Some of the components have changed, partly for the better, partly for the worse. Thirty years ago, Manchester and other industrial cities were slum-ridden. Today, the slums have been cleared away. On the other hand, 30 years ago Manchester and all other areas had huge municipal housebuilding programmes. Slum-dwellers could be rehoused quickly and in areas of their choice.
Now council housebuilding programmes have vanished. Their disappearance is an achievement – if you can call it that – of the Thatcher-Major governments. Now, the main public sector builders for rent are housing associations, and they are building far fewer dwellings than councils used to. As it happens, I was the minister who piloted through the 1974 Housing Act, which substantially increased funding for housing associations.
That increase in funding was not intended to enable housing associations to replace local authorities as builders of new housing; it was intended to enable them to augment local-authority housing with specialised dwellings, such as those for disabled people and for pensioners. Furthermore, the withdrawal of funding and loan authorisation by the Conservative government, and the ringfencing of housing revenue accounts, led to a calamitous backlog of repairs and modernisation in local authority dwellings, which has cost us £19bn to rectify.
Since 1970, housing needs and expectations have been transformed. Most people prefer to own rather than rent, and a large majority of householders are indeed home-owners. All well and good, although under the Conservatives, home-ownership became something of a hazard: a million owner-occupied homes either had their homes repossessed or watched them slide into negative equity.
So, this country has serious housing difficulties, recognised in the recent government green paper, Quality and Choice: A Decent Home for All. I like a great deal about this green paper, summed up in that word “choice”. I want people to be able to choose, within reason, where they want to live and what kind of tenure they prefer. Of course, someone able to afford a semi is not going to be able to buy a country mansion, so unrealistic choices cannot be catered for.
Someone able to afford a semi is not going to be able to buy a country mansion
The overwhelming majority of choices are reasonable rather than unrealistic and, since the home we live in shapes our lives in a way only paralleled by health and a job, it ought to be an objective of government to put reasonable housing within the reach of most people.
The last Labour government did this with a mortgage subsidy system. Today, with a far higher level of home-ownership and many more people looking to buy, such a scheme is no longer viable, but the government is taking modest but valuable initiatives to make the home-buying and selling process easier, and to help first-time buyers and key workers such as nurses and teachers.
Millions of people, however, either do not aspire to home ownership or cannot afford it. For them, renting is the only option. It is essential that it should be an option that enables choice, rather than a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum from an unresponsive council housing department.
Even now, too many councils treat tenants like serfs, and fail to respond adequately to their concerns – if they respond at all. So I welcome John Prescott’s intention “to give new applicants and existing tenants more say in choosing where they live”. I also welcome his promise that people can remain council tenants if they wish. Housing departments may not be perfect, but they are at least more accountable than housing associations and private landlords.
I am pleased, too, that the government intends to tackle housing benefit fraud, which is theft from other tenants and, in the end, from taxpayers. I am strongly in favour of helping those in need with housing costs. But Prescott’s pledge to “make sure that unscrupulous landlords who neglect their responsibilities do not benefit from housing benefit” is also heartening, and I welcome his undertaking to allow the licensing of private landlords where bad landlords and bad tenants – sometimes in collusion – are destabilising the community.
Postscript
The Right Honourable Gerald Kaufman is MP for Manchester Gorton and chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee.
