I see that Elton John grew up in one, and (maybe more) famously, Karl Pilkington grew up in one, but that phrase is unknown in the US. I gather it’s a city-sponsored form of housing.
Can you tell me the facts of what it is, and the implications people get from learning that someone is living in one?
A council house is pubic housing. It is very basic housing, semi-detached if you;re lucky, most likely blocks of units, built very cheaply and provided by the state at a nominal rate.
Council housing is provided to those who can’t afford normal housing, which effectively translates to borderline poverty. So it’s occupied by the chronically unemployed, the unemployable, drug addicts, mental patients, single parents, old age pensioners (retirees on Social Security in US terms) and so forth.
It has a largely deserved reputation for being very basic, very cramped, often borderline substandard accommodation. Council housing estates generally have about the social charm and crime status that you would expect when you consider the close living quarters and the types of people being housed there.
If you translate council housing as the US “projects” then you’re going to get a pretty good handle on the implications of living in council housing. The person/family in question is so incapable of obtainaing money that they can’t even afford to pay the rent. Historically council housing was filled with the uneducated and unskilled, with a reputation of being the unwashed. Since WWII that “unwashed” reputation has grown worse, and it is now largely seen as being the domain of those who are lost causes.
So the fact that somebody could rise from council housing to become a millionaire celebrity is a literal rags to riches story. If you are too young to remember the world prior tot he 80s, it was even more amazing because coming from that background was not itself selling point as it became afterwards fro many musical styles. So someone like Elton John was seen to have managed to get to where he did despite having everything stacked against him.
I am afraid that the above is so wrong in many respects. When council hoses were first introduced before WW2 they were the means to provide millions of people a decent home away from the inner-city slums. For the first time people had bathrooms and indoor toilets, a garden and plenty of space. These house were well built, with many of them still standing today. Most of the occupants were in full time employment and paid the rent on time.
After WW2 this same situation prevailed with many new council houses provided for people who had lost their homes in air-raids, plus the continuation of slum clearance. I grew up in a council house during the 1940’s and 50’s. Most of our neighbours were decent, hard working people and nothing like the picture painted above.
Then Maggie Thatcher came onto the scene. She forced the local authorities to sell these houses to the sitting tenants at a knock-down price. Those who could afford this bargain took up the offer, thus reducing the pool of social housing. I also disagree that most council house tenants are feckless and work-shy. I know of many decent families who work and pay the rent without having to resort to government hand-outs.
Rayne Man, I can;t see where you are disagreeing with anything i have posted, yet you say that it is “so wrong in many respects”.
Perhaps you would care to tell us what you actually think is wrong. That council housing was often cramped and borderline substandard? That council estates have high crime rates? That council housing tenants are and always were largely unskilled and uneducated?
I’m honestly not seeing how any of that is even debatable, much less controversial.
You say that your family and neighbours were nothing like the picture I painted, Yet the only picture I painted was that they were largely unskilled workers and uneducated. If I’m wrong in your case then that’s fine, but let us know, how many of these people were tradesmen or professionals, and how many of the adults had even a high school education? I’m going to bet that the reality is that they are exactly as I described: unskilled and uneducated.
That’s not really surprising since it was always viewed as accommodation of last resort. Anybody with the money to get a better place would have done so, and those with skills and education were of course those who were best able to do so.
You say that you “disagree that most council house tenants are feckless and work-shy”. Well it’s good of you to want to try to stand up for these people, but this is supposed to be a forum for factual answers. And the fact is that
of the 2.6 million working age people living in social housing in Britain 1.4 million are officially unemployed. Once you add in spouses/partners, single parents and other who are not officially unemployed then I would guess that around 70% economically inactive.
So whatever you may think on the issue, the simple fact is that most council tenants are not working and are dependent on state handouts to survive. Doubtless you know many people who are not like that, but the majority are apparently just like that.
I grew up in Coventry and most of the occupants of council hoses were either semi-skilled or skilled workers at the various engineering and car factories. As for the houses being cramped and poorly built, they were not. Why do you think there are still many of these houses still surviving from before WW2, now mostly occupied by people who have bought them and are happy with the build quality?
Once again, this is a forum for factual answers, not anecdote. And the fact is that one in five social housing properties are classed as ‘non-decent’ accommodation and that in 2004 it was 40%. So it seems things are getting better, but the reputation of council housing being substandard and cramped has a very strong basis in fact and is largely deserved.
Do you think that might be because the ones that were bought by people were those with good building quality, rather obviously. What, do you think they kept the shitty ones and tore down those that were of the best quality? Or do you think it’s more reasonable that the ones torn down were the ones of lower quality?
Really, saying that the quality of all the housing from a time period must have been great because the surviving examples are great is just one big confirmation bias.
So, from your figures, slightly over half of those tenants eligible for employment are unemployed. Are you claiming that all or nearly all of those people are unemployed (in this very bad economy) because they are feckless and work-shy"? Only that implausible and offensive claim can support your interpretation of the figures. Are you also claiming that “spouses/partners, single parents and other who are not officially unemployed” (i.e., those who are not claiming unemployment benefits because they take care of households and children full time) are also uniformly “feckless and work-shy”?
Since I never once used the term “feckless and work-shy” I’m not quite sure you quote me before attacking that particular straw man.
This is starting to get animated, I think muchmore context is required here.
In recent decades its true to say that living on council estates is seen as a second best option, and it seems that this view gets stronger as time goes on, and it is understandable to a great extent, but in those decades there has been a huge amount of political division at work.
If you look at UK history, throughout almost all of it, home ownership for the working classess has been very limited, and its only the last 40 years that it has been a practical reality, for many reasons from sheer poverty to lack of a decent banking system and insecuroty in employment.
The exemplar models of ‘public’ housing were largely put in place by industrial philanthropists such as Port Sunlight, Bournville, Saltaire - its worth looking these up if you want to have any understanding of social housing in the UK.
These gave a glimpse of what might be possible if workers were provided with decent housing - home ownership was simply out of the question.
The great obstacle to public housing was the use of taxes and city rates for housing, and the the landowners who argued for literally centuries that this would be unfair competition. Housing at the lower levels was often awful, and as the industrial revolution wore on it became much much worse.
It became apparent that the wealthy had plenty of interest in improving the lot of workers, especially in the 1830’s onwards when cholera came to Britain, especially in the great Victorian cities such as Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, London.
The problem was what to do, certain studies were carried out that proved that communicable diseases struck more often and more intensely in the worst housing - usually having no connection to drainage, no water, not facilities, you can read all sorts of reports online about this.
The ‘Unhealthy Housing acts’ allowed local councils to declare housing unsafe according to certain criteria, but even so, it took decades vbefore they had the power of compulsory purchase before they could do much about it.
The demolition of unhealthy housing began in a wave around 1900-1910, maps were made in many cities which showed regions of unhelathy housing - all of which were then blighted and lost value - so the landlords didn’t maintain them even though it took decades more to actually do something with them.
These slum clearances seem to have been in waves, and in between not much.
The roots of true council housing began in the late 1920’s, these were built away from the crowded townships on virgin farmland. This actually excluded the poorest, as they could not afford the rents and the transport costs, so they were populated with the trade skilled workers, whose employment was often fairly secure and relatively well paid compared to the majority of the workforce.
British society was highly stratified, much more than nowadays and you would find that supervisors migh live in certain house that had perhaps a couple of bedrooms, and middle managers would live in slightly larger houses, you could readily tell the social standing of a person by the street they lived in.
These new council estates were seen as a social step up the ladder from the inner city back to back housing, there were tight rules in rent payment and maintenance of gardens - eviction was quite easy to enforce so people behaved themselves.
It was not all that long that the issue of people living in poor housing and low wages was recognised, and local authorities brought in a system of rent subsidisation for the low income workers. The skilled workers resented this, they saw themselves as earning their way out of poverty through self reliance, they set up tenants associations and during the 1930’s there were many rent strikes.
The differances and divisions were sert in, and after WW2 home ownership became the way out, skilled workers bought their own homes away from the council estates leaving the lower paid subsidised renters behind - it also started to create a self reinforcing social stigma.
During the 1960’s the pace of council estate building increased massively, but so did the process of skilled and better paid workers buying their own homes. Social legislation was introduced which compelled local authorities to house anyone in need no matter what their past. It also became very much harder to evict miscreants.
I actually remember people who moved into some new council houses being charged a slightly higher rent because of the view, you could be evicted for not keeping your garden under control - those rules were legislated out.
As the more motivated workers moved out, the rest were left behind, if you got a decent job, you moved out as soon as you could.
The best quality council houses were sold off to long standing tenants under changes during the reign of Thatcher who saw it as an opportunity to reduce the power of local councils and perhaps improve council estates, the idea is that if you own your own home you will take more care of it than if you are basicly given it.
This reduced the stock of council houses, and of course they were the worst ones too, such that the the only ones who lived int hem were seen as second rate by a large section of the UK public.
This has become self fullfilling, council estates often have a higher number of ‘undesirables’ who do not give one jot about their neighbours, they are benefit dependant and have a sense of entitlement yet they contirbute little of benefit to society - at least this is how many council estate residents are viewed by a goodly sized chunk of the UK public.
There is some truth in this but its really a stereotype, its not the whole picture. I can name some notorious council estates. In any case, just viewing them as social dumping grounds is unlikely to help the situation.
I am no supporter of Thatcher, but I suspect that’s a little bit adrift of the facts. AFAIK, the Thatcher government passed legislation that allowed council house tenants to apply to buy their properties, and allowed the Council to sell the houses to those who wanted to buy them. The legislation made the sale possible, wheres it had not been previously. It did not make the sale compulsory.
One can of course debate the wisdom of this legislation, and there are many issues to be raised about its long-term effect on the provision of housing for the less well-off. Nonetheless, this proposed legislation was featured in the Tory manifesto before the election, and was apparently quite a popular vote-winner at the time.
I understand that those words were quoted from Rayne Man’s characterization of your position, but you made it very clear that you were disagreeing with his rejection of that view, and clearly implied that you believe it is “factual” that “most council house tenants are feckless and work-shy”. There is no straw man; your attitude is abundantly clear.
Sorry, but the reality is that this legislation did force councils to sell houses provided the resident met certain criteria such as legnth of previous tenancy.
There was one notorious case in Leeds where the chief park keepers house was sold when the tenant, who held it as part of his employment, took the council to court and won - the council was forced to sell it at a knockdown price - that house has to be worth close to £1 million now.
The income from those sales was effectively tied up by Thatcher so they could not build more housing - this was done by use of the total spending cap - it meant that councils had literally hundreds of millions of pounds that they could not touch, well they could but their central grant would have been reduced by the amount they had spent above the centrally imposed cap.
Those sales sold off public assets at levels far below their true market value - I never understood how free market advocates could justify this course of action, but then they did repeat it with the sale of other public assets too - and it worked in some cases, the companies often became more efficient, though French and Spanish, and it got Thatcher reelected, so if you are a Tory supporter it was worth it.
perhaps there were big changes in the type of people who lived there in 70s and in 2004? If things went seriously downhill, then both Blake and Rayne Man can be right at the same time. In the past maybe people there were decent employed citizens with low salaries, and now maybe they are mostly unemployed underclass type of people. O tempora o mores and so forth.
I grew up on a council estate in the 70s and I only knew a handful of people who lived in “private homes”. I had no idea that we lived in borderline poverty. I wish someone had told me.
But when I was 10, I used to go pick up my girlfriend for Saturday Morning Pictures from her privately-owned house. My friends and family made fun of me for having rich tastes.
I went back to visit the estate last year - first time in 30 years. I expected a rundown shit hole but I was shocked to find that it was actually very attractive. It was all freshly painted. There were beautiful flowerbeds everywhere.
I live in a million-dollar home now but my “borderline-poverty” childhood home didn’t seem so bad by comparison.
Most council houses are certainly not “sub-standard” - in fact they were built to meet very stringent specifications.
A lot of the “luxury apartments” that were built in British city centres during the housing boom of the past decade, and are now lying empty/repossessed, don’t meet these standards. It was suggested that councils buy them off the banks in bulk at a reduced rate, to use as coucnil housing. Unfortunately the vast majority of these flats, supposedly for upwardly mobile young city dwellers, don’t even meet minimum council standards. (Open-plan kitchens are one of the main reasons for failure.)
I know very little about this whole situation, but…
When I toured the Isles in 1990 one of the places that I saw was the old “black cottages” on Lewis and Harris, where up until the end of WWII it was not uncommmon that some rural peasants still lived in medieval housing.
Then, I was told, the Socialists (Labour) got into government and started a big campaign to get everyone into modern housing. If you watch some of the movies about prewar times in urban England (I forget the name of the movie that spawned the series that spawned the American series All in the Family) they still had outhouses in the back yard rather than toilets.
Labour was determined to help the working man (use the term loosely) and provide modern housing and a lot of the public housing today dates from that time.
Is that the gist of it, or did I misunderstand the origin of council housing?
Then the argument in the 1980’s was that a person paying minimal rent to the local council was doing nothing for the tax situation. The ability to hand out council flats and other such largesse was a pork-barrel plum that the typically left-wing councils loved to have.
Thatcher had a long-running battle with the councils, not unlike the Republican-Democrat divide today; she decided that she would stick it to the councils, turn handout receivers into homeowners, and reduce the influence of councils.
The term I used to hear mostly from this side of the pond was “council flats” - so there were as many or more “projects” of slum-grade or better apartment buildings as there were semi-deteched or row houses?
Like public housing in north america, the quality and “ambiance” of the housing developments could range from “OK” to “rotten slum”? And like North America, once you start handing out rental accomodation below market value, you undercut anyone else so the only competition becomes undermaintained private slums; thus increasing demand in a vicious circle until everyone below a certain income level needs to be in public housing. What starts out as a good idea - “lets provide low cost housing to the needy” basically turns the government into the only landlord and a money-losing one; at which point the councils expected the central government to help pay their losses.
On the subject of Margaret Thatcher, I thought she was pretty good; whereas some people from England that I said that to (emigres to Canada) blew up in my face about how she destroyed the UK. Once again, one of those debates like Republican-Democrat which has no end.
I had an arguement once with a self-important asshole in the local NDP (Canadian socialist party) about the Beatles’ song Taxman -
"Let me tell you how it’s going to be,
one for you 19 for me,
'cuz I’m the taxman, "
He claimed the top marginal tax rate in Britain never got over the Canadian rate of about 55%. So I looked up the stat, in the early days of the internet, and the top marginal tax rate when Thatcher took over was 83%! Remember that when you’re whining about Obama wanting an extra few hundred from people making $250,000.
casdave provides a pretty good summation of the development of social housing up thread a bit.
Your point about old croft buildings in the Western Isles isn’t really germane, partly because people up there dance to a slightly different drum than the rest of the UK*, but mostly because the main aim was to get people out of terrible living conditions in major cities. In some places this was done cleverly, and unfortunately in others it was bungled horribly. If you’re interested, Glasgow is the classic example of what not to do.
They were delighted to have six youngsters to visit - tea and biscuits and cakes and much, much whisky. We camped on their land and cut enough logs to last them a year, and then there was much, much more whisky.
To be honest, the two most impressive people I’ve ever met, hewn from stone, indomitable.
The reason that housing was so lousy prior to the council house program that started mainly in the 1920’s is that it was privately owned, and landlords simply did not care.
There was a shortage of housing and overcrowding was a huge problem, especially with the larger families of the time.
Private landlords could charge pretty much what they wanted, and invest very little.
It was onsidered pretty unhygienic to have the toilet inside the house right through to WW2, but many houses had only midden spoil heaps and only had access to water through communal facilities.
Right into the 1960’s communal washrooms were a fact of life for much of Britain’s working population, and many folk seem to have forgotten that to have a proper bath, one went to the local baths - where there was often also a swimming pool as well, but the main facility was the ordinary bath, this was so prevalent that in Leeds the abslolutely brand new Leeds International pool that was built in the early 1970’s used to offer the use of ‘slipper baths’ for a fee.
My opinion of council housing is that the inhabitants are stereotyped, most of it is of good quality but there are also a number of utterly horrible sink hole estates. The legal responsibility to house the homeless without regard to the damage they have done to previous housing, and without regard to the sheer nuisance to their neighbours has not helped, there should be sanctions of eviction to such people. Even though this absolute right to house has been recently ended, most councils are reluctant to enforce it because there are often children caught up in it, and the Childrens Act law works against repossession orders.
As ever, the image of the ‘unworthy poor’ is a long held one in the UK, its a view that heaps the blame for poverty upon the poor themselves instead of upon the policies of leaders and investment decisions of companies. This view has been around in differant guises for literally 500 years or more, it goes back to the days of poor relief right back to the 15th Century when the children of the poor could be compulsory indentured, its a view that believes that if all the pooor just got themselves out and about and made more effort, then poverty would dissappear.
It’s a view that has been wrong for all these centuries, and the feckless council inhabitant is just the modern interpretation of a very old theme.
High rents are a form of poverty trap, in council housing the rents are relatively low so if the tenant is unemployed but gets work, they can afford to pay the rent out of their wages.
Private landlords charge much more for rent, and I can testify just how shit some of their houses are, they are just slum landlords. The reason that slum landlord charge so much rent is simple, they find it is better to keep someone in the poverty trap claiming benefits and rent from the state as the income is secure, it is paid to them direct debit and the tenant never actually sees the money.
If the tenant found work they would not be any better off than on benefit once they had paid all their bills.
Some steps have been taken to limit the rents that landlords can charge, but only indirectly.
Although I am tempted to comment on Magaret Thatcher, this would risk taking this thread on to a completely differant tangent, but she was incredibly divisive and that is not a great quality for a leader, her divisiveness was such that it can be argued that it led directly to the cdemands and creation of the Scottish Parliament and Welsh assembly as they had been so adversely affected by her policies that they wanted as little as possible to do with Westminster based government.
Newly built council housing is often superior to newly built private stock because of the additional regulations that apply to its construction.
Culturally, council tenants have historically experienced (and continue to experience) stigmatisation.
I’ve lived on a council estate amongst broadcasters, social workers, designers and assorted professionals. Admitedley there were also prostitutes, drug users, and a crazy Liberian ex-soldier who used to throw his wife out naked into the street.