Tackling Britain's Housing Crisis Modules 1&2

Housing Modules

1. Introductory module: (This is an introductory module to introduce the issues that need to be unpacked if we are to be effectively campaigning as well as engaging with and contributing to policy developments in this field) The current housing crisis: what housing crisis? And what’s to do about it?

Britain has a housing crisis – of that there seems to be little doubt. But what exactly do we mean by this? Whose housing crisis? And why do we have a housing crisis in the first place?

Homelessness: housing need at the extreme: One place to start might be with the facts about increasing homelessness. More people are sleeping on the streets, in doorways and under bridges because they don’t have access to any kind of housing at all. Rough sleeping has been on the increase every year since 2010, with a total rise of 169% - the sharpest and most visible sign of Britain’s housing crisis.

Rough sleepers

This is seriously dangerous for the people concerned – rough sleepers have very different life expectancies from the rest of us. And they are only too vulnerable to violence and sexual abuse.

Rough sleepers tend to be amongst the most vulnerable in society, in any case. People with mental health problems are disproportionately at risk. So are those who have been traumatised by experiences of violence, including disproportionate numbers of those who have served in the armed forces. And young people are amongst the most vulnerable of all, especially young people who have been in care, for whatever reason. Youth homelessness has been increasing – with nearly half of those in homeless accommodation under the age of 24 years (2014 figures, Homeless Link 2015.3).

Being homeless can have drastic effects on young people’s educational opportunities and future life chances.

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Temporary accommodation The growth in rough sleeping illustrates the housing crisis at its most extreme. When faced with the threat of becoming homeless, families with children are supposed to have other options - the opportunity to be re-housed in temporary accommodation. Last year (2016) 124,000 children woke up on Christmas morning in temporary accommodation – Bed and Breakfasts and /or hostels - a 10% increase on the previous year (Independent 17/12/16). Better than being on the streets – better even than a manger in a stable perhaps - but still not exactly most people’s idea of home on Christmas morning.

Bed and breakfast accommodation is not even cost effective as a policy option. On the contrary, this is a very expensive way for local authorities to provide what is typically very inappropriate accommodation for those in direst housing need.

At the end of 2016 the housing charity, Shelter, estimated that 250,000 people were homeless, if those in temporary accommodation and hostels were included – a quarter of a million people in dire housing need. London has been the most affected but other hotspots include Birmingham, Brighton and Luton. And these figures take no account of ‘sofa surfers’ – those who are managing to avoid sleeping on the streets by staying with family and/ or friends, sleeping on their sofas - increasingly common, particularly amongst young people who are unable to afford a place of their own.

So who actually becomes categorised as ‘homeless’? This has been increasingly contested, as eligibility has been redefined - effectively rationing support for homeless people, as a result.

Rather than tackle the underlying causes of the housing crisis from the 1980s and 1990s onwards, Conservative governments have been pushing market-led agendas, promoting the privately rented sector whilst cutting back on social welfare benefits. These changes have been impacting especially harshly on those aged under 25 years old. Despite initiatives to tackle rough sleeping, homelessness has continued to rise overall.

Poor housing: Then what about those who do have a home? How might the housing crisis be affecting them – if at all? Shelter, estimates that four out of every ten homes in Britain today fail to make the grade in terms of the Living Home Standard -what makes a home a home. Poor conditions were found to be widespread, with too many homes overcrowded and/or lacking basic repairs and maintenance.

Damp and mould were found to be all too common, along with pest infestation.

Council housing has generally offered better standards. Repairs and maintenance issues have been continuing concerns for council tenants too, but at least they have been able to express these concerns – without risking evictions from their landlords, in revenge (or mostly – there have been exceptions here, tenants not being listened to, and tenants being bullied Insecurity is a major problem in the privately rented sector though. Landlords can fail to renew such tenancies, if tenants complain about poor maintenance and repairs. And landlords can keep raising their rents, each time tenancies come up for renewal, thereby pricing their existing tenants out of their homes. This is the single most significant cause of rising homelessness at the present time 2

These issues emerged particularly starkly in the tragic case of the Grenfell Tower in June 2017, the chronicle of a tragedy foretold. Although this was council property the management functions had been subcontracted to the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, part of wider processes of ‘marketisation’ – opening the public sector up to private contractors, enabling them to make profits from the provision of public services. Two of the tenants of Grenfell Tower had actually been threatened with eviction by this tenant management organisation, as a result of their complaints about safety. These were complaints that were to prove all too justified in the fire that swept through the tower block, causing so many fatalities as a result. The victims of this fire didn’t just die, they were killed. Their deaths were the result of cuts, outsourcing and deregulation. But when tenants raised their concerns they were threatened – and ignored.

Tenants have had greater security of tenure in the past, together with statutory protection, regulating rents, hard won rights as the result of previous tenants’ struggles. But from the 1980s successive Conservative housing acts shifted the balance of advantage towards private landlords, undermining tenants’ security of tenure whilst removing their protection from unfair rent increases.

Security of tenure remains a key demand for private tenants along with the right to be protected from unfair rent rises.

Scene from ‘Cathy Come Home’, Ken Loach’s film about a family that becomes homeless- a film that led to the development of Shelter, the organisation that campaigns on homelessness

Tenants of social landlords -local authorities and housing associations – have more security, generally – at least for the present (more about potential threats to social housing tenants’ security of tenure, later in this course). But the waiting lists for social housing are daunting, to say the least.

There are some 19,000 households on the waiting list in just one London borough, the London borough of Islington, for example. How many of these are likely to be rehoused any time soon? Last year the council was only able to let 1,200 properties – 6% of those on the housing register as being 3

in housing need. Genuinely affordable homes with security of tenure are in such dramatically short supply.

At the time of writing, the Housing and Planning Act is still on the statute book, representing yet further threats, despite vigorous campaigning from tenants and residents, backed by a broad alliances of trade unionists and other activists. The housing crisis could be expected to escalate even further if the Housing and Planning Act were to be implemented more extensively.

The list could go on –we will be working through these issues, (including the implications of the Housing and Planning Act) unpacking them in more detail as the modules move on. The point to emphasise here is simply this, that whichever way you look at it the housing crisis is on the increase. - People are experiencing this housing crisis in varying ways. But overall the situation is getting worse and worse So what needs to be done?

Build more homes?

One of the most frequent responses to the housing crisis is to argue for building more houses and flats. As an article in the Guardian (Monday 9 January 2017) pointed out, the scale of the housing crisis is as great now as it was in 1951 (when Britain’s housing stock had been devastated by bombs during the Second World War). The then housing minister, Harold Macmillan, pledged to build 300,000 houses a year, a pledge that was actually met, with the construction of 348,000 new homes in 1954, 239,580 of which were council houses. This could be achieved then. Where there’s a will there’s a way and ‘yes, we can’.

But has there been the political will to address the challenges to be faced, taking on the vested interested involved, including the development and construction industries. And facing up to the procedural and financial barriers to be overcome? More about all these barriers to follow in subsequent modules.

Meanwhile subsequent achievements have been so much more modest. From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s fewer than 30,000 social housing homes were being built a year - and subsequent figures have been even worse.

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In their manifestos for the 2017 General Election both Labour and Conservative parties pledged their commitments to massive housebuilding programmes (although there are major differences between the Labour and Conservative manifestos’ approaches, as subsequent modules will be exploring in more detail). If only we could achieve such building programmes, it has been argued, we could solve the housing crisis for good and all.

Or could we?

Building new homes sounds like common sense, doesn’t it? More homes to house the homeless, with new and better-quality homes for the poorly housed. But is the answer actually that simple?

More homes for whom?

That same Guardian article went on to point out that more of these new homes should be for rent, rather than for sale to those who can afford to buy them. Housing costs have risen faster than earnings, much faster in fact, with rising rents as well as rising house priced. This makes it so much harder for people, especially young people, to save enough to put down a deposit on a home of their own, let alone to be able to afford the mortgage, subsequently. This is a massive constraint in London, most particularly (where house prices rose by over 100% between 2005 and 2017) the most extreme examples of a wider set of problems across the country (where house prices rose by some 44% over the same period). Home ownership has been falling from 71% of households in 2003 to 64% in 2016, as a result, with the sharpest fall for the under 45 year olds. So building more homes

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for sale isn’t going to provide all the answers. (More on homeownership and the politics of home ownership to follow in subsequent modules).

Is building more homes the answer anyway?

Not necessarily, according to some experts, including experts who are strongly committed to solving the housing crisis in socially progressive ways. According to Professor Danny Dorling, for instance ‘We have already built enough houses. We have more bedrooms than we have ever had before’ (Dorling, 2014).

This ought to be good news. But the reality is very different in his view, as ‘a few have been taking far more than their fair share, increasingly so ever since 1980; and very recently they have been taking far more again with each year that has passed since the crash (the financial crash in 2008).

Many at the top of society have been harming the rest’, he continues, pointing to the ways in which market forces and the policies of austerity have been stoking up the housing crisis, pushing up housing costs and exacerbating social inequalities more generally.

Building new homes is not going to help, in his view, if the new homes are too expensive, beyond the means of those who need them most. Nor does it help if new homes are bought up as investments in rising property prices – and kept empty while their owners accumulate the resulting capital gains.

In 2016 more than 200,000 homes were empty for at least six months – including homes that were kept empty for precisely such reasons. So market-dominated policy approaches have to be challenged, as subsequent modules explain, developing the counter arguments for building council housing as a substantial proportion of the national building programme that we so urgently need.

A block of empty flats: London has increasing numbers of such empty luxury flats, bought and sold for capital gain

Housing needs also vary from place to place, just as housing needs vary over time. As the population ages, we need more homes for single person households, for instance. And we need more homes in areas where the population is expanding rapidly, such as London.

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Danny Dorling also argues that it matters who provides housing, and under what conditions. To what extent are market forces dominating, focusing upon maximising the scope for making private profits for developers and landlords? Or conversely, to what extent are public policies intervening to prioritise the provision of housing to meet social needs?

There is increasingly wide-spread recognition that housing should be about having a home, rather than an investment opportunity. But public policies continue to be contradictory and contested, when it comes to tackling the housing crisis in practice.

Tenants in Swindon, campaigning to keep their council homes public

So is this to be housing for profit or housing for social need?

These questions need to be unpacked, if we are to understand the underlying reasons for Britain’s growing housing crisis AND, most importantly, if we are to promote the policies that will really make a difference right now AND for the future, longer term.

When you have completed this course you should: a) feel confident about discussing housing problems with people on the doorstep and in your community. b) And feel confident taking part in policy debates about: • What should be our priorities within our own areas? • And how should we be developing housing policies at the regional and national levels? c) And you should feel confident about working with others, building alliances to develop campaigning on housing issues.

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The following outline sets out the ways in which these modules will be exploring these issues in further detail: •

• • •

•

setting out the background history of the development of housing policies in Britain, including the key contributions of communities and trade unions, campaigning on housing issues in the past explaining the differences between varying approaches, focussing upon those that rely on the private market and setting out the case for developing progressive alternatives, developing public policies to meet housing needs setting housing policies within the wider policy context, taking account of the links between housing and planning, education, health and wellbeing and social welfare, to name the most evident And exploring ways of working alongside communities and trade unions, campaigning to develop progressive ways of tackling Britain’s housing crisis

The campaign against the Housing and Planning Act 2016, a broad alliance of tenants, travellers, housing workers, trade unions and other housing activists working together with progressive local councillors and MPs.

The Modules to come

2. How have housing policies developed?

This module starts with a very brief history of the development of different approaches to identifying housing crises and tackling them, from the late nineteenth/ early twentieth century onwards, through to the post war Welfare State. This illustrates the contributions of social reformers and popular movements, including tenants and residents’ movements, working with the Labour Party, trade unions and other progressive forces to campaign to: •

Build affordable, quality homes 8

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Intervene in private housing markets to safeguard quality and to provide security of tenure for tenants

3. Market-led solutions: from the’ Right to Buy’ to the current Housing and Planning Act This module provides a brief outline of the rationale for market-led solutions together with a brief outline of the accompanying political objectives of the ‘Right to Buy’ and deregulation more generally. Through these policies Tory governments have been aiming to: • • •

Promote home ownership as the preferred form of housing tenure Fragment and marginalise public housing more generally Whilst safeguarding private sector interests, including the interests of the international financial sector as well as the interests of the construction sector, private developers and landlords.

4. Developing progressive policies:

This module starts by exploring proposals for alternative approaches at the national level. The module then moves on to focus upon how to apply progressive policies to the specific needs of more local situations, taking account of demographic changes (using research findings and official data, critically). We need to understand the context, locally as well as nationally, if we are to develop relevant and effective plans for housing to meet social needs rather than for private profit by: •

• • • •

Building genuinely affordable quality housing with community facilities, taking account of the potential for including co-operative and self-build housing as well as council housing And intervening in private markets by: Campaigning for rent controls/ ‘Living Rents’ With security of tenure (for all tenants) And controls on letting agencies Plus disincentives for keeping properties empty (‘Buy for Capital Gain’)

5. Linking housing with other policy issues, including planning, education and training and health and well-being

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This module starts with a brief summary of the negative impacts of market-led approaches to planning, together with the links with other, related Tory policies including: • poor housing and environments being associated with poor health including poor mental health • the choice agenda in education (effectively pushing up house prices in particular catchment areas) • the lack of security of tenure for tenants, resulting in frequent moves, undermining children’s school performance and • The destabilising effects of housing insecurity and scarcity on local communities – displacement/ social cleansing, social churn and the damage to community support networks This provides the background for understanding the importance of developing progressive housing policies that form part of progressive strategies more widely, including progressive policies to tackle problems with wages and benefits.

6. Working with tenants and residents and trade unionists: building effective alliances for the future This final module emphasises the importance of building progressive strategies locally and regionally as well as nationally.

This includes discussion of the varying ways in which different types of organisations take decisions, so that we build alliances based upon shared understandings of different organisational structures and different organisational traditions.

The course concludes by encouraging you to work in small groups to develop strategies, building alliances for progressive housing policies at local and/ or regional/and/ or national levels.

Suggested reading: Bowie, D. (2017) Radical Solutions to the Housing Supply Crisis, Bristol: Policy Press Madden, D. and Marcuse, P. (2016) In defence of housing, London: Verso Robbins, G. (2017) There’s No Place – The American Housing Crisis and What it Means for the UK

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Module 2 How have housing policies developed? And in whose interests?

This module starts with a very brief history of the development of different approaches to identifying housing needs and tackling them. Starting from the late nineteenth/ early twentieth century the module summarises debates through to the post war Welfare State.

This illustrates the contributions of social reformers and popular movements, including tenants and residents’ movements, working with the Labour Party, trade unions and other progressive forces to campaign to: • •

Build affordable, quality homes Intervene in private housing markets to safeguard quality and to provide security of tenure for tenants

But housing has been a continuing bone of contention. Private sector interests have continually pressured governments to try to ensure that housing remains profitable – housing to yield private profits rather than housing to meet social needs.

On completing this module you will: • •

Have developed your understanding of the different contributions of social reformers and popular movements And developed your ability to evaluate the arguments about public sector versus private sector approaches to meeting housing need

Early days In pre-industrial times there were examples of philanthropic housing – alms houses provided for the deserving elderly, for instance. It was only with the Industrial Revolution and wide scale urbanisation, in the nineteenth century, that housing emerged as a significant issue for public policy. Employers needed affordable housing for their workforces, within reach of their factories. And they needed better quality housing – insanitary conditions could spread disease, posing risks to the rest of the population more generally.

The links between poor housing and ill-health represent a continuing theme in debates on housing policy.

As the nineteenth century came towards a close, it became increasingly obvious that more needed to be done. As a Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes, appointed in 1884, concluded ‘through poverty, the failure of local authorities to protect their interests and the success of the landlord class in exploiting their need, the working people in the UK were as a class ill-housed to the point of destitution’ (quoted in Mullins and 11

Murie, 2006. 18). Engels’ study of working class housing provided graphic details, illustrating the misery of living in the slums in rapidly growing cities such as Manchester.

There were examples of philanthropists, such as Peabody and Guinness, who provided better quality housing for less than the market rate, described as ‘philanthropy and 5 per cent because they were prepared to take no more than 5% profit from their ventures to house the ‘respectable’ sections of the working class. Some of their dwellings still stand. But the rents were still too high for the lower paid and for those with irregular jobs (the nineteenth century version of zero hours contracts). Private landlords provided housing for the rest of the working class, who were typically living in over-crowded and insanitary slums, as a result.

By the end of the nineteenth century local authorities had been given some powers to intervene, to cope with the failures of the private market and the gaps in philanthropic provision. The 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act enabled them to clear and rebuild slums, paving the way for the development of council housing. These were measures that were, at least in part, responses to labour movement pressure for more effective public policy interventions. But these were still early days, in terms of the development of more systematic approaches. More needed to be done.

So what more needed to be done?

Popular pressures for public policies to tackle the failures of the private market By the time that the First World War broke out then, there were mounting pressures for more effective political responses. These were pressures from trade unionists as well as tenants, prepared to make a united stand - with women at the forefront of their struggles.

Private landlords needed to be prevented from exploiting their tenants. And local authorities needed to provide genuinely affordable homes, for rent.

The Glasgow rent strike of 1915 was an epic example –although far from the only one.

As Nan Milton, the daughter of one of the key activists, John Maclean, explained, the background to this struggle was as follows. Since the beginning of the war, thousands of workers had flooded into Glasgow to work in the munitions factories there, causing the demand for housing in some districts to be much greater than the supply, as a result. The munitions workers were relatively better paid (their labour being much in demand, in war time). So, realising that they could charge the munitions workers more, landlords began to raise the rents. But this posed affordability problems for the wives and families of the soldiers and sailors who were away fighting (Milton, 1973).

The women led a movement ‘such as had never been seen before, or since for that matter’, in the view of another activist from that time, Willie Gallacher. ’Street meetings, back-court meetings, drums, bells, trumpets – every method was used to bring the women out and organize them for the struggle’ he continued. ‘In street after street, scarcely a window without one (i.e. a12 notice saying)” We are not paying increased rent’ (Gallacher, 1978 edition, 52-53).

Mary Barbour’s ‘army’ of rent strikers

When the landlords attempted to collect the rent increases from the tenants’ wages, at source, this was met with further resistance. This time the men who were working in the munitions factories staged walkouts in solidarity with the women rent strikers, creating panic amongst the authorities concerned, as a result. ‘The workers have left the factories’ the sheriff explained, in an urgent phone call to the Minister of Munitions, Lloyd George. ’What am I to do?’ ’Stop the case’ he was told in reply. ‘A Rent Restriction Act will be introduced immediately’ (Gallacher, 1978 edition, 57). And so it was.

These were extraordinary circumstances, of course. The ability to curtail the supply of munitions was a particularly powerful weapon in wartime. But this weapon was used to great effect. So the Glasgow Rent Strike represented an extraordinary victory, putting the case for rent controls and for the development of social housing firmly on the agenda for the future - thereby demonstrating what could be achieved, through determined action in the community, backed with solidarity in the workplace. This was a step forward – if only a step.

Rent control was introduced in 1915, in response to the Glasgow rent strike and similar mobilisations, elsewhere. This was a major step forward in housing history. But this was not to remain unchallenged. Once the First World War was over, there were pressures from the property lobby, pressures that led to some relaxations of rent controls, as a result. Still rent controls remained for the lowest end of the market, controls which were then re-extended, with the outbreak of the Second World War. So rent controls have been - and continue to be – contentious, reflecting the shifting balances of power between labour movement interests on the one hand and propertied interests on the other. The labour movement has had to struggle to persuade the state to intervene, in order to contain the worst excesses of the market. And private landlords and their supporters have been fighting back, arguing the case for deregulation, freeing up the market in the interests of private profitability.

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The development of council housing The housing campaigns of the First World War period went further than defending tenants from the worst excesses of the private market, as the story of the Glasgow Rent Strike illustrates. Campaigners were going on to demand more proactive interventions – in the form of council housing. The public sector needed to step in directly, to provide housing to meet social need. Faced with the possibility of further unrest, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, Lloyd George responded with the slogan of ‘homes fit for heroes’. By 1919 there were plans to provide central government support to local authorities to enable them to build half a million homes over the coming three years. Concessions were needed, it has been argued, in order to prevent the spread of Bolshevism (Orbach, 1977).

The Boundary Estate: the dream of early social housing

There were continuing debates about the extent of the subsidies to be provided. But the first Labour government still succeeded in promoting a major building programme. Overall, 504,500 homes were built with the benefit of the subsidies provided under the Labour government’s Wheatley Act (1924). This established local authorities as key to the whole process of providing homes for working class people.

But state intervention in the housing market continued to be contentious. By the 1930s, the focus of public policy interventions shifted towards the promotion of slum clearance, rather than simply focussing upon the lack of housing per se. Local authorities were to play key roles in slum clearance AND in rehousing those displaced. They were to be rehoused in affordable alternatives. So far so good – BUT to be genuinely affordable, the new dwellings tended to be poorer quality, with ‘utilitarian and ill-designed flats and estates on the edge of cities, where there was poor access to jobs, schools and community facilities’ according to the critics (Mullins and Murie, 2006.24).

Meanwhile the mainstream of new building in the 1930s remained with private developers.

And build they most certainly did. But almost three quarters of the homes that were built between 1934 and 1939 were built for sale, with only 15% for rental. Mullins and Murie 14

summarised this situation as follows. ‘Thus during a period when local authorities could have continued to build high-volume, high-quality homes and benefit from low construction costs and a low cost-income ratio, their role had shifted to housing those who the private sector could not, and moreover in lower-quality homes than under previous acts’ (Ibid). ‘By the late 1930s local authorities were being manoeuvred into a more residual role, leaving general needs provision to the private sector’ (ibid. 26).

Meanwhile government subsidies to local authorities were insufficient to keep their rent levels within the reach of the poorest and most marginally employed, leaving a gap between rents and wages. But central government preferred to reduce public expenditure, rather than to raise the level of subsidies.

Sounds at all familiar?

So how might these shifting patterns relate to wider political shifts over this period?

The end of the First World War ‘witnessed the broadest and most serious strike wave yet seen’. Thirty five million working days were lost in strike action. This built on the militancy on the Clyde and elsewhere during the war along with militancy spilling over from elsewhere, following the Russian Revolution of 1917. The labour movement was in a relatively militant mood (at least until the defeat of the General Strike, in 1926).

There were two Labour governments in the inter-war period, in 1924 (the year of the Wheatley Act) and then again from 1929 to 1931. There were significant achievements, including the Wheatley Act. Both were minority administrations, though, and this seriously limited these Labour governments’ scope.

But there were progressive labour movement mobilisations at local government level, too, during this period. ‘Popularism’ was the most notable, with Labour councillors in Poplar, East London, defying the government of the day, holding on to local resources in order to keep tackling the problems of poverty and unemployment in the borough. In 1921 these councillors were arrested and imprisoned. But they were subsequently released as a result of mass demonstrations in their support. People power and progressive Labour councillors versus the government of the day, supported by the Right-Wing leadership of the London Labour Party.

Housing struggles – for rent controls and for the development of genuinely affordable council housing – need to be understood within this wider political context (TUC History Online 1918-1939).

The Second World War and beyond: the struggles continue 15

Like the First World War, the Second World War led to labour movement pressures to tackle the housing problem, only more so. Because the Blitz had damaged or destroyed some four million homes. These displaced families replaced themselves by occupying empty army camps. By

the autumn of 1946 the movement had spread, with organised squatting in empty housing too. Blocks of luxury flats were occupied by hundreds of squatters in London, for example.

Nervous that ‘a mass movement of lawless rage against the housing shortage could have swept through many cities’, it has been argued (Branson, 1984. 10) as ‘people were taking the law into their own hands - the government moved to evict the squatters’ (Ibid). The News Chronicle had reported that the Cabinet had taken a very dim view of squatting, arguing that ‘unless steps are taken to check lawless measures of this sort the rights of ordinary law-abiding citizens are endangered and anarchy may result’ (News of the World, 12 September 1946).

After some discussion the squatters eventually agreed to leave voluntarily, however, having first negotiated that they would be rehoused by the relevant local authority (the then ‘London County Council’).

Although the squats in question were abandoned then, the squatters had held together as a group. Important gains were eventually achieved. The government of the day directed that all requisitioned property that was not required for official purposes should be made available for housing. And the need for more genuinely affordable housing was more firmly on the agenda, as part of the post war development of the Welfare State.

Eileen was glad to have a roof over her head when she squatted in bombed-out post-war Bristol

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But these gains had not been achieved without incurring major human costs. During these struggles five activists (all Communists) had been prosecuted – for conspiracy. They faced the threat of extremely serious consequences, with the prospect of long prison sentences.

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In the event, they were eventually bound over. But these must have been traumatic experiences for them and their families.

Squatters and the law: The 1946 squatters’ prosecution

At the end of the war, a considerable number of large buildings which had been requisitioned by government for the duration of the war remained empty despite the high number of families who had been bombed out of their homes or displaced.

In response to the Labour government’s inertia, the London district committee of the Communist Party, led by Ted Bramley, organised mass occupations. In consequence Bramley and five others were charged with conspiracy to trespass. This was a novel charge, since trespass was a civil wrong and not a crime; but the judge ruled that conspiring to commit it could nevertheless be a criminal offence. They were tried at the Old Bailey. The prosecutor was Anthony Hawke QC (later Sir Anthony Hawke, Recorder of London).

While the jury was considering its verdict, the squatters’ solicitor asked Sir Walter Monckton, their barrister, about the possible sentences to be faced if the jury convicted them. All but one of the defendants had clean records, but one of them, Tubby Rosen, had a conviction for police assault at the battle of Cable Street (the East London battle with Sir Oswald Mosely’s fascists thugs) and there was concern that he might be given a custodial sentence. ‘Don’t worry’ said Monckton, ‘I’ll have a word with Tony’ – i.e. the prosecutor.

When the jury returned with guilty verdicts, the judge asked whether anything was known about the accused. As the inspector in charge of the case set off for the witness box with a large pile of files, Hawke rose to his feet and said ‘Nothing known, my lord.’ ‘Are you sure?’ said the judge, eying the inspector and his files. ‘Nothing of any consequence, my lord,’ said Hawke.

So none of the defendants went to gaol. The solicitor, an old Bolshevik, was not ungrateful, but as he commented, if the ruling class is prepared to do such things for its enemies, can you imagine what it will do for its friends?

Not everyone was so fortunate though. Some squatters were actually imprisoned.

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‘She cried her heart out’ –the Paddington squatters leave for jail and Mrs Field (centre), assisted by her husband and Mrs Shootbridge, cried bitterly at the parting, 1949

The Labour Government of 1945 believed that solutions had to come from the public sector, rather than the private sector. As Minister of Health Aneurin Bevan put it this way: ‘if we are to plan we have to plan with plannable instruments, and the speculative builder, by his very nature is not a plannable instrument .. ..we rest the full weight of the housing programme upon the local authorities, because their programmes can be planned’ (quoted in Mullins and Murie, 2006. 29).The starting point was to be solving first ‘the housing difficulties of the lower income groups’, i.e. housing to meet social needs not to make individual profits. Local authority completions (excluding prefabs and other temporary dwellings) rose from 3,364 in 1945 to 190,368 in 1948.

Given the extent of the housing crisis, and the pressures to tackle it, the Conservative government that succeeded the 1945 Labour Government actually continued with a massive house building programme, reaching 300,000 by 1955. But policy was shifting. Once the acute shortages that followed the Second World War had been addressed, in the Conservatives’ view, then market mechanisms should once again predominate. Rents were to be increased in both the public and the private sectors (with the 1956 Housing Subsidies Act which allowed rents to be considerably increased in the public sector and the 1957 Rent Act which decontrolled significant parts of the private rented sector).

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There were struggles over rent rises as a result, including mobilisations of tenants and residents along with trade unionists, supporting them in their communities. The St Pancras Rent Strike was a case in point.

Councillor John Lawrence of St Pancras Borough Council (third from left) arriving at Clerkenwell magistrates’ court with his fellow councillors: David Goldhill (left), Hilda Lane and Stewart Phelan, secretary of St Pancras Trades Council.

One of the effects of this reduction of rent controls in the private sector was to increase the growth of owner occupation, a growth that was fuelled by tax relief amongst other measures. So the public sector was increasingly subsidising the private sector – a trend that can, of course, be traced more recently too.

Meanwhile the council housing that was being built included tower blocks, a form of housing that proved widely unpopular, with reductions in the quality of the new housing that was being built more generally. The construction of tower blocks declined subsequently, and quality standards improved again, but a certain amount of reputational damage had been done, it has been argued.

Council housing (especially high-rise housing) was becoming stigmatised - thereby contributing to Conservative arguments in favour of the private, rather than the public provision of housing. In their view council housing should be for a residual minority of the very poorest – everyone else should meet their housing needs via the private market. There were carrots in the form of tax concessions to boost owner occupation, for example. And there were sticks in the form of

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Conservative attempts to force local authorities to raise their rents (through the Housing Finance Act of 1972).

Ironically this was the very period when some of the worst excesses of private landlordism were being exposed in the 1960s and the 1970s. And this was the very period when tenants and residents were mobilising in response, with upsurges of community action. (See for example Jan O’Malley’s account of community action in Notting Hill, O’Malley, 1977).

Poor housing in Notting Hill in the 1960s and 1970s – currently one of the most expensive and the most socially divided housing areas, close by Grenfell Tower

The Labour Government that took over from the Conservatives in 1974 introduced a rent freeze, as part of wider attempts to redress the balance in favour of housing for social need. But economic pressures were mounting, reducing the scope for public expenditure on housing along with other aspects of social expenditure. This was the context in which Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government came to power in 1979, with consequences to be explored more fully in the following module.

References Branson, N. (1984) Squatters, 1946, Proceedings of a conference of the Communist Party History Group, May 1984 Gallacher, W. (1978 edition) Revolt of the Clyde, London: Lawrence and Wishart Milton, N. (1973) John Maclean, London: Pluto Mullins, D. and Murie, A. (2006) Housing Policy in the UK, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan O’Malley, J. (1977) The politics of community action, London: Pluto Orbach, L. (1977) Homes fit for Heroes, London: Seeley Services Robbins, G. (2017) There’s no place: the American housing crisis and what it means for the UK TUC History Online, https://ww2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/mrc/explorefurtherdigital/scw/more/tuc 20