There are very few areas of policy more political than planning. Within the scope of the debate on planning, there are few areas more political than housing policy.
Locally not only is the management and planning of housing stock the subject of political questions, it is also extremely contentious.
To demonstrate this point we can isolate a couple of new housing developments on Teesside that have been met with strong opposition from existing local communities.
Firstly we can look at the development now underway at the Grey Towers Farm site in Nunthorpe. This is a project of David Wilson Homes (a subsidiary of Barratts) to build a 295 home conurbation of larger ‘executive’ style properties for private sale over the next 10 years.
Before permission was granted by Middlesbrough Council’s planning committee, the plans were controversial enough to provoke a 3,000 strong signature petition opposing the scheme. The objections were various, ranging from concerns of horse-riders about the loss of a popular bridleway, concerns about access to the estate via the creation of an additional exit on the busy Poole Roundabout, to concerns about increased traffic on the already heavily congested Marton Road.
The site is also not only ‘Green field’ land, but an area of significant natural drainage prone to flooding during periods of heavy rainfall. Once this is covered in tarmac and new drainage installed to clear away water from what would previously have been standing lakes gradually absorbed by the field, there is a clearly increased risk of flooding to lower lying parts of South Middlesbrough in Nunthorpe and Marton.
So controversial did these plans prove, the Nunthorpe Parish Council went so far as to petition to transfer out of the Middlesbrough municipal boundaries in the hopes of scuppering the development.
Another stretch of local green belt land soon to be given over to property developers, in this example Taylor Wimpey, is at Galley Hill Farm, in Guisborough.
In this case the local planning committee had actually rejected the planning application for 350 new houses on the site by 10-1, with objections about access, road safety, overpopulation of Guisborough and, significantly, that the proposals fell outside the Council’s own local development plan.
Once Taylor Wimpey appealed the decision and the Government appointed an inspector to lead an inquiry the Council quickly withdrew its objections.
There are many more examples where this pattern is followed. Locally and nationally, the story is consistent. A political blog with a readership such as this site enjoys does however provide a useful platform for me to make two arguments here. First, that the entire national housing model has reverted back to the pre-war position in that it is largely market-led and has little regard to locally-defined planning needs and priorities. Furthermore, that these new applications for significant housing developments do little or nothing to address any of the underlying causes of the housing crisis as exists in this country.
Secondly to make the argument that this is also a reflection of the barren status of modern local government generally and to question what the approach of activists should be to local politics given these facts, particularly given the recent result of the Middlesbrough Mayoral referendum in September.
First of all, socialist principles should always be dictated to by the needs of the working class population (a social class that as I define it includes not simply manual labourers but working professionals, students, pensioners, the disabled and the families of all the above – in other words the vast majority of the population). Central to these needs will always be somewhere decent to live.
A good starting point therefore would be the recognition that the most successful policies on housing and planning ever enacted were socialist in character, driven through by Aneurin Bevan as Housing Minister in the wake of the carnage of the Second World War.
In 1945, of course, the population’s housing needs were severe. The incoming Housing Minister Nye Bevan was faced with an enormous task not just to overcome the legacy of the war, but also the legacy of pre-war housing policy. Before the war there were 350,000 houses built per year under the stewardship of Winston Churchill. Most of these, however, were built for the middle classes, for sale. Only one in every fifteen new houses went towards relieving overcrowding or slum clearance.
The task was made more difficult by the fact that the pre-war house-building machine had been dependent on a work force of over one million men, most of whom were now part of the armed forces.
Of the 12 ½ million houses in Britain in 1939, one in three was damaged in the war. Of the houses that escaped damage, they had not been repaired in the entire six year period. Furthermore, to add to the physical difficulty of the task, the post-war years saw an 11% increase in the rate of marriages and a 33% increase in the rate of births. Bevan defended himself from the taunts of Churchill when the latter derided him for the initial slow rate of house-building, which contrasted with romantic Tory figures for 750,000 or so houses being required. For Bevan the real task, as had been demanded in the election manifesto, was to build good homes – to raise the standards of living to something resembling comfort for as many people as possible.
Michael Foot, in his biography of Bevan, was prepared to defend his stance:
“To build good houses for poor people on a huge scale was something that had never been accomplished in modern industrial societies. Often, as in the Britain of the thirties, the spur had come from the slackness of the economy as a whole. After 1945, the instruments for a house-building programme had to be assembled virtually from scratch and it had to be inserted into an economy where all the hundred and one materials required were scarce and insistently needed for other purposes. Yet the situation had one advantage to set against all the disadvantages. Except in the case of temporary houses, no irrevocable decisions had been taken. Bevan could make his own plan and could be judged on his own performance, not someone else’s.”
In order to stay true to his long-term goals, he desperately needed to find homes for 116,229 families by the end of 1946. This was remedied by a string of policies: priority to the repair of war-damaged houses, which made 60,000 suitable for occupation again; local authorities were instructed to requisition 77,000 unoccupied premises; the practice of converting homes to offices was banned; and a ‘share your house’ appeal was made to the public, aided through policies lifting the legal burdens on the installation of sinks and cookers –a policy that allowed multiple families to have their own facilities within a single, shared house.
Another feature that explains what might have underlain the almost unrecognisable politics of that time was precisely that public spirit of solidarity. My own Grandparents were part of that post-war generation of new families looking for accommodation. My Grandma once wrote about it:
“During the summer of 1946 we were urgently seeking a home as our first child Andrew was on the way. We decided that an empty army hut would make ideal accommodation for families like us and there was an empty army camp at Great Bounds Estate the other side of the common.”
It was a popular practice. My Grandma continues:
“... one weekend Bill and his father squatted in the best one, namely the NAAFI offices. Squatting was going on all over the country in ex-army camps. Within 48 hours the whole camp was occupied, people came from all over the country. The local council were forced eventually to make the camp habitable and re-instate the toilets and electricity and they also provided little cooking ranges. And of course, they had to accept rent which they were reluctant to do at first because they didn’t want to be responsible for the camp.”
Are there much better examples of the population taking it upon themselves to make the most of the resources available for their own benefit? It is only speculation, but presumably had there been a Churchill Government from 1945 onwards practices such as this would have been frowned upon as undermining the property rights of developers and landlords. The idea of setting up homes in the non-derequisitioned huts was adapted by Communists in London, organising what they called ‘the Great Sunday Squat’ in an empty block of flats in Kensington. It was in that summer of 1946, whilst the housing queues were growing, that my Grandparents were among those who took direct action, not wanting to wait for Government assistance. In many localities there was soon popular support for the squatting communities.
“Our hut was divided with a wall across the middle with a door through to the front half which was divided in two, so we had a living room and two bedrooms. One of these rooms had shelves of paving slabs making cubby holes for the offices. Bill and various friends and relatives moved these and made steps up the bank outside the front door. Relatives also gave us items of furniture and in no time we had most of what we needed including a carpet. It was really very comfortable. A little breeze block room was already attached at the back, so this was our kitchen...
At weekends visitors used to come and see these people who had squatted in the army camp and I often invited people to come and see how nice we had made it. Council Officials came sometimes to inspect living conditions and were very surprised at what they saw. I think they wanted an excuse to condemn the camp, but until they could offer an alternative accommodation there was nothing they could do. On the whole families living in the camp were friendly and there was no rowdiness.”
‘Was it not clear,’ asked Michael Foot, ‘that full employment, fuller wage packets, the fact that people were now being encouraged to demand a house of their own, were multiplying Bevan’s difficulties as Housing Minister? ‘Dissatisfaction with the Government’, [Bevan] said in an interview at the end of 1946, ‘is the real dynamic of democracy, the elemental force of political action. How on earth can people be satisfied when the lack of houses is such a fertile source of human misery?’ Then, as usual with him, his own eloquence opened wider vistas. ‘A society in which the people’s wants do not exceed their possessions is not a Socialist society. That sort of satisfaction is not Socialism, it is senility’
Bevan placed almost the entire responsibility on the 1,700-odd local authorities, county boroughs, and urban and rural district councils. He charged them with drawing up their own programmes, preparing the sites, making the contracts with private builders or establishing direct labour departments, fixing the rents, allocating the tenants and supervising the estates thereafter. This was a revolutionary change from the pre-war practice, where house-building had been left in the main to the operation of the free market, to speculative builders producing for profit; under Bevan, even when a small proportion of houses was to be built for sale (one in five was the suggestion at the outset), permits had to be secured from the local authority.
The logic behind choosing local authorities as the instrument was twofold. First, the conclusion that it was the best way of ensuring the homes went to those with the greatest need. This is fairly obvious as it meant councils would be the ones selecting the tenants, not the private builders. Second because the aims would not have been realised without a strong element of practical planning; something that would have been impossible had the responsibility been left exclusively to the speculators.
As stated, Bevan’s concerns were not dominated exclusively by numbers. What sort of houses, how should they look, what they would be like to live in and where should they be built were equally important questions. These ideas were addressed by Bevan in his first housing speech in the House of Commons. He condemned the entire pre-war system of house-building, claiming that it produced ‘castrated communities’. He was referring to how property speculators would build houses for the higher income group, and local councils would build for the lower. He called it a ‘wholly evil thing from a civilised point of view, condemned by anyone who has paid the slightest attention to civics and eugenics; a monstrous infliction upon the essential psychological and biological one-ness of the community’.
Of course this notion was near-revolutionary. Bevan’s intent was to liberate his people from servitude to capitalist machinations, and this was why his position was informed by practical desires for comfortable living (and thus a higher standard of life generally) rather than the minimum necessities to keep workers alive (and thus fit to work):
“After all, you know, a man wants three houses in his lifetime: one when he gets married, one when the family is growing up, and one when he is old; but very few of us can afford one.’ A much wider embrace of municipal ownership could offer a tentative solution to these complexities. By the same reasoning, local authorities should strive to find hospitality for all age groups on their estates. ‘I hope that the old people will not be asked to live in colonies of their own – they do not want to look out of their windows on endless processions of the funerals of their friends; they also want to look at processions of perambulators... The full life should see the unfolding of a multi-coloured panorama before the eyes of every citizen every day.”
For Bevan, the application of standards was paramount. Herbert Morrison called him a ‘perfect Tory’ for insisting on inside lavatories. He rejected the pre-war house size of 750 square feet for a three bedroom house, and the proposal in a Ministry of Housing manual from 1944 for 800 square feet. He adopted the suggestion of the Earl of Dudley that such a home should be at least 900 square feet, plus 50 for storage. He encouraged and challenged the local authorities to do even better than that. ‘The distinctions,’ wrote Michael Foot, ‘may sound trivial, but they soon became topics of controversy’.
“Could not more be saved, without reducing the actual living space, by making the passageways narrower, the larders fewer, the walls thinner? Could not more houses be built if these minor adjustments were permitted? The answer was plain; they could. But from 1945-1950 Bevan, the alleged demagogue, refused to increase the number of houses he could claim to have built by yielding to the demand. To cut standards, he insisted, was ‘the coward’s way out’. It would be, in his own words ‘a cruel thing to do. After all, people will have to live in and among these houses for many years. Enough damage has already been done to the face of England by irresponsible people. If we have to wait a little longer, that will be far better than doing ugly things now and regretting them for the rest of our lives.’”
The fact is, the policy was a successful one and the parallels to the modern difficulties are obvious even if the demographics and needs are different. The fundamental task of both modernising the country’s housing stock and meeting the accommodation needs of the population still cannot be achieved without the strong hand of democratic bodies.
This was recognised by a biography of Middlesbrough by the Borough Librarian William Lillie, published in 1953 to commemorate the centenary of the town’s incorporation. Looking at the initial growth of the town, it was very obvious that the expansion was so rapid the main problem had always been one of housing the people who live here. ‘The broad streets and their symmetrical layout,’ the book explains, ‘give evidence of some planning but, because in the old days means of transport were not so readily available as they are now, houses had to be built near to where the men worked and the results can clearly be seen in the large numbers of houses closely packed in the streets in the centre of the town’.
Middlesbrough town council recognised before even the War that the whole town could not be remodelled without a tremendous amount of planning and to this end in 1944 they commissioned Max Lock to publish his plan for the reconstruction and development of the town.
By 1945 the town Corporation had a waiting list of six thousand families without homes of their own, not to mention many more thousands living in overcrowded conditions or in unsatisfactory dwellings. As the Council had no land immediately available for building they ‘tackled those builders who had sites partially, if not completely, equipped with roads, sewers and drainage, and made arrangements with them to buy all the houses they could build. This became known as the Direct Purchase of Houses scheme, and the lead given to the country by Middlesbrough was soon followed by most other local authorities’.
In the seven years following the end of the Second World War the Corporation built over 4,000 houses, with a further 500 built by private builders for sale across entirely new housing sites in Thorntree, around Cumberland Road, at Beechwood and Saltersgill, and then eventually at what is now Pallister and Park End.
Crucially, these were low density, low-rise housing estates. Homes designed for young families with communal green areas and many of the houses having small gardens of their own. All of these developments were essentially state-led and allowed for clearance out from the inner-city, high density ‘slum’ housing in areas such as St Hilda’s and Newport as built by private builders and owned for rent by charlatan private landlords.
If this housing model was so successful, how therefore have we arrived at today’s housing crisis?
The answer is simple: that all Governments from Thatcher onwards, motivated by the ideological desire to roll back the ‘intrusion’ of the state in the housing market, have taken us back to a privatised system of planning and development.
The symptoms of the housing crisis, however, are not simply a shortage of new housing. It involves many strands, chief among which is the affordability of accommodation. Research by Shelter suggests that in 55% of local authority areas typical private rents are unaffordable to the average working family when compared with stagnating wages. This has led to a situation where, nationwide, there are in excess of 2 million families stuck on seemingly impenetrable waiting lists for social housing.
No surprises, therefore, that we have seen a rise in people – particularly single young people, and particularly people who for various reasons may not have the luxury option of remaining with parents or abusive partners, for example – sleeping rough. There has also been an obvious rise in the numbers of people stuck in temporary accommodation, or having been referred to ‘sheltered housing’ providers or private landlords by charities.
Nor is the picture particularly rosy for those in owner-occupation of their homes. In 2004 the number of mortgage repossessions by lenders stood at 8,200. In 2012 the rate stood at over 35,000, with over 160,000 mortgage accounts estimated to be in arrears, many of which will be subject to suspended court orders for possession themselves.
We should also recognise the additional modern phenomenon of young people simply unable to move out from under the feet of their parents – itself having very little to do with a shortage of newly built properties available for sale and much more to do with the enduring hangover of the house price bubble of the last decade. Faced with the option of privately renting a home at a rate leaving very little surplus cash at the end of each month, or spending an infinity trying to save for a deposit, remaining ‘at home’ has become the most practical option for many thousands of young adults across the country.
It is the whole housing model that is therefore broken, and the roots of the problems we face can be easily traced back to their source. In fact, the modern housing model is one that has been based on an entirely ideological preference for owner-occupation. In 1979 just 11% of households had owner-occupied status, compared with a 2005 high of 71%.
The first cause of this was the Right to Buy scheme brought in by the Thatcher government in 1980, which allowed (and indeed encouraged) social housing tenants to purchase their then council-owned properties at a rate well below market value. The policy was combined with a slashing of public housing budgets leading to a fall in the social housing stock available and a deliberately-engineered backlog of council housing repairs.
The financial straightjackets then imposed on local councils by the late 1980s and then onwards forced many into a position where they transferred their remaining housing stock into non-profit housing associations (Regulated Social Landlords). The RSLs had greater powers of borrowing, greater flexibility to increase rents in accordance with local market rates, and greater ability to evict tenants, all of which allowed for potential for investment in improvements.
The alternatives to stock transfer included introducing ‘Arm’s Length Management Organisations’ or direct council-led investment in improvements funded through the Private Finance Initiative.
Between 1980 and 2009 a total of 4.39m social houses were sold off or demolished: 2.75m through Right To Buy, 1.4m through stock transfer, and 0.24m through demolition.
The Housing Green Paper ‘A Decent Home For All’ in 2000, brought in under the progressive cover of introducing a minimum ‘decent’ standard of home, aimed for the transfer of an average of 200,000 properties per year to RSLs, up to 2010.
Given the circumstances, and given during more prosperous times fuelled by cheaper rates of more easily accessible borrowing, the notion of setting up non-profit housing associations as a vehicle for funding improvements to remaining social housing stock was understandably popular with local councillors and social tenants themselves (who after all were all balloted on the question).
The privatisation of the majority of the housing supply was one of the more significant engines of economic growth between ‘Black Wednesday’ in 1992 and the great financial crash of 2008. In an economy with structural mass unemployment, ‘flexible’ labour markets and weak trade unions wages for those other than a small minority at the top essentially stagnated during this period, more or less bumping along with the rate of inflation. Not only this, but the other components of the welfare state, such as the utilities, transport, and state pensions, were in continuous retreat from people’s lives.
The consequences that these policies would have had for living standards were offset for enough people (‘swing voters’; ‘the squeezed middle’) by continually rising house prices, allowing for private household borrowing against equity in privately-owned property.
A bonanza for the lending industry this may have been, but as we have seen from 2008 onwards this was a fatally flawed economic model adopted on both sides of the Atlantic. The decline in house construction that led to over-inflated house prices also lead to a toxic situation where many first-time buyers with limited housing options other than to purchase a property of their own could not afford on their incomes to enter the market without mortgage lenders engaging in supremely risky, ‘sub-prime’ lending.
A whole industry was then built up on the invention of imaginative financial packages and ‘products’ for hiding these bad debts. The City of London was the world leader in this industry. Inevitably, when default on repayment of bad debts led to the sub-prime crisis in America, collapse in market confidence in investment banks who were heavily vested in these products led to a general collapse in the financial sector as a whole and with it the British economy by now overly-dependent on the Square Mile for tax revenue.
Far from seeking to reassess the basic economic system that lay at root cause of the crash, the incoming Tory-Lib Dem Coalition instead looked to press ahead even more rapidly with the privatisation of the housing sector in a number of ways.
These include cuts to housing benefit that will have an especially foul impact in London, where thousands of lower income families will be priced out of high-rent areas in inner-London. Also the introduction of the ‘Affordable Rent’ funding model, which effectively forces councils to charge 80% of market rates on new homes and replacing lifetime social tenancies with as little as two-year tenancies. The legal right to a secure council tenancy has been removed, forcing people into the private rented sector at public expense. The scope of types of accommodation that can now be contracted out as temporary accommodation has been expanded to include mobile homes and even in some cases, boats.
Furthermore we have seen the reintroduction of a means test, forcing people out of social housing when their incomes reach a certain level without any regard for their ability to afford private rents or to available local housing supplies.
The last 30 years of housing policy has therefore been to purge Bevan and introduce an ugly hierarchy, a form of almost economic apartheid, where social housing providers accommodate one income group and where owner-occupation is presented as a symbol of affluence and aspiration.
What is more the incumbent Government intends to ‘finish the job’ with public housing through a series of benefit reforms entirely intended to attack social housing providers. The ‘Bedroom Tax’ for example has next to nothing to do with re-prioritising housing stock and instead will force housing providers to rebuild or reclassify a significant proportion of their existing portfolios to rehouse people into properties that would not be classified as under-occupied by the Government’s rather arbitrary standards.
The potential consequence of the bedroom tax is that social housing providers will not only have to build one bedroom properties, but to allow an increase in the proportion of their portfolios that exist as one bedroom properties – a practice that is both inefficient and undesirable.
The introduction of Universal Credit is also estimated to have an impact given the anticipated increase in rent arrears. This will drive up the administrative costs incurred by Housing Associations, such as legal and insurance, as well as pushing up their borrowing costs due to greater risk of default. All of which will impact on the bodies’ ability to invest in new housing and maintenance of existing stock.
Not only this, but unless the Government’s jaundiced welfare cap is indexed to inflation the rents charged on larger properties needed to house larger families will become unaffordable and thus unworkable from the point of view of providers.
So we see that the question of housing is considerably more nuanced than simply numbers of houses. The problems in housing are in a shortage of affordable housing, with vast waiting lists for social housing, social housing providers restricted in their ability to meet demand effectively, private rents at rates that take up almost all of a household’s disposable income, and houses for sale at prices that require vast deposits against mortgages that are out of reasonable reach of people who otherwise might comfortably afford monthly subscription rates.
Might I therefore encourage considerable reluctance on the part of socialist activists and Labour councillors from the temptation to frame arguments over housing developments as one of prejudice and snobbery versus allegedly socially progressive construction of new homes.
The answer to our housing difficulties lies not in allowing ourselves to act as unwitting mouthpieces for profiteering property speculators, who have no social responsibilities, who have vested interests in unmet demand in the housing market to prop up eventual sale prices, who prefer to build either on more aesthetically attractive green belt land or in the place of sold-off public facilities where infrastructure already exists, and who are not motivated by philanthropic desires to comply with local housing priorities.
The irony of course is that so often the arguments over proposed developments takes precisely this form: labour run councils versus local busybodies in Tory-voting electoral wards.
This is particularly ironic given that it is a Conservative Government, elected with the help of donations from property developers, that has pushed local councils into a position where they have little ability to actually resist planning applications even where these are strongly opposed by the local population.
Councils already, for example, had a statutory duty to make a minimum number of hectares of land within their boundaries available for new house construction each year. Furthermore councils as stripped back corporate bodies find themselves in competition with neighbouring boroughs for council tax revenue, leaving council executives biased towards development of new higher bracket housing estates to limit population decline. Developers can also sweeten the deal with so-called ‘s.108 agreements’ in which they stump up often comparatively small offers of funding contributions to social projects the councils may be engaged in, and then usually prove reluctant to actually stump up the goods.
The Cameron Government has tipped the scales even further in favour of the developers. First by ‘reforms’ to bring in a default presumption in favour of planning permission for new housing developments. Second by implementing significant cuts to central government grants to cash-strapped local authorities and then bribing councils through a fund put aside for the ‘new homes bonus’ and money for road improvements where they give the green light to planning applications. Third by lifting the restrictions on developments on green field sites, and finally by introducing the ‘Help to Buy’ scheme. This scheme is only available on newly built properties despite hundreds of existing privately owned properties having been on the market for long periods of time as it is. The effect of this will do nothing to relieve the symptoms of the housing crisis I identified earlier and will instead only serve to push up the sale price of newly built houses.
The real solution to the housing crisis is obvious, and has been obvious to both campaign groups and also grassroots Labour Party members for the better part of the last decade. There needs to be a considerable programme of house building, but this needs to be new social housing. Three successive labour party conferences from 2006 to 2008 endorsed the so-called ‘4thoption’ calling for direct investment in council house building.
Such a programme would not only help to meet the political goals of economic stimulus, job creation and reduction in homelessness, it would also relieve social housing waiting lists and thus bring genuine choice into the housing market, bringing down private rents in the process. There would be social advantages too, as communities would be less castrated and segregated according to income groups. If this can be done, it also moves away from the preference for owner-occupation as accommodation status currently held by both individual households and government. This would, incidentally, help to bring down house prices without having to contend with messy local arguments about behemoth private housing developments.
Such a radical policy position is unlikely, however, unless and until we prick the myth that property ownership is always a route out of poverty. A recent TUC pamphlet written by the Fabian Society sought precisely to tackle these myths. In the report, ‘Can Housing Work for Workers’, a number of arguments are made.
One looks at the fact that in 2008/9 poverty before housing costs studies show that 53% of those living in what is defined as poverty are in fact owner-occupiers. As high as 31% of these own their properties outright, due to the fact that many people, mostly pensioners, are asset-rich but income-poor. When rates of poverty after housing costs are studied, a full 25% (some 2.1 million working age people) of those in poverty are living in mortgaged, owner-occupied properties.
Put simply, for a significant proportion of homeowners their tenure status is not a means of rising living standards or social status but more a reflection of the fact that monthly mortgage subscriptions tend to be cheaper than monthly rents for similar size properties. Being the registered proprietor of the title with the Land Registry does not provide any protection to your home should you encounter even a modest impact on your income or outgoings.
Not only this, but the pamphlet also makes a further interesting point. Some £2 trillion worth of wealth in the UK is tied up in housing as a consequence of the obsession with ownership – wealth that could otherwise be utilised for investment in industry and innovation.
If this year’s Labour Party Conference gives any indications, it does seem that party policy is moving in a more progressive direction. Pledges included increasing construction of affordable housing to 200,000 per year by 2020, a ‘use-it-or-lose-it’ policy to prevent the owners of land suitable for development either from holding out for higher premiums or from perpetrating an abuse of the planning system by holding back on development which is then pushed onto more lucrative Greenfield sites.
There are several other methods for achieving the re-expansion of the State’s role in housing, should the need for this finally be accepted, which in my view should accompany this scheme. An example would be for an end to PFI but delivering on banking reforms to allow for affordable lending to local authorities and social housing providers to invest in the construction of new social housing. We should also consider a demand for a government fund through which owner-occupiers of former right to buy properties whose security of tenure is threatened by financial difficulties leading to mortgage arrears, to revert ownership back to local authorities who can then lease the property back at an affordable rate of rent.
This would represent an expansion of the progressive Mortgage Rescue Scheme brought in during the dog days of the dying Gordon Brown Government in 2010. Under the scheme households that meet a priority need under the 1996 Housing Act, where at least one member of the house is in full time work and where the property itself is valued at under £120,000, can sell their home to the Government, redeem their mortgage, and then rent the property back without having to be evicted. At present, however, borrowers have to have essentially hit rock bottom before qualifying for assistance under the scheme. If the scope were extended this would also, in the long term, help to grow the publicly owned housing stock.
Reinstating the Bevanite vision, adapted for 2013, with mixed tenure communities and housing choice that functions effectively and for the benefit of the public, also requires a general reversal on the attacks on local democracy that have also been a feature of the last 30 years.
Transport, housing and planning have all been privatised. Local government has been reduced to, in essence, an arm of central government responsible for rationing out the provision of certain statutory services. More worrying has been the entirely false ‘localism’ paradigm pushed by the political Right. Greater powers given to councils to raise the highly regressive council tax have sat alongside reductions in central government funding from progressive general taxation.
Authorities also enjoy the unpleasant privilege of existing as corporate bodies in their own right whilst being governed by statutory restrictions on their abilities to raise funds through borrowing and to trade as a company. Communities with the greater needs, therefore, have become increasingly liable for meeting the costs of maintaining the services they depend upon.
What is more, the introduction of right-wing gimmicks such as Police and Crime Commissioners and elected town Mayors have served only to reduce the influence of elected councillors in seeking to ensure that the population is adequately represented.
Policy is increasingly determined by non-elected council executives, informed by personal relationships with board members of other local corporate bodies such as housing associations, businesses, arms-length development corporations, private sector providers of services, GP Commissioning groups, local enterprise partnerships or Academy and free school principals.
It is no coincidence that early in the lifetime of the Cameron government there was a spate of referenda in various towns and cities on the introduction of more executive mayors. The Tories know all too well that had they been successful in that push they could have at a stroke neutered potential opposition from council chambers, and use powers of patronage to ram through the decisions of civil servants.
It is therefore with a sad note that we recognise the result of the recent referendum in Middlesbrough on whether to retain a directly-elected mayor. The result stands, but my only hope is that we can elect a political activist with proper regard to the social needs and aspirations of the people, and somebody who can articulate a fight against government policy. This is essential if we are to work with the public and with Council employees to ensure that social services for the most vulnerable residents (described by Ray Mallon in a 2004 radio interview with BBC Cleveland’s Mark Turnbull as a sponge on resources) and the public workforce do not bear the brunt of cuts.
Certainly we need to avoid a power grab by a hypothetical candidate who would serve only as a representative of local business, and whose own business model has involved profiteering on the back of the on-going fire sale of public land and assets by Middlesbrough Council.
The debate on replacing local government with genuine local democracy is a national one. Perhaps however we can use the opportunity of a mayoral election to begin that debate here on Teesside.
Joe Culley
