Fries yes and this was kept in the programme too - she mentions a shared toilet on the landing but then jokes that it's all theirs anyway because everyone else has left, and when Jenny asks why everyone else has been moved on but not her she explains that the council deems them to need a 4-bed house, which they don't have any of. So despite the fact that a 2 or 3 bedroom flat would be much better than their current living conditions, they don't get moved on. I can't remember if the happy ending in the countryside was true or not, though it sounds plausible.
There's also some stuff in the books about how moving people out of the tenements into flats and houses and council estates had a very detrimental effect on some of the families, because they were used to being crammed together in a very small space and had formed a community, once they were all spread out and moved to different places, it was hard for that community to stay together - and most families wouldn't have had telephones so it's not like they could stay in touch that way either. I did some stuff about this in my sociology degree and found it really interesting, the link with the books. There were studies done on it.