Embrace Nye Bevan’s hopes for social housing
For generations, social housing has played a vital role in meeting the housing needs of people across the country for those unable to buy their own homes.
Social housing has given millions the quality and dignity of life that insecure and unaffordable private renting struggled to provide.
Social housing in this country dates back as far as the late 19th century, but it wasn’t until the 1919 Housing and Town Planning Act that the government embarked on the first comprehensive plan to build social housing.
Led by councils, this was the foundation of a large-scale programme of building that stretched all the way through to the latter half of the 20th century.
After the Second World War, governments were faced with the persistent problem of private rented slums, the destruction of war, and the need to house returning soldiers.
They set out an even bigger vision for social housing and postwar governments of differing parties carried out programmes of social housebuilding that provided the stability of long-term tenancies at low rents to millions.
In the three-and-a-half-decades after the end of World War Two, local authorities and housing associations built 4.4 million social homes at an average of more than 126,000 a year.
Minimum standards for council-owned homes were rolled back during the 1930s Depression, but they were reintroduced by Aneurin Bevan, who became Clement Attlee’s Minister of Health.
In a Parliamentary Speech of 1949, Bevan said: “We should try to introduce in our modern villages and towns what was always the lovely feature of English and Welsh villages, where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street.
“I believe that is essential for the full life of citizen, to see the living tapestry of a mixed community.”
At the end of the 1970s, more than 40 per cent of people lived in stable social housing.
However, the Right to Buy in 1980 allowed council tenants to buy their home from the state with a discount of up to 70 per cent of its market value.
Between 1980 and 2015, it resulted in the sale of more than 2.8 million dwellings and by 2016-18, just 17 per cent of households in England rented their homes from a local authority or housing association.
The Housing Act 1988 was an attempt to return to social housebuilding, led by housing associations backed by private finance.
Since then, housing associations have delivered most of the very low numbers of new social homes built in recent years.
As a result, social homes have been sold off faster than they have been replaced.
In their 2019 election manifestos, all the main political parties included commitments to increase housing supply in England but there is now a backlog of need.
When people are unable to access suitable housing it can result in overcrowding, young people living with parents for longer, impaired labour mobility, which makes it harder for businesses to recruit staff, and increased levels of homelessness.
It is the task of all those involved in the provision of housing to address these serious issues, so that we can perhaps embrace the 1949 views of Nye Bevan to see
,the “living tapestry of a mixed community”.