When the Boundary Estate opened at Arnold Circus in 1900, it was meant to show what public housing could be. London County Council had cleared some of the worst East End slums and replaced them with decent, publicly owned homes. But this is not council housing as we understand it today. The new flats were largely 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, especially family homes and better-located properties 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 kept to the rules and created succession rights. What council housing remained was rationed ever more tightly by acute need, becoming smaller and more marginalised.
This has created a strange settlement. Council housing has a smaller role, but the rights attached to it have become stronger. A tenant given a three-bedroom home for their family can remain there long after their household had changed. Many London social homes are now under-occupied: nearly 200,000 social rented households have at least one bedroom more than the official standard says they need. That led to a crude argument for 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 homes in inner London are among the most valuable things the state can allocate. In places like Acton, Fulham or Southwark, the gap between a social rent and a private rent can be the difference between a stable life and permanent precarity. Britain’s council housing remains one of our great public achievements. Without it, inner London would be more unequal and more monocultural. Whole communities would have disappeared long ago, pushed out by a market that does not have enough homes but has plenty of people willing to offer absurd proportions of their salary for what is left.
A new argument is gathering force against all this. A recent article by Sebastian Milbank pins social housing in central London as the chief villain in the affordability crisis. It sparked a debate that says there are too many council homes, the stock mismanaged, the tenants dependent, and in its more racist register, too often foreign-born. They say London’s social sector is the mistake and the answer is to clear it out. This is an incredible misdiagnosis, and the politics it leads to is a dead end for everyone.
There is an assertion that a 30 or 40 per cent social rented share in central London is freakishly high. It is not. Vienna’s combined municipal and limited-profit sector covers around 43 per cent of the city’s housing stock. Southwark sits at around 40 per cent. The proportion is not the problem. It’s the system around it that is.
Vienna’s sector is large enough not to become a stigmatised welfare service, and it is growing rather than shrinking. London is the opposite. It has a shrinking stock rationed by desperate need. That is what produces the concentration of disadvantage that critics then complain about. But we should be honest. The purpose of social housing has become confused. Is it a mass working-class tenure? A permanent home for those lucky enough to get in? An emergency service for those in the greatest need? Or a scarce public asset in a city where millions are locked out of security altogether?
The hardest version of the question is demographic. A generation ago, a council tenancy was not a rare prize. Councils had hard-to-let estates. Private rents were lower relative to wages. The median Londoner had options. That world has gone. Today, the people locked out of low-rent homes near transport are the people who make London work: nurses, teachers, carers, hospitality workers, junior council workers, young graduates and families who earn too much to have priority but too little to live well. Many workers will spend their twenties and thirties in shared accommodation. Some will leave London altogether. Others will commute for hours into boroughs where the public sector owns homes they will never realistically occupy.
For a nurse paying half her salary for a room in Tooting, a secure council tenancy in Zone 1 can look like an extraordinary privilege. The resentment is very real. But to get past it, we mustn’t enter into a zero-sum conflict. The right’s answer is to push existing tenants onto the market and free up the land. But what you get isn’t a flat for the nurse. 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 underbuilt, a vast industrial zone surrounded by 11 tube stations? Why is low-density public land in Zone 2 untouchable? Why do estate renewal schemes deliver only modest net increases? We should be building more council homes, co-ops, mansion blocks, market flats – more homes of all sorts. 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 been shut and what remains is a biscuit factory and rows of low-value warehousing. An ambitious plan could see over 200,000 homes on the 650 hectare area. All within walking distance of public transport and HS2.
A serious left housing politics should defend social housing but it should not defend a shortage. The debate around homes in London has a xenophobic tone on both sides. From the right we hear that too many migrant families take up precious homes, but from the left we hear that anyone who has moved to London from elsewhere has no place being there. I get the same pang of pain from discussions about too many market homes for young workers as I do hearing about complaints about social housing. Why should a young person who has left home for a better life in the capital be the subject of scorn from 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 homesteads into the city in search of a better life, and in the process created modern Britain.
In Britain we have rationed every form of home. The market rations by rent; council home waiting lists ration by desperation. Everyone can point to someone else and ask: why them, not me? These shortages cannot create strong, enduring political coalitions for the left or indeed successful societies. The recent discussion around the Aylesham centre in Peckham reflected much of that divide. Market homes, the only homes that most people can access, are the alternative chief villain. The residents aren’t from Peckham. They will blight the landscape and irrevocably ruin the area. They should go elsewhere. Maybe an hour away or, better yet, leave London. Manchester would happily welcome young workers. It shows in the city’s sense of hope, optimism, and more crudely, their economic growth.
There is a clear divide in London between the landed interests, and those without property. In London, councils and housing associations can take the form of these large landed interests. Too often they find it much more convenient to ignore the unfairness in the system. Social and economic malaise can be easy to ignore when the Treasury foots the bill, and housing allocations are an unquestionable procedure rather than life-changing decisions that separate the lucky poor from the unlucky poor.
There are a few ways to get more homes from the limited stock in this current system. Firstly, there is too much housing fraud in many London estates. Unscrupulous tenants can make £2,000 a week from renting out their flat on Airbnb. A crackdown would release more flats, and improve community cohesion on estates. Secondly, many estates are lower density than our Viennese cousins. There are estates in Hackney and Lewisham that feature way too many bungalows for a city being crushed under a housing crisis. While these may have been built in an era when London was depopulating, the world has changed. We should embrace it with higher density. My suggestion would be to revive the London County Council’s great tradition of mansion blocks. Lastly, we should 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 countryside, freeing up valuable London homes.
There remains a significant legitimacy question with no easy answer: the majority of inner London council homes have an out of work lead tenant. I don’t know what we say to the working-class people that spend hours on the bus or tube every day to get to work about why this system is fair. This hasn’t always been the case. In 1981, when council housing was plentiful, 67 per cent of working age householders in social housing were in full-time work. There could be a convoluted policy answer with cruel implications for edge cases, or we could build more homes for those working-class people currently excluded.
Fundamentally, housing is only as scarce a resource as we want it to be. There is a choice for everyone here. We can accept the status quo of scarcity and fight over prioritising certain groups, or we can build more. Too many in politics choose the former. Choosing the short-lived dopamine of the reactionary, rather than building the case for something better.
More than half a million Londoners now live in flat shares. The average private rent in London is nearly £27,480 a year. London is adding 33,000 homes a year, while its population is projected to rise by around half a million over the next decade. If tensions feel high today, imagine what they will look like after another decade of failure.
[Further reading: Thomas Heatherwick and architecture’s culture war]
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