Council housing in the seventies

[rattymol]

In the seventies one third of people in Britain lived in a council house. Council houses were built because of the terrible way private landlords behaved and the poor standard of housing many people lived in. We are returning to those days
4.5 million households privately rent with 23% of that housing deemed not to meet the decent homes standard. We need council housing again.

I know.

My mum and a few neighbours got grants to do their privately mortgaged houses up.

@kitsuneghost Why have tenants got to pay the price all the time. We have developers responsible for the flammable cladding crisis being allowed to carry on and build more and continue to profit (IMO they should be prevented from doing so until they have rectified their "mistakes" ) and yet i see many more threads on here denigrating SH tenants than i do with these companies.

MIRAS anyone????

We live on a the edge of a council estate. It’s well designed when they built it, a good mixture - 2/3/4 bedroom houses, 2 bed maisonettes, and bungalows - with small gardens.

A lot of the houses have been brought & are either rented out or lived in by owners. There is a lot of older people in the still council owned houses that are waiting for one of the bungalows to become available - they want to stay within their communities. The problem is there isn’t enough of anything - so everyone stuck, families in the maisonettes and 2 bedroom houses wanting larger homes and the older people not wanting to move or like others have said have adult children staying with them as they also can’t afford to move :(

We do have a newly built block of flats but again full of families even in the 1 bed ground floor aimed for older people.

A mixture of homes need to be built. A mixture of bungalows and houses. If flats are to be built access to outside space - as I know my Nan loves gardening and wouldn’t want to loose that space :( but sadly the right to buy does need to end, even though I know my parents and their siblings benefited from getting on the housing ladder being able to buy their council homes.

If you keep moving people around like chess pieces it fragments communities. A social housing tenant on NMW who has been moved further away from family is not going to be able to afford to travel back and forth to help care for their elderly mother for example.

There was a huge stigma to living in a council house back when they first appeared. Where I live large council estates were built between the end of the war in the 1940s and the 1970s. From the time they were built, they were dismal areas. Everything was uniform. Identical front doors in the same colour. They screamed social housing. Once the right to buy came in those who bought took pride in their homes and added new doors, windows, garages and drives. These estates now look the same as any other estate. The council were glad to be relieved of the upkeep for housing stock that was ageing.

I agree that we need a lot more rentals that have low rents and the current system of having a percentage in new build estates, indistinguishable from owner occupied properties takes away the stigma. We just need a lot more, but the right to buy changed the drab estates into much more desirable areas.

I’m currently reading the excellent Tenants by Vicky Spratt which examines the housing crisis in this country. Interesting to read that RTB was actually championed by Labour long before Thatcher came into power, she was just the one who put it into action.

Agree that something needs to be address all these issues. Rent for a former 2 bed council flat in my part of London would set you back around £1800.

Considering how low interests were until recently I find it hard to believe councils were getting significantly cheaper loans. Council rents are lower than mortgage payments so even if they build cheaply I still think it is unlikely they pay off the loan in ten years. One source of loans to councils is the Public Works Loan Board, last year before Liz Truss crashed the market their rate was 4.33%, my DD arranged a mortgage at the same time and it was 1% lower. Lending on a house is pretty risk free, the purchaser pays a deposit and if they default on the loan the mortgage company get the house.

I had a google and found Liverpool were charging £408 a month for a 2 bed new house so in 10 years they would pay less than £50k, (looking at examples on here that seems about right) to clarify I don't know if that would include council tax but it won't include insuring your house which would probably cost you about £2k for ten years and repairs and who knows what they would cost. Speaking as a home owner who has just had a quote for £3k to repair my roof and to replace my boiler at another £3k I can say repairs do add up. So no I don't think you'd pay for a new council house with ten years rent. So the land plus building cost would need to be significantly lower than £50k for the rent to pay it off in ten years. Of course the council might be paying itself the rent as it is possible some of the tenants will be getting help with their rent.

I think big builders like Taylor Wimpey with their own work force could easily equal what a council can negotiate but of course they will want a profit.

There isn't actually any need for it to be paid in ten years as hopefully the life of the property will be far in excess of ten years but the fact remains that I highly doubt council rent pays off the cost of the house in ten years.

Right to buy, I think, was much like Tax credits - started off as a brilliant idea, but was tweaked, changed, and adapted so much plus implemented so poorly that they became really bad ideas.

Had all the money made from RTB been invested in building more new homes for people to rent, then buy then it would have funded the next generation of council homes. That it wasn’t was the disaster point.

Yes there were.

It was very noticable in my area that after the council allowed tenants to buy there was a big improvements scheme for the existing housing stock. The council had a lot of houses in need of repairs which they couldn't have afforded without charging higher rents so it was a lose-lose. A lot of tenants bought their houses ( including my DPs) and the houses around us got painted, new porches, roof repairs, new bathrooms and were generally brought up to stratch. It's very easy to say you shouldn't sell council houses but if they can't afford repairs the existing housing stock will end up unusable for people.
I do think that the right to buy should have very strick rules, it should only be the tenants and not if they own any other property, nor should you be allowed to rent it out, you live there or not at all

From an older thread. four years ago

The Elephant and Castle neighbourhood is being physically, socially and ethnically transformed. This started with the demolition of the Heygate estate, a classic for stigmatised perceptions of council housing and the people who live in it. As the local 35% Campaign has meticulously documented, a succession of promises to Heygate residents were broken to arrive at a situation where 1,214 council homes were demolished, to be replaced with 2,704 new homes, of which only 82 (3%) are for social rent. The HA partner was London and Quadrant. To be eligible for the cheapest one-bedroom home built by them on the Heygate site, people needed a minimum household income of £57,500. The average household income in that part of Southwark is £24,324

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/sep/19/balfron-20-how-goldfingers-utopian-tower-became-luxury-flats

There is a hell of a lot of cognitive dissonance going on around this narrative. e,g ive seen posters on here saying that the minute a tenant earns above minimum wage they should buy or go into private rental and let someone who really needs it have the chance to rent their social home. Then the SAME posters moan that they wouldnt buy a property anywhere near a housing eatate because its too much like a ghetto When its what they were bloody insisting it should be

We need proper community housing. Like Somerford Grove which had different dwellings built for everyone at all different stages of their lives.

This problem goes further back than 1980
The 1953 White Paper stipulated the continuing of promotion by all possible means the building of houses for owner occupation.

In 1954 private housebuilders were freed from the obligation to secure building licences one of the main ways by which local authority housing had been prioritised in the immediate post war years.

The big change came with the 1954 Housing Act which required that future council efforts be concentrated on redevelopment RATHER THAN general needs.

Where we are now is the result of decades of changes going further back than 1980.

https://www.eastendreview.co.uk/2015/03/24/balfron-tower-poplar-harca/

If you can afford to buy a property and obtain rent then you shouldn't need a council property as well?

It was, but Labour intended to re invest the money into more social housing

Im.pretty sure you can have a council.property if you already own a property in sure that one of the factors which disallow a person from applying 🤔
maybe in exceptional circumstances?

That doesn't make any sense

Can't ,sorry

@woodhill To qualify for social housing in their area you had to have at least 2 children.

We don't know for sure but subsequent family medical conditions suggest it might have been due to a blood clotting condition which would not have been known about or tested for 75 years ago.

They need to go back to the waiting list instead of priotising based on "need" which means the houses always go to unemployed people, refugees etc.

They should be homes for life, and when people buy a house, a new one should be built to take its place.

If you can afford to buy a property and obtain rent then you shouldn't need a council property as well?

A person who lives in a council home and who also owns property elsewhere would have been allocated the council home at a time in their life when they didn't own property elsewhere. Under current rules, there's no obligation o tenants to forfeit their council homes with lifetime tenancies if they become able to afford to live elsewhere. Although if someone owns property they're not living in, it will be counted as an asset and treated as if it was cash in the bank when calculating their income for eligibility for means tested benefits.

They need to go back to the waiting list instead of priotising based on "need" which means the houses always go to unemployed people, refugees etc.

Your ignorance is shocking. Being on a low income, being unemployed, being a refugee etc doesn't prioritise a person for a council home. The issue is those types of circumstances lead to people becoming homeless and that does prioritise a person for a council home. So you're effectively saying you don't give a shit about homeless people and disagree that not having a roof over your head should give a person any sort of priority for housing.

I disagree/d fundamentally about the sale of council houses. Even worse than that however was the decant of human communities from slums in the 50's/60's/70's into Tower block estates without a heart which quickly turned into more modern slums that without community became the breeding grounds for gangs. They are all over London: East, West, North, South.