to meet the cost of buying older properties and converting them into modern flats – costs that are almost unimaginable now, as house prices have escalated sky-high.

Cathy was more a direct representation of the experience of becoming homeless, although in the years to come Shelter was to put this at the forefront of its campaigning.

The Rachman scandals had shown how private tenants were brutally evicted. Research had laid bare the shocking scale of child poverty. But it was Cathy Come Home that shattered complacency

A decade later, the 1977 Homeless Persons Act gave homeless families a right to housing, and outlawed the practice of breaking up families and taking homeless children into care. Although the 1996 Housing Act weakened the duties to homeless families, the 2002 Homelessness Act has restored their legal right to a permanent home and brought in comprehensive duties to meet the needs of anyone who is homeless.

So, over the past 40 years, some things have changed for the better. Living conditions have improved, with less overcrowding and far fewer people living in homes without basic amenities. The unforeseen disaster, of course, was that many of the homes built in the 1960s were the tower blocks and deck-access flats that have become a nightmare for those who live in them.

But some things have not improved – some have even got worse. The commitment of governments to building homes, especially homes to rent for those on lower incomes, has declined, and the political priority of housing has fallen as the more affluent majority are able to buy homes. Since 1980, the number of new homes has consistently fallen short of the growth in the number of households. From annual programmes in the 1970s of 150,000 socially rented homes, last year only 20,000 were built.

When Cathy was first shown, there were only 1136 homeless people in temporary accommodation. It seems a small number to us now, but it masks the drastic lengths to which people went to avoid ending up under the harsh regime of a hostel, often ending up in a cramped, dilapidated home run by an unscrupulous landlord.

In 1966 more than 350,000 homes were built, nearly half of them council homes for rent, but almost all of these went to people being rehoused from clearance areas or those who had already spent years on waiting lists. They offered little help for young families or immigrants recently arrived in the country, especially in inner-city areas where the shortage was greatest.

The real comparison with today is what happened after the Homeless Persons Act gave homeless families a legal right to housing. In 1980, 5000 homeless households were placed in temporary accommodation by local authorities; in 1990, 50,000. At the end of 2002, the figure has risen to 85,000.

I did a TV interview with Jeremy Sandford on the 30th anniversary of the showing of Cathy and the launch of Shelter. He was a warm, gentle man, who still showed the passionate conviction that inspired him to write Cathy and his other works exposing the fate of people who fall through the welfare safety net: the TV play Edna the Inebriate Woman and the book Down and Out in Britain.