Johnson on housing

/ colin wiles / 1 Comment

(N.B. I wrote this on the 15th July, a week before Boris Johnson was elected as Leader of the Conservative Party with 66.4% of the vote)

I’m going to take a punt and predict that Boris Johnson will become prime minister on the 22 July with at least two thirds of Tory members’ votes.

(If I’m wrong, and Johnson loses, then stop reading now!) What, then, will a Johnson premiership mean for housing?

In the short term, probably very little. He will be pre-occupied in the first few months with Brexit and its aftermath. Perhaps he will also call a snap general election.

But thereafter, what do we know about his track record and his views on housing, and affordable housing in particular?

His published writings offer an insight. In an article last year titled We need to kickstart the housing market by kicking developers who treat buyers like serfs he attacked Persimmon for building shoddy homes and commented on the problems faced by first time buyers:

“This is meant to be Britain, the great homeowning democracy, but we now have lower rates of owner-occupation, for the under-forties, than France and Germany.”

“In the seventies we were building about 300,000 a year…By the time of Tony Blair’s Labourgovernment, that number had fallen to 156,000… the underlying problem is supply.”

The answer, he concluded, was to liberate brownfield and public land, reduce stamp duty, tackle landbanking, and to “…tell Lefties like Sadiq Khan to stop their ideological obsession with quotas for affordable housing on each development”.

So, Johnson is very much on the Policy Exchange wing of Conservatism. He wants to build, build, build, but his priority is on boosting the overall supply of market homes, and thus pushing down prices (he hopes), rather than any focus on traditional social housing.

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Challenging stigma – building better

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When we founded the SHOUT campaign in 2014, one of our primary objectives was to challenge the stigma surrounding social housing. The problem persists. I was looking through Facebook the other day and came across several sites that denigrate and stereotype the residents of social housing estates.

One aspect of this stigmatisation is the physical look of social housing. Our homes often stand out because of their appearance, whether it’s cottage estates built before and after the war or brutalist tower blocks and low-rise estates built in the 1960s and ‘70s. They are immediately identied in the public mind as “council housing” regardless of whether they are owned by a council or a housing association.

The late Bob Crow used to say, “I was born in a council house and I will die in a council house”. (In fact, he was living in a housing association property, but in his mind, as in the minds of many, social housing IS council housing.) This is despite the fact that around one in five homes on a typical estate will have been sold under the Right to Buy. Most estates are mixed communities, but the stereotyping persists.

Yet too often, the residents of social housing are offered little opportunity to shape the way their estates present themselves to the outside world. I recently visited Vauban, an eco-township in Freiburg im Breisgau in south-west Germany. It is built on the site of an ex-French army base (the French occupied the area after WW2 and only left in 1992). Squatters and hippies occupied the site and some of their ethos informed the design of the new development. It’s now home to 6,000 residents. Million-euro owner-occupied homes stand next to social rented homes and it is hard to tell them apart. Trams and cycle lanes run through the township and 70% of residents have no private car. There is a local power station and many of the homes are built to Passivhaus standards. All houses and many of the flats have private gardens or allotments and there are trees and bushes in abundance. Open spaces have a clear function and there is still a slightly ramshackle feel, with some gardens containing wacky sheds and shepherd’s huts. It is a vibrant eco-friendly community where residents have a big say in governance.

Compare and contrast to many English social housing estates with their acres of unused and unusable grass, their ‘No Ball Games’ signs, their lack of private gardens and defensible space, their restrictive management practices

Inside Housing used to run a feature called ‘Development of the Week’ (perhaps they still do, I never see the magazine). If this was our best then I would hate to see the worst.

Invariably, the photographs showed unimaginative design, brickwork lacking in variety or decoration, shallow roofs without eaves, or high pitched roofs with no useable space in the loft, plastic windows flush with brickwork, stick-on porches, knee-rail fences, acres of tarmac and useless grass, bleak private gardens, or none, unimaginative planting, grass areas with little amenity use other than for dog-messing, the ubiquitous ‘No Ball Games’ signs. Only one thing was missing from these photographs, a big sign with a pointy arrow saying “SOCIAL HOUSING – POOR PEOPLE LIVE HERE”.

We can and must do better. There is an old adage, ‘buy cheap, buy twice’, and the same could be said of social housing – ‘build cheap, build twice’. I have recently been reading ‘Cook’s Camden’ – a description of the homes built under the leadership of Camden’s Borough architect Sydney Cook in the 1960s and ‘70s. Over this period, Camden was building up to 3,000 homes a year and many of them were high quality, bespoke homes in some of the leafiest parts of the Borough (often in the face of fierce opposition from rich nimby neighbours).

Today, architectural students from around the world make the pilgrimage to view them and no objective person would immediately label them as social housing. They epitomise the vision of Aneurin Bevan of “...the living tapestry of a mixed community… where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street”.

Whatever the constraints of grant or funding, if we are to challenge stigmatisation, we absolutely must do better, by building homes that are well-designed and spacious, that blend into their surroundings and will still be popular a hundred years from now. Above all, residents must be better involved in shaping the appearance of their homes and their neighbourhoods.

 

(This article first appeared in the Spring 2019 edition of HQN’s Governor magazine)

Putting tenants in the driving seat

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My housing “career” started 40 years ago in the London Borough of Camden. The Chair of Housing was Ken Livingstone and the Director was the legendary William Barnes.

Not only were Camden building 3,000 council homes a year, they also had a well-entrenched structure for resident engagement.

Five District Management Committees comprising councillors and resident groups exercised devolved decision-making over local improvements and investment.

The DMCs also contributed to strategic and policy debates. I left Camden in 1987 but I was pleasantly surprised to see that the DMC system is still running, forty years later. It’s clearly a successful model.

But Camden is sadly the exception to the rule. Some landlords make genuine attempts at resident involvement, others throw in a few gestures, many have cut budgets.

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Estate regeneration: the case for residents’ ballots

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The news that Sadiq Khan will give residents a veto over regeneration schemes on social housing estates will be welcomed by the 350,000 Londoners who might be affected by plans to demolish their homes. Regeneration of social housing estates has been a hugely divisive issue in London. The likely collapse of the Haringey Development Vehicle is only the latest in a long history of controversial demolish and rebuild schemes.

The Heygate estate in Elephant and Castle is one of the most infamous, where 1,194 social rent homes (typically let at 30 to 50 percent of local market rents) were demolished. In its place 2,700 new homes were built but only 82 were social rented. Many of the remaining properties were sold off plan to overseas investors or let at rents that were unaffordable to people on low incomes. Continue reading →