From the link on Tues at 20.24
n the early thirties, the average weekly rent of Leeds council housing stood at 8s 2d (41p) – the rent on a three-bedroom parlour house could be as high as 12s 6d (62.5p). In contrast, back-to-back rents were generally below 5s (25p). Moreover, it had been Council policy, prior to Labour’s victory, that no family on public assistance be granted the tenancy of a council dwelling larger than a two-bedroom flat
Jenkinson’s solution to the conundrum was the Differential Rent Scheme: the most comprehensive scheme of rent rebates in the country. Anyone with a weekly income below that calculated necessary by the BMA’s Committee on Nutrition to meet essential needs would pay no rent. Leeds – uniquely – did not set a minimum rent payable by all. Jenkinson stated baldly
We shall not begin to talk about rent until there is sufficient money in the household to provide that family with the necessities of life.
Conversely, those who could pay the full economic rent were expected to do so.
Translated from policy to practicalities, the scheme – which affected 5750 tenants – required wide-ranging means testing and increased officialdom. Weekly incomes had to be submitted to council scrutiny in the tenants’ ‘Grey Book‘; 28 additional rent collectors had to be employed. Such intrusive means testing had unavoidable echoes of the reviled Public Assistance Committees so active in this period of the Great Depression
It also meant, of course, that a significant minority of council tenants would pay increased rents, sometimes by as much as 5 shillings a week.
To T.H. Gilberthorpe, president of the Leeds Federation of Municipal Tenants Associations, ‘The whole system [seemed] to be turning round.’ More affluent working-class tenants felt their aspiration and respectability affronted. As one spokesman stated:
Are we then unsuitable tenants? Definitely no! Do we not bear ample witness to the good judgement of those who selected us to occupy these houses? The average corporation tenant is a credit to the community… It may be that the fact that we are corporation tenants has enabled us to get good jobs
The Federation carried out a door to door ballot of nine of the city’s eleven estates. Of a total of 2,284 returned ballots, 1,667 voted against differential rents.
The Federation carried out a door to door ballot of nine of the city’s eleven estates. Of a total of 2,284 returned ballots, 1,667 voted against differential rents.
The scheme had caused immense division. Financially, there were clear winners and losers and differential rents set better-off tenants against the worse-off. One opponent complained of the ‘constant bickering and…general feeling of unneighbourliness’ which had resulted.
In the event only some 400 to 500 tenants withheld rent. And when the Council responded firmly – sending out notices to quit by registered mail – the resistance collapsed. The ‘strike’ lasted barely two weeks. A later legal challenge to the scheme also failed.
But his focus on rehousing the poorest and the means employed did create a dynamic in social housing – the potential, at least, that it would come to be seen as housing of last resort for the least well-off. The ideal of the council estate as a mixed community had been eroded – as it would be far more drastically from the 1980s. The interwar reality of council estates as a site of upward mobility for the ‘respectable’ working class was weakened
Could it have been different? Even to ask the question seems somehow to imply that Labour reformers could have ignored the poor. Maybe the easiest thing to say is simply that there were no good options. Where resources were scarce, Jenkinson’s determination to do the bold, right thing for the poorest inevitably impacted on those just a little up the ladder.
We wrestle with dilemma today as Charles Jenkinson and his Labour colleagues did in the 1930s