When the Boundary Estate opened in Arnold Circus in 1900, it was intended to show what public housing could be. The London County Council had cleared some of the worst neighborhoods of the East End and replaced them with good, publicly owned houses. But this is not communal housing as we understand it today. The new housing was mainly for the “respectable” working class: artisans, clerks, policemen. It was an attempt to build decent homes for ordinary working people.
Today, we live in a very different world. Thatcherism transformed council housing. Right to Buy sold off much of the best stock, particularly family homes and properties in better locations, attractive to tenants who could afford to buy. At the same time, the Housing Act 1980 gave most council tenants statutory security of tenure, effectively a lifetime tenancy, provided they complied with the rules and created succession rights. The remaining commune housing was increasingly rationalized out of acute need, becoming smaller and more marginalized.
This has created a strange settlement. Municipal housing has a smaller role, but the rights attached to it have become stronger. A tenant who is given a three-bedroom house for their family may stay there long after their family has moved on. Many social homes in London are now under-occupied: nearly 200,000 social rented households have at least one more bedroom than the official standard says they need. This led to a crude argument about the bedroom tax, but housing is more than a state asset. It gives people security, dignity and the ability to contribute to civic life.
Council houses in inner London are among the most valuable things the state can share. In places like Acton, Fulham or Southwark, the gap between a social tenancy and a private tenancy can be the difference between a stable life and permanent insecurity. British council housing remains one of our great public achievements. Without it, inner London would be more unequal and monocultural. Whole communities would have disappeared long ago, driven by a market that doesn’t have enough houses, but there are plenty of people willing to offer absurd amounts of their salary for what’s left.
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A new argument is gathering strength against all this. One last one ITEM by Sebastian Milbank places social housing in central London as the ultimate devil in the affordability crisis. She sparked a debate that says there are too many council houses, mismanaged stock, dependent tenants and, in her most racist register, too often foreign-born. They say London’s social sector is wrong and the answer is to clean it up. This is an incredible misdiagnosis and the policy it leads to is a dead end for everyone.
There is a claim that a 30 or 40 per cent share of social rent in central London is extremely high. it is not. The combined municipal and limited sector of Vienna covers approx 43 percent of the city’s housing stock. Southwark sits around 40 percent. Proportion is not the problem. It’s the system around him that is.
Vienna’s sector is large enough not to become a stigmatized welfare service, and it is growing rather than shrinking. London is the opposite. It has a shrinking reserve rationed out of desperate need. This is what produces the concentration of disadvantage that critics then complain about. But we have to be honest. The purpose of social housing has become confusing. Is it a massive working class mandate? A permanent home for those lucky enough to get in? An emergency service for those in greatest need? Or a rare public asset in a city where millions are completely locked out by security?
The more difficult version of the question is demographic. A generation ago, a council tenancy was not a rare prize. Councils had hard to rent properties. Private rents were lower compared to wages. The average Londoner had options. That world is gone. Today, the people locked out of low-rent homes near transport are the people who make London work: nurses, teachers, carers, hospitality workers, young council workers, young graduates and families who earn too much to get by but too little to live well. Many workers will spend their twenties and thirties in shared housing. Some will leave London altogether. Others will travel for hours to boroughs where the public sector owns homes they will never actually occupy.
For a nurse paying half her salary for a room in Tooting, a secure council tenancy in Zone 1 can seem like an incredible privilege. Anger is very real. But to overcome it, we must not enter into a zero-sum conflict. The right’s answer is to push the existing tenants off the market and free up the land. But what you get is not a nursing home. You get a flat for someone who can pay £4,000 a month.
The real question is why London is not building enough homes for everyone. Why is Park Royal still unbuilt, a vast industrial area surrounded by 11 subway stations? Why is low-density public land in Zone 2 untouchable? Why do asset renewal schemes provide only modest net growth? We need to build more council houses, co-ops, blocks of flats, market flats – more houses of all kinds. Park Royal could be a start. The land is protected for industrial use by the Greater London Authority, but many of the post-war factories have closed and what remains is a biscuit factory and a string of low-value warehouses. An ambitious plan can be completed 200,000 houses on an area of 650 hectares. All within walking distance of public transport and HS2.
A serious left-wing housing policy must defend social housing, but it must not defend deprivation. The London housing debate has a xenophobic tone on both sides. From the right we hear that many immigrant families get precious homes, but from the left we hear that anyone who has moved to London from elsewhere has no place there. I feel the same pain from the discussions about too many market houses for young workers as I hear about the complaints about social housing. Why should a young man who has left home for a better life in the capital be scorned by the left? Britain’s economic growth and social progress are the product of the same journey taken by many of our ancestors. They moved from their rural homes to the city in search of a better life and in the process created modern Britain.
In Britain we have rationalized every form of home. Market rations for rent; council waiting lists at home ration out of desperation. Everyone can point to someone else and ask: why them, not me? These absences cannot create strong and stable political coalitions for leftist or successful societies. The recent discussion about Aylesham Center in Peckham reflected much of this divide. The market houses, the only houses that most people can access, are the alternate devils. The residents are not from Peckham. They will destroy the landscape and irreversibly destroy the area. They should go somewhere else. Maybe an hour away or, better yet, leave London. Manchester would gladly welcome the new workers. It shows in the city’s sense of hope, optimism and more crudely their economic growth.
There is a clear division in London between landed and landless interests. In London, housing councils and associations can take the form of these large land interests. Too often they find it more convenient to ignore the injustice in the system. Social and economic ills can be easy to ignore when the Treasury foots the bill, and housing divisions are an uncontroversial procedure rather than life-changing decisions that separate the lucky poor from the unlucky poor.
There are several ways to get more houses from the limited stock in this current system. Firstly, there is a lot of housing scams in many London properties. Unscrupulous tenants can do £2000 per week from renting out their apartment on Airbnb. A crackdown would free up more housing and improve community cohesion on the estates. Second, many properties have lower densities than our Viennese cousins. There are estates in Hackney and Lewisham that contain too many bungalows for a town reeling from a housing crisis. While these may have been built in an era when London was depopulating, the world has changed. We must embrace it with greater density. My suggestion would be to revive the great London County Council tradition of apartment blocks. Finally, we need to encourage more transfers within the system. Some councils already offer small cash incentives for downsizing and there is a scheme for older Londoners to move to the seaside and the countryside, freeing up valuable London homes.
There remains an important question of legitimacy with no easy answer: the majority of inner London council houses are out of work. the principal tenant. I don’t know what we tell working class people who spend hours on the bus or subway every day to get to work why this system is fair. It wasn’t always like that. In 1981, when council housing was plentiful, 67 percent of working-age families in social housing were in full-time work. There could be a complicated policy response with cruel implications for the fringe cases, or we could build more homes for those currently excluded working-class people.
Basically, housing is only as scarce a resource as we want it to be. There is a choice here for everyone. We can accept the status quo of scarcity and fight to prioritize certain groups, or we can build more. Many in politics choose the former. Choosing the short-lived dopamine of the reactionary, instead of building the case for something better.
More than half a million Londoners now live in flat shares. The average private rent in London is approx £27,480 a year. London is adding 33,000 homes per yearwhile its population is projected to grow by approx half a million over the next decade. If tensions are high today, imagine what they will be like after another decade of failure.
(Further reading: Thomas Heatherwick and the culture war of architecture)
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