raphael samuel but nothing happends

8/18/2019 Raphael Samuel But nothing happends

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UT

NOTHING

H PPENS

Raphael Samuel James Kincaid Elizabeth Slater

1. In Five Years Time

The definition of what constitutes a slum is at any time arbitrary andshifting, depending more upon the vagaries of the English social consciencethan upon any precise and identifiable condition. In times of social crisis,when opinion is deeply disturbed the number of slums is generally thoughtto be very high indeed; at other times the number is thought to be few, and

the slum is judged a relic, archaic and outmoded, of a way of life thatis fast disappearing. Looked at in this way, the slum can be described as acondition of life which the English public pronounces intolerable, every20 years or so, and then quietly forgets.

The slum is best understood in relation to the policy of the govern-ment rather than as an objective physical or social fact. At any given time,the number of officially recognised slums tends to correspond, more or lessexactly, to the number of unfit houses (usually about 3 per cent of thenation’s total housing stock) which the government thinks it can pull

down within a given period (usually five years) plus a slightly larger numberwhich it hopes to clear later (usually about 3.5 per cent).

An ‘estimate’ of the number of slums, is an enumeration, sponsored bythe government and conducted by local authorities, which includes someunfit houses in its count, but excludes others. Estimates vary a great dealfrom place to place, irrespective of housing conditions. The estimates of unfit houses are no more precise or dependable than the notion of theslum itself.

‘Obsolescence’ and ‘sub-standard’ are two further categories which,

like the slum, are better understood as administrative conventions ratherthan as objective facts. They are legends fixed to unfit housing that thegovernment does not want to clear or is not able to clear for many yearsto come.

A slum clearance programme is a target which the government fails toachieve by about 50 per cent. Thus, if the government declares it willdestroy all the slums—those, that is, whose existence it recognises—within a five year period, it will in fact destroy about a half; if it intends todestroy only a half, then it will destroy a quarter. The number of officially

recognised slums never diminishes very much, either because, if the pro-gramme really gets under way, additional slums are listed (as happened


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during the 1933–1939 campaign), or because progress is so slow that theoriginal estimate is not seriously diminished (as happened in the 1950’s).

The function, if not the intention, of a slum clearance campaign is todivert attention from the extent and variety of housing need, by suggestingthat the housing problem has at last been brought within manageableproportions; that the number of slums has been firmly delimited; and thatin a very short while they will all have disappeared. There are usually moreslums at the end of a slum clearance programme than there were at thebeginning.

In the course of the campaign itself, towns that grossly under-estimatethe number of unfit houses are able to clear their slum problem within avery short time (see Table 7). On the other hand towards the close of thecampaign it becomes evident that there are towns whose clearance pro-gramme will take twenty years or more to complete (see Table 1). If their problem is particularly grave, the government may cut their subsidyfor new housing from £22 1s. 0d. to £8 (see Note on Subsidy p. 68).

As a prelude to the campaign, the Minister asks local authorities toestimate the number of unfit houses in their areas, and to draw up afive year programme. Often the distinction is unclear to them and theyreturn the same figure for both. The Minister is none the less confident thatthe problem has at last been circumscribed and delimited. He waits

expectantly for the slums to begin to dwindle away and begins to lookforward to the day when, notionally at least, he or his successor can informthe House that henceforth there is not a single known slum in the country.It seems unlikely, he feels, to be many years away:

‘In the view of His Majesty’s government the present rate at whichthe slums are being dealt with is too slow and they look for a concertedeffort between central government and the local authorities immediatelyconcerned to ensure a speedier end to the evil, and an end within alimited time. . . . In the opinion of the Minister, to make sure that the

evil shall be remedied, it is necessary to fix a limited time for the work,and to prepare a time-table for its progress and completion within thetime limited. The time-table must, of course, be based upon a completeappreciation of the whole extent of the problem in the area concerned . . .The Minister will be glad to receive, not later in any event thanSeptember 30th next, a copy of the programme adopted by the localauthority. . . . The programme should, so far as practicable, be drawnup on the basis of clearing all areas that require clearance not laterthan 1938.’ Ministry of Health Circular , (1933).

‘Twelve months hence the slums should be falling, according to presentprospects, five times as fast, till the work reached its maximum speedtwo years hence. Five years was not an unduly long time in which to curean evil which had been growing for a hundred.’

Sir Hilton Young ( Minister of Health) , 1934l

‘Many local authorities should be able to solve their housing problemsin five years or so without invoking their powers to defer demolitionat all.’ Harold Macmillan ( Minister of Housing ), 19542

1Speech at Sevenoaks, Kent. Times, 8th March 1934.2Speech to Annual conference of Urban District Councils Association, 25th June,

1954. Ministry of Housing. Press Release.


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‘The success of the house building drive has now made it possible for thegovernment to adopt a much more comprehensive housing policy. From

now on, we attack on all fronts . . . We think there may be about amillion slum houses. If this figure proves correct, I suggest we shouldaim at breaking the back of the problem within ten years.’

Duncan Sandys ( Minister of Housing ), 19553

A clearance campaign falls into four periods. The first is given over toalarums. For it is not in the spirit of the social reformer, grave, enquiring,and cautious to the point of being bureaucratic, that the Ministerapproaches the campaign, but rather in that of the subaltern, a littlereckless, a little extravagant in manner, but with high courage, tense and

alert, as he waits, poised for the offensive. The metaphor, it will beobserved, is continuously military:‘I can make to-night an “all clear” signal, all clear for the builders andbuilding societies to build us the houses we want, all clear for the localauthorities to get rid of the slums we don’t want . . . We must have thewhole force of public opinion to support the advance.’

Sir Hilton Young , 19334

‘The government have sounded the trumpet for a general attack uponslum evil . . . I am confident that this movement is going forwards

with such force of conviction that nothing can stop it.’ Sir Hilton Young, 19335

‘We are now on the threshold of a growing slum clearance drive, and,with all the evidence that is coming in to me from all quarters, it isquite clear that the drive is gaining momentum.’ Duncan Sandys, 19566

‘We are past the stage of making paper plans. The job of speeding upslum clearance is now already underway in most places . . .It is an immensejob. It will call for energy and close co-operation between all concerned—local authorities, the building industry and the government. It isgoing to be one of the biggest combined operations on the social front

in this generation.’ Duncan Sandys, 19567

In the second period of the campaign, the Minister is still happily un-encumbered by any knowledge of what is happening around him, andfeels free to indulge in the most visionary estimates of what has alreadybeen achieved. Ministerial statements rise to a crescendo of self-congratulation: the most workaday duties of the Minister are endowedwith the aura of a strenuous campaign,8 and the putative achievementsare already confidently asserted to be without precedent:

‘Up to the end of this year, closures and demolitions should be runningat a rate at least equal to the highest yet known in this country. Thereafteryou will be called upon to cope with rehousing on a scale for which there

3Speech to a meeting of Midland local authorities. Manchester Guardian, 12th January,1955.

4Speech to Burnley Building Society. Daily Telegraph, 25th February, 1933.5 Manchester Guardian, 1933.6Address to Town and Country Planning Association. Times, 30th November, 1956.7Speech at Stoke on Trent, 21st March, 1956, Ministry of Housing Press release.8‘We intend during 1954 to make a new assault on the housing problem. We are

going to give a fresh impetus to slum clearance, we are going to speed up repairing,

improving and converting the older houses, and we are going on building new houses’,speech by Harold Macmillan. Financial Times, 1st January, 1954.

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is no precedent in our experience.’Enoch Powell (Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Housing), 19579

The Minister is now ceaselessly itinerant, opening the two or the three orthe four millionth post-war house, addressing the Institute of MunicipalTreasurers one week, the Society of Housing Managers the next, issuinghis orders of the day now from one clearance site, now from another,10

constantly popping up in the most surprising but always encouragingsituations—painting the number on the front door of the last house of thefirst street of the newest out-county estate, wielding a pick-axe and ‘havinga go’ on the 5,500th house cleared by the LCC—and presenting to thepublic a perpetually cheerful countenance.

Above all, he is concerned to impress the local authorities and the

professional institutes of the success which is attending his work: ‘So faras slum clearance was concerned, record progress was being made.’( Sir Kingsley Wood , 193511); ‘I think things are going pretty well. Theslum clearance drive is steadily gaining momentum’ ( Duncan Sandys,195612); ‘The rate of progress already achieved promised completion of the programmes within the appointed five years’ ( Sir Hilton Young , 193413).Despite the eventual vacuity of the claims they are all—as the constantrepetition shows—an essential part of the over-all strategy. The Ministerseems to believe that the targets may be achieved by their mere iteration,and that local authorities will carry out reflexively, as it were, the achieve-

ments with which he has already credited them. His prophecieswill thus stand self-fulfilled.

By the start of the third period the Minister must face the fact thathe cannot hope to reach any of the targets or substantiate the claims sohopefully made. The programme—or its first five year term—is drawingt oa close, but to the naked human eye the cities do not seem much changed,and there are no signs at all that the slums have been extinguished. If the original estimates seem likely to be attained—as they were in theThirties—further slum houses are added to the programme.14

9Address to the Society of Housing Managers. Manchester Guardian, 11th January, 1957.10‘The Minister of Housing, Mr. Duncan Sandys, toured Stepney and Shoreditch

for six hours yesterday looking at slum clearance areas. It was the first of severalsimilar tours which he plans to make during the next few weeks. Their purpose, as heput it, will be to “impress local authorities with the importance of giving increasedpriority to their programmes of slum clearance” . . . Several times he departed fromhis set programme at the invitation of people who wanted him to see what it was likeliving in old houses. “Come in here and see what it’s like to be a slum dweller,” said awoman in Eastman Street, who was living with her husband and six children in tworooms. The Minister of Housing accepted the invitation and disappeared into whatappeared to be a black pit behind a sagging brick wall. He emerged a few minutes later

with a sober expression on his face and announced that this was “really dreadful.”Mr. Sandys had also asked to see demolition work in progress, and in Bethnal Greenhe was able to see the demolition of the 5,500th house that the LCC had pulled downsince the war. A group of workmen pointed to a pickaxe and suggested that he “have ago”. As a result of this and other exploits during the course of the day, Mr. Sandyslooked considerably the worse for wear by the time he climbed into a long black saloonfor his journey back to Whitehall. A fine snowfall of cement dust had turned his tweedcoat several shades lighter and there was a thick yellow encrustration of mud on whathad been a pair of shiny black shoes.’ Manchester Guardian, 22nd March, 1956.

11Times, 1st July, 1935.12Hansard , Vol. 562, Col. 702, 13th December, 1956.13 Manchester Guardian, 19th October, 1934.14In the 1933–39 programme, the ‘drive’ really did gain a certain momentum, with

90,000 houses being cleared in the peak year, 1938. As a result overcrowding was addedto the problems to be remedied, by the Act of 1935, and successive upward revisions in


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But if the original estimates themselves have scarcely been indentedand progress has fallen behind even the modest aims originally set, the

Minister must cling to the view that they represent the definitive total of slum housing, insinuating that progress, though it may be slow, is at leastalways in the direction of a final solution. By the exercise of a kind of regressive optimism he can find comfort and cheer in even the gloomiest of statistics:

‘I am going about the country to see for myself on the spot how slumclearance is getting on. Last week I was in Oldham, the week before inMerthyr. Today I am visiting three different parts of London, includingNotting Hill which has been in the news lately. Next week I shall be in

Wolverhampton; after that in Liverpool. . . . I am determined to get allslums down. The census which Mr. Macmillan ordered when he wasMinister of Housing four years ago disclosed that in England and Walesfour years ago there were close on 850,000 houses not fit for humanhabitation. We have already more than 150,000 of them demolished orclosed. . . . Keep it up I say, because though we shall soon have got rid of all the unfit houses and cottages in the villages and smaller towns, it is along haul before they will all be gone from the larger towns and cities.But go they must.’

Henry Brooke ( Minister of Housing ), June, 1959.

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In these straitened circumstances the Minister does not cease frompresenting a brave front, nor does he refrain from trumpeting his ownachievements; on occasion he can still outmatch, in hyperbole, themost extravagant efforts of his predecessors: ‘Never in history has somuch been going forward on every front to improve housing conditionsand to solve the housing problem’ (Henry Brooke, Minister of Housing ,195916). Sustained by assertions which err towards generosity in estimatingwhat has been accomplished, and towards economy in counting what

remains to be done, he proves equal to the poorest records of progressthat come in. But although he goes on lavishing praise on his Ministry, hisboasts are now often couched in qualified superlatives rather than pitchedas absolute claims: ‘In two or three years there will be no slums left in most of Britain’ (Henry Brooke, 196017). ‘In a few years time there will be noslums left except in the big cities and a few of the old industrial towns’(Henry Brooke, 196118). And when all else fails, he takes heart not anymore from what has been achieved, but rather from the magnitude of thework that stretches before him, the contemplation of which fills him withwonderment and joy:

‘The wonderful fact is that, if we can continue the slum clearance drivefor another 20 years, the slum disgrace will be almost unknown. This isan aim worth rejoicing in, and I do not intend to be diverted from it.’19

the slum estimates were made, see Marian Bowley, Housing and the State 1919–45, p. 151.In the 1955–59 programme, by contrast, even the modest aim of clearing 75,000 houses ayear was never achieved. The average for the first five year period being 45,000.

15Henry Brooke, 10th June, 1959. Ministry of Housing. Press Release.16Henry Brooke, Hansard , Vol. 629, Col. 874, 8th November 1960.17Henry Brooke, Daily Herald , 3rd December, 1960 (our italics).

18Henry Brooke Speech at Luton. Daily Telegraph, 8th April, 1961.19Henry Brooke Speech at National Federation of Housing Societies, 11th June, 1961.

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Any description of the fourth period must be tentative, because it hasnot yet run its course (the war interrupted the equivalent period in the

1933 campaign). Some things, however, are already clear. The Ministercan no longer avoid facing the fact that the slum problem, wherever it isconsiderable, has scarcely diminished. He may go on praising his ownsuccess, but he can no longer pretend that the face of England has changed,or that the poorer towns have been transformed.

The government is driven to make of this a virtue, to claim that it isthe very success of its work which has revealed the true contours of theproblem. After five hard years, clearing away the marginal and the peri-pheral it has been able to locate the true centre, the hard core of the

problem—and it has found it in the big cities, in the old industrial towns,in the North:‘Though over the country at large unfit houses should have practicallydisappeared within the next ten years, in certain areas—about 50 or so,including some of the largest towns—the job of clearance will take muchlonger. Most of these are places where there are heavy concentrationsof slums accounting for a considerable proportion of all the houses inthe area... they include Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham, and anumber of the older industrial towns in North-East England, South

Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire. These concentrationsof slums are the hard core of the problem’.

White Paper, Housing in England and Wales, 1961.20

‘If we can maintain the same rate of progress as we have had in the lastthree years, we shall have broken the back of the problem outside thelarger cities. We shall then be free to concentrate on these’.

Harold Macmillan, 1961.21

The first five years, it is insinuated, was merely a preliminary skirmish:the Minister can now move on to the next stage of the campaign. Once

again he is cast in a belligerent role; but now he is the supreme com-mander, matured in years and laden with experience, skillfully deployinghis forces first in one part of the terrain, then in another. The observationposts have been manned; the enemy has been reconnoitred and hisencampments patrolled: all that remains is actually to engage with him.

‘The Ministry of Housing and Local Government announced lastFriday that as soon as economic conditions permit he was proposingto mount a further attack on Northern slums and squalor. Next tomaintaining the general impetus behind the nation’s householding

programme, slum clearance, with a special blitz on the northern slums,must remain our first priority.’

Earl Jellicoe, Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Housing , February, 196222

But it is due to no achievement of the Ministry that the problem cannow be located in ‘Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham and a numberof the older industrial towns in North-East England, South Lancashire

20Housing in England and Wales, Cmnd. 1290, HMSO, 1961 pp. 3–4.21Harold Macmillan Speech to Conservative Party Conference, Times, 16th October,

1961.22Hansard , HoL, Vol. 237, Col. 94, 7th February, 1962.


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and the West Riding of Yorkshire’—for that, after all, is where italways was. Nor is it at all clear what the government propose to do

about its discovery. Their solitary act, with any special bearing on theproblem, has been to introduce a new subsidy rate, the main effect of which will be to deprive Liverpool and Manchester—authorities whichdo not pass the new test of ‘financial need’—of the grant they have beenreceiving for every slum they clear. (See Note on The New Subsidy).

Indeed, looking at the places in Table 1, it is not at all possible to sayhow the government’s campaign will end, or, indeed, whether it willend at all. Perhaps it will go on for ever.

The government could of course ask the authorities to revise their

estimates downwards, or suggest that the Medical Officers of Health hadapplied their standards too stringently, and without proper regard to theprevailing circumstances in their area. Or they could run a separate

Table 1 The Rate of Clearance: some examples

Years to No. est. No. cleared clear at

unfit %est. 1.1.55 to present 1955 unfit 30.9.61 rate

Newtown andLlanidloes 767 29.0 0 Never

Pembroke 1,250 32.0 17 480Ogwen 280 21.0 9 279Kingsclere and

Whitchurch 1,098 19.6 92 175Freebridge Lynn 1,421 37.5 84 110Liverpool 88,233 43.1 6,546 94Horncastle 380 29.9 30 80Holderness 1,066 17.2 90 74Kerrier 2,000 29.5 171 73Manchester 68,000 32.7 8,754 46Bacup 2,400 35.8 328 43Oldham 11,169 25.7 1,593 41Dundee 23,700 42.0 3,804 36Portsmouth 7,000 10.9 1,070 35Birmingham 50,250 10.1 8,419 33Hartismere 900 15.2 173 32Ashby de la Zouch 363 17.6 66 31Stalybridge 1,949 25.0 416 26Rochdale 5,000 16.0 1,062 26Brighouse 1,440 12.9 358 21Stockport 6,000 12.7 1,338 21

Sources: Slum Clearance (England and Wales) Cmnd. 9593, HMSO 1955.

Housing Return for Scotland , 30th September, 1961.Housing Returns Appendix, HMSO, December, 1961.

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campaign for Lancashire, as they do now for Scotland, and thus berelieved of the embarrassment of Liverpool and Manchester.

But failing something like this, there seems no alternative but for theMinister to go on his way, distending his predictions over longer andlonger periods, qualifying them with larger and larger exceptions,laboriously advancing towards the final target with no encouragementother than the congratulations he showers on himself. And what if, whenthe target were eventually, and after long travail, achieved, the estimatesshould themselves prove wrong? It is to this possibility that we now turn.

2. The Estimates

In 1954, when they were preparing to launch their campaign, the

Ministry of Housing asked local authorities to provide the ‘best estimate’they could of the number of slums in their area, together with theirproposals for ‘action in the first five years’.23 In the following year,these were published in a summary called Slum Clearance, which gavethe separate returns of each local authority.24 In all, 847,112 houses inEngland and Wales were estimated to be ‘unfit for human habitation’(a national average of 6.5 per cent), of which 375,484 were to be demolishedin the next five years.

The Ministry’s handling of the survey does not suggest any great

anxiety to know the precise dimensions of the problem they were aboutto take on. They conducted no independent survey of their own, nor didthey issue detailed instructions on how the survey was to be carried out.In the preface they note that there was ‘considerable variation’ in theinformation on which the returns are based (‘some local authorities havebeen able to carry out detailed inspection, whereas some have had to relyon broad estimates’) but they were satisfied that the returns represented‘the best conclusions which local authorities were able to reach in thelight of their local circumstances’.25

A number of authorities, however, had made no returns at all (Smeth-wick, Macclesfield, Kettering, Southport, Windsor, Leek R.D.C., CannockR.D.C.), and, though few, the publication of the survey without them ischaracteristic of the haphazard way the estimates were arrived at.26 The‘variations’ are too considerable—indeed grotesque—to be accounted forby the difference between a ‘detailed inspection’ and a ‘broad estimate’.The relevant distinction—the Ministry omits to point out in the preface—is between a clearance target and a real attempt to assess the numberof slums. Some authorities returned all the houses they considered to beslums, even though they had no hope of immediately clearing them.Liverpool, for instance, returned 88,000 houses as unfit, while expecting

23 Slum Clearance (Englandand Wales), HMSO, Cmnd. 9593, 1955, p.iii.24The returns cover England and Wales only, the Scottish figures were published

separately in the following year.25Ibid. p.iii. ‘I expect no more than an estimate of the total problem—the best

estimate that can be made—and of the time it will take to deal with the problem, plus amore detailed programme for the first five years’ Harold Macmillan. Speech to theannual conference of the Urban District Councils Association, 25th June, 1954.

26Macclesfield later appeared in a government White Paper as one of the fifty towns

with the longest clearance task. Housing in England and Wales, Cmnd. 1209.HMSO,1961, Appendix.

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to clear only 7,000 in the first five years. But in many places the municipalofficials seem either to have misunderstood the difference between an

estimate and a programme, or else to have ignored it. Fully one-half of the local authorities appear with identical figures in the two columns‘Estimated number unfit ’ and ‘ Action in first five years’.27 They includemany places whose problems might have been expected to be lessimmediately tractable, among them Middlesbrough, Rotherham, Don-caster, and Barnsley. And among those whose estimate exceeded theirfive-year target there must have been many in the worst areas, who facedwith a great mass of poor housing, preferred to put down only thosehouses they could expect to clear in a reasonable number of years, and like

Salford, excluded ‘obsolete houses’ of ‘only fair to poor condition’ inwhich ‘re-development would be carried out if practicable’.28

The results of so variegated a procedure are, as might be expected,random. London, for instance, where all but three29 of the metropolitanboroughs returned the same number for both their estimate and theirfive-year target, fell far below the national average, with only 2.5 per centof its houses returned as unfit. Table 2, compares a number of metropolitanand suburban authorities who returned similarly low numbers. It will be

Table 2 London and the suburbsTotal no. Est.no. %est.

houses unfit unfit Stoke Newington 11,386 12 0.1%Hammersmith 26,238 144 0.5%Fulham 31,337 356 1.1%St.Pancras 30,000 371 1.2%Hackney 39,800 527 1.3%Paddington 24,255 422 1.7%Islington 45,357 834 1.8%

Sutton and Cheam 23,346 20 0.2%Finchley 19,967 111 0.5%Carshalton 16,882 96 1.2%Sunbury-on-Thames 7,315 196 2.7%Rickmansworth 7,801 243 3.1%EastBarnet 11,992 415 3.5%Brentford and Chiswick 15,654 659 4.2%

Source: Slum Clearance Cmd. 9593 HMSO, 1955.

27The figures are the same for 765 of the 1,465 authorities. We have not included inthis figure the 22 authorities who returned NIL under both columns, and the 31 whomade no return at all.

28Salford City Development Plan, quoted in Cullingworth Housing Needs and Housing Policy, 1961, p.52. The Salford return of 12,026 was in fact the same as their twenty-yeardevelopment programme. It is not possible to say how many towns arrived at theirestimates in this way.

29The three were Paddington, which in the first five years planned to clear 305 of

422 (1.7%); Kensington, which planned to clear 268 of 784 (2%); and Bermondsey,which planned to clear 1,189 of 1,289 (8.2%).

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Table 3. EquationsThis table compares local authorities which, according to the 1955

estimates had slum problems of comparable but negligible size. Mainly Industrial and Working Class Dormitory, Middle Class, etc.

Total Est. % Est. Total

no. no. est. no. no.

houses unfit unfit unfit houses

11,386 12 Stoke Newington 0.1% Welwyn Garden City 9 7,087

63,641 141 Cardiff 0.2% Sutton & Cheam 41 23,346

0.3% Bournemouth 106 40,491

26,264 116 Newport 0.4% Epsom & Ewell 81 18,750

26,238 144 Hammersmith 0.5% Penge 38 6,940

1,692 11 Wirksworth (Derbs.) 0.6% Eastbourne 111 17,639

9,498 66 Caerphilly 0.7% Ilfracombe 20 2,974

22,050 175 Swindon 0.8% Cheltenham 149 18,100

14,613 128 Accrington 0.9% Orpington 184 21,015

29,800 300 Rhondda 1.0% Hemel Hempstead 103 10,544

31,337 356 Fulham 1.1% Littlehampton 44 4,413

30,000 371 St. Pancras 1.2% Carshalton 208 16,882

39,800 527 Hackney 1.3% Solihull 204 22,289

7,319 100 Heanor (Derbs.) 1.4%

20,150 308 Barrow-in-Furness 1.5% Hailsham 180 12,048

5,228 86 Leyland (Lancs.) 1.6% Weston-Super-Mare 195 11,787

15,212 264 Burton-on-Trent 1.7% Hoylake U.D.C. 145 8,700

45,357 834 Islington 1.8% Barnet 138 7,618

42,130 812 Middlesbrough 1.9% Reigate 263 14,089

2.0% Cowes 110 5,391

15,558 329 Rotherham R.D.C.2.1% Swanage 50 2,340

9,250 246 Llanelly 2.2% Tunbridge Wells 259 11,636

60,000 1,418 Lambeth 2.3% Wallasey 599 26,225

13,906 329 Rugby 2.4% Haslemere 80 3,310

5,898 147 Hindley (Lancs.) 2.5% Godalming 112 4,412

27,577 728 Battersea 2.6% Bideford 13 1,792

11,545 316 Consett (Co.Dur.) 2.7% Sunbury-on-Thames196 7,315

26,666 740 Darlington 2.8% East Grinstead 34 3,671

8,641 250 Droylsden (Lancs.)2.9% Dorking 164 5,624

3.0% Andover 132 4,341

24,371 750 Rotherham 3.1% Tring 52 1,664

4,848 153 Belper 3.2% Poole 797 24,740

14,500 483 Stanley (Co. Dur.) 3.3% Burnham-on-Crouch 44 1,341

20,280 700 Chesterfield 3.4% East Barnet 415 11,992

40,592 1,442 Woolwich 3.5% Malmesbury 30 847

42,000 1,500 Derby 3.6% Aylesbury 314 8,681

16,353 614 Deptford 3.7% Maidenhead 303 8,228

7,650 292 Coalville (Leics.) 3.8% Buckingham 52 1,364

9,718 578 Houghton-le-Spring3.9% Knutsford 90 2,287

8,600 343 Workington 4.0% Chippenham 166 4,156 Source: Slum Clearance, 1955.


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seen that the recorded percentage of unfit houses was the same in Carshaltonas in St. Pancras, in Penge as in Hammersmith, rather higher in Sunbury-

on-Thames than in Islington, and twice as high in Rickmansworth as inHackney. Sutton and Cheam actually returned more slum houses thanStoke Newington, as did Potters Bar, Wimbledon, Finchley and Elstree (seeTable 2. ‘London and the suburbs’).

Table 3 shows that such equations are neither occasional nor confinedto one area. Taking towns and boroughs which fall well below the nationalaverage of 6.5 per cent, it is possible to find such oddly-equated couplesfor all but three of the 40 gradations between 0.1 and 4 per cent. Not muchneeds to be said about the peculiarities of a procedure which can class

Rotherham and Tring, or Orpington and Accrington as facing, sideby side, problems of the same negligible proportions. But the actual

Table 4 Neighbours

Households 1951 CensusTotal no. Est. no. % Est.of Houses unfit unfit Bath* WC* Piped

Water*Manchester 208,144 68,000 32.7% 41% 10% 13%

Salford 50,881 12,026 23.6% 59% 11% 12%Stockton on Tees 21,041 3,075 14.6% 38% 8% 15%Middlesbrough 42,130 812 1.9% 46% 7% 14%Batley 14,075 4,796 34.1% 58% 45% 5%Dewsbury 17,703 1,714 9.7% 50% 35% 7%Sheffield 156,614 13,500 8.6% 49% 12% 10%Rotherham 24,371 750 3.1% 44% 10% 8%Liverpool 204,486 88,233 43.1% 48% 17% 21%Warrington 22,900 1,401 6.1% 51% 35% 10%

Preston 37,141 6,153 16.6% 52% 8% 13%Wigan 24,167 2,145 8.9% 55% 7% 9%*Shared or none.

Sources: Slum Clearance and Census 1951 (England and Wales), County Reports.

numbers are even stranger: there were more slum houses returned inTunbridge Wells than in Llanelly, in Hoylake U.D.C. than in Cardiff, inAylesbury than in the Rhondda, in Hailsham than in Belper, in Sevenoaks

(Kent) than in Hindley (Lancs) (see Table 3, ‘Equations’).The disjunctions are as surprising as the equations, suggesting violentcontrasts between towns of a rather similar character. Table 4 comparesthe estimates for some neighbouring towns in Yorkshire, Durham andLancashire, towns which share a common experience of both exploitationand neglect, and an inheritance which—as can be seen from the Censusfigures of ‘amenities’, printed on the right-hand of the table,30—they

30 The figures are taken from the 1951 Census, those of the 1961 Census being not yetavailable. There is no independent way of finding out the condition of housing

in a particular town. The Census figures refer to households only, and there-fore give only a very rough indication of the standard of the houses themselves.

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49

have not yet cast off. ‘Amenities’ are not a sure guide to the conditionof a house, but it is simply not believable that the proportion of unfit

houses is seven times as great in Liverpool as in Warrington, or thatBatley and Dewsbury, both very poorly-provided towns, can be sosharply opposed, or that Middlesbrough and Rotherham have less thanthe national average of unfit houses (see Table 4, ‘Neighbours’).

Within this general disorder, there are discernible regional trendswhich add their own peculiarities and distortions. They seem to resultmore from differences in the mode of assessment than from actualhousing conditions. Table 5 compares the three worst-provided areasof the country.31 The Lancashire estimates, though with exceptions,32

Table 5 Regional contrasts

Total no. Est. % Est.houses no. unfit unfit

Lancashire 1,520,760 243,280 16.0%Northumberland and Durham 687,882 51,466 7.5%Glamorgan 330,196 11,594 3.5%

Liverpool 204,486 88,233 43.1%Newcastle 88,216 4,645 5.3%Newport 26,264 116 0.4%

Source: Slum Clearance.

are on the whole high, and account for a large part of the national estimate.Durham, by contrast, which is in some ways a poorer and more neglectedcounty, and which has had very little new building in this century, recordsa qualitatively lower assessment, while Glamorgan appears to have nospecial housing problem at all, falling far below the national average andrecording a percentage little higher than Sussex. The regional contrast is

emphasised by the difference between their three ports: the Liverpoolpercentage return is eight times higher than that of Newcastle, and onehundred and seven times higher than that of Newport (see Table 5, ‘RegionalContrasts’).

Table 6 sets out the returns for the towns of Monmouth and Glamorgan,together with the 1951 Census figures, and shows that, except for Merthyrand Ebbw Vale, all of them fall below the national average. Indeed so loware the estimates that the four rural district councils of Caernavon (Gwyffai,Lleyn, Nant Conway and Ogwen) condemned the same number of houses

as Cardiff, Newport, Tredegar, Caerphilly, Bedwelty, Rhondda, Aberdare,and Mountain Ash, taken together. The deficiency in elementary household

‘Amenity’ figures cannot be used as an index of unfitness, but they give a roughindication of the general character and age of housing: a town with a highpercentage of households with no bath is likely to have a high percentage of poorhousing.

31Scottish housing is discussed elsewhere in this issue. But it is important to note herethat Scottish housing conditions are in every way—in overcrowding, in lack of elemen-tary household provision, in age of buildings—worse than the worst in England, thoughthe Scottish estimates are actually lower, even for the Clyde Valley, than those of Lancashire.

32Accrington (0.9%), Barrow-in-Furness (1.5%), Warrington (6.1%), Blackburn(6.2%) and Wigan (8.9 %) returned low assessments.


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provision is shown in the Census figures printed alongside (see Table 6,‘Industrial South Wales’).

The implausibilities of the document become total when the estimatesin Slum Clearance are compared with the clearances that have beencarried out since 1955. Table 7 lists a number of older industrial townswhich have cleared the houses estimated as unfit in 1955, or will shortlyhave done so. But as the Census figures printed alongside them show,they are among the worst-equipped towns in the country. Among the150 largest towns and boroughs in the country, Rhondda has the largestpercentage of households which have no bath or share one, Sunderland

Table 6 Industrial South Wales

Households 1951 Census

Total no. Est. no. % Est. Piped of houses unfit Unfit Bath* WC* Water*

Cardiff 63,641 141 0.2% 49% 30% 32%Newport 26,264 116 0.4% 52% 29% 33%Caerphilly 9,468 66 0.7% 61% 18% 26%

Rhondda 29,800 300 1.0% 83% 23% 30%Bedwellty 7,083 75 1.1% 66% 22% 25%Aberdare 12,605 180 1.4% 70% 15% 21%Blaenavon 3,000 436 1.4% 74% 24% 18%PortTalbot 17,372 623 3.6% 46% 21% 30%Abertillery 7,202 300 4.2% 78% 27% 29%Pontardawe 10,000 453 4.5% 52% 24% 33%Tredegar 5,390 275 5.1% 64% 19% 18%Swansea 42,971 2,402 5.6% 47% 22% 28%

Pontypool 11,841 708 6.0% 60% 24% 26%Neath 8,964 545 6.1% 57% 24% 38%

EbbwVale 7,229 710 9.8% 66% 29% 33%Merthyr 17,470 2,847 16.0% 70% 14% 14%

* Shared or none. Source: Slum Clearance and Census 1951 (England and Wales) , County Reports.

and South Shields were among the three towns with the highest percentageof households having no internal water supply, and Dewsbury (followedby Barnsley and South Shields) has the second highest percentage of households sharing a lavatory.33 These are among the towns which thegovernment claims have ‘broken the back’ of their slum problem and‘should by the end of 1965 have completed the clearance programme whichthey set themselves in 1955’ (see Table 7).

33British Towns, C. A. Moser and Wolf Scott. Centre for Urban Studies Report No. 2

1961, p. 29, Table 10. Barnsley, Warrington, South Shields and Dewsbury were four of the six worst-provided towns for shared lavatories.

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Table 7 Towns without Slums

Est. No. Households 1951

No. cleared Censusunfit 1.1.55 Still to Still to Piped

houses to clear clear Bath* WC* water*30.9.61 1961 1965

Barnsley 969 1,076 NIL NIL 50% 28% 10%Rhondda 300 232 68 NIL 83% 23% 30%Middlesbrough 812 1,119 NIL NIL 46% 7% 14%Dewsbury 1,714 1,334 370 NIL 50% 35% 7%Sunderland 3,500 2,346 1,154 NIL 52% 32% 43%

South Shields 2,870 2,182 688 NIL 54% 30% 21%Rotherham 750 564 186 NIL 44% 10% 8%Newcastle 4,645 2,231 2,414 926 39% 16% 18%Cardiff 141 476 NIL NIL 49% 30% 32%Newport 116 191 NIL NIL 52% 29% 33%Barrow-in-

Furness 308 378 NIL NIL 43% 9% 11% Jarrow 1,772 1,420 352 NIL 56% 17% 29%W. Hartlepool 2,452 1,591 861 NIL 50% 6% 18%

Darlington 740 564 176 NIL 35% 8% 11%Crewe 328 356 NIL NIL 35% 30% 11%

* Shared or none. Source: Slum Clearance, Census 1951 (England and Wales), County ReportsHousing Returns. Appendix, December 31st, 1961.

The ‘variations’ are not always as spectacular, or as self-evidentlyinapposite, as those we have picked out, but they are to be found—wehope to have shown—in every part of the country, bringing into weirdjuxtaposition, as places with no serious slum problem, the poor townsand the prosperous, the industrial and the dormitory, and setting inunaccountable contrast towns which share a common inheritance of deprivation and neglect. As the tables cumulatively show, these are notoccasional variations, or minor discrepancies, and they cannot beexplained except on the assumption that different things were beingjudged in different places by different standards. As a guide to the problemin individual places Slum Clearance is misleading, so great are thevariations from one town to another; as an assessment of the amount

of unfit housing in the country—itself a poor and arbitrary index of housingneed—it is worthless; as an indication of the regional distribution of poorhousing it is deceptive, so unrepresented are the needs of London, Durhamand South Wales. As the basis for a major government campaign it isderisory.

The Minister has never questioned these estimates, though he must,presumably, glance at them from time to time. On the contrary, he hasclung to them; he has quoted them so frequently that they have acquired

an authority in spite of themselves. Year by year he has lovingly measuredprogress against the original estimates, for they have been the solitary

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standard by which his policies, however inadequate in relation either towhat was achieved in the past, or even to his own preliminary boasts,

could be counted, in however small a way and with however many quali-fications, a success. When, for instance, Mr. Brooke claimed in 1959 that‘We are nearly a quarter of the way to abolishing the slums’,34 there werethe estimates whose achievement stood at the end of the path. And whenDr. Hill says that ‘over a large part of the country the slum problem hasceased to exist’35 he is including—if he has troubled to make a count—Barnsley and Middlesbrough, Crewe and Barrow, Caerphilly and Cardiff and Newport. And when the Ministry White Paper Housing in England

and Wales claims that ‘Well over half the 1,469 housing authorities inEngland and Wales should by the end of 1965 have completed the clearanceprogrammes they set themselves in 1955’ it is South Shields and Sunderland,Dewsbury and Rhondda, Rotherham and West Hartlepool which swellthe total.36

It has taken the government more than five years to discover that poorand unfit housing is to be found rather in the North than in the South,rather in the cities than in the suburbs, rather in the older industrial townsthan in the Surrey Hills or the Hampshire Downs. Perhaps in anotherfive years, or it may be ten, the Minister, or the Minister’s successor, orhis successor’s successor, will come round to taking official cognisance

of the fact that housing conditions are as bad in the North East of Englandas in Lancashire; and that they are worse in Scotland than anywhereelse in the country. He may then learn that bad housing has not disappeared,magically, with neither blitz nor clearance to aid its passage, from thevalleys of South Wales; that it can still be found in St. Pancras and inIslington, and that it exists in more than average quantity in Warringtonand Wigan. And he may discover, at the same time, that Barnsley andDewsbury, Middlesbrough and Crewe are not emerald isles, punctuatinga darkly Northern murrain, but are towns much like the other townsaround them, afflicted quite as much as their neighbours by the en-

cumbrance of a 19th century past.He could then launch a campaign.There would be plenty to occupy him for many years to come, if he

did no more than bring the existing estimates to some common standardof judgement. But he would, no doubt, use the occasion to add a pro-

But Nothing Happens

34Henry Brooke speech at Rochester, 21st March, 1960. Ministry of Housing, Pressrelease.

35Charles Hill, Speech at Scarborough, 7th November, 1961. Ministry of Housing, Press release.

36So far from correcting the more obvious errors in the document, the Ministrycompounds them. In its white paper Housing in England and Wales, published in 1961,it reviews progress in the previous five years and prints, as an appendix, a list of fiftylocal authorities ‘whose estimates indicate a long slum clearance task’—the townswhich it has earlier declared to be the ‘core’ of the problem. Naturally enough thereis no place here for Barnsley or Dewsbury or Newcastle. What is surprising is thatthe list includes Wolverhampton, which at its present rate will clear all its slums within12 years, and also Huddersfield, which at the present rate will take 18, but excludesPortsmouth, which at the present rate will take 35 years, and Bristol which will take 21.Presumably this is to support, by exclusion, its earlier argument that the slum problemhad now been localised in the North and the Midlands. Tredegar unexpectedly appears,with 1,068 houses in the column headed ‘estimated unfit in 1955’—a number which hasmultiplied four times since it was first printed in the 1955 document. Presumably the

Ministry was using here the revised estimates, which it asked for in 1960, but whi:h ithas never yet published.


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portion at least of the houses which had become unfit in the first 15 yearsof the government’s campaign. And he might well include some, at least,

of the decayed houses of the Victorian middle class, on which the Ministryjust unleashed its latest ‘attack’.37

It is not difficult to imagine what he would have to say. The Ministermight inform the House that he had to take account of changes that hadtaken place since the last estimates were drawn up in 1955. The bestefforts of the government as a whole, and of his Ministry in particular,had unfortunately been defeated by the galloping decay of the buildingsthemselves; many houses which, only ten years ago, were perfectlyadequate, or at most sub-standard had suddenly and treacherously

transformed themselves into slums, pitching entire regions into conditionsthey thought they had escaped, and enmeshing dozens of towns and citiesin problems they thought they had definitively solved.

He might put an optimistic gloss upon the otherwise melancholynews, and declare himself encouraged by the magnitude and apparentintractability of the problem which stretched out endlessly before him.He might proclaim—for it would surely be an occasion for celebration—that standards had risen so rapidly (thanks to the bold and adventurouspolicy pursued by his Ministry) that conditions, perfectly acceptable only

a few years ago, were now widely felt to be intolerable; that it was nolonger seemly for so many of the people of Dewsbury to have to share alavatory; or for so many people in the Rhondda to have to do without abath of their own; and that the housewives of Sunderland and SouthShields, bravely though they have managed in the past, ought now to beprovided with a supply of water, inside their homes.

And the alarums would sound, and the trumpets would be blown.A ‘drive’, a ‘massed assault’ could be announced. Or perhaps, this time,selectively: a dawn attack on Rotherham, surprising it, smoke-laden,

sleeping there in the valley; a salvo across the river-mouth at Newcastle, toshatter her ill-judged complacency; an ultimatum to Wigan and to Warring-ton, commanding them to surrender their unjustified pretensions. Theministerial itinerations would recommence—starting perhaps with KensalNew Town or the Caledonian Road, and going on to St. Ann’s Wells orCanon Street Road. And the cheerful bulletins would issue endlessly Intwo years time . . . or perhaps in five . . . Taken as a whole . . . in the countryat large . . . Everywhere except . . . Tyneside . . . Merseyside . . . Clydeside.

III. The ConservativesThe Conservative tends to doubt whether the housing problem reallyexists. In the years following a war he recognises that there are specialcircumstances requiring special action, and shortages which only govern-

37‘One of the most acute housing problems still left is the multi-occupation by familiesor lodgers of many large houses designed originally for use by single families . . . Suchhouses are mainly to be found in large cities, or in parts of older towns which oncewere fashionable but have since gone downhill . . . The government want to see anattack on the squalid living conditions to be found in these houses which are not onlybad in themselves but may also breed delinquency and crime. The government proposeto provide stronger and more selective powers than those that have existed hitherto’.Housing in England and Wales, p. 13.

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ment action can meet. But he is easily persuaded that these circumstancesare exceptional, and quick to claim that they have passed away.38 At every

other time he believes that supply and demand are about to balance eachother, (usually within the space of a year 39); that the shortages which existare more apparent than real; and that difficulties, where they exist, comefrom ill-advised meddling with the market mechanism. With the solitaryexception of slum clearance itself, there is no need, he believes, whichcannot best be satisfied by the free play of market forces, by the landlordpursuing unhindered his work of repair, and the private builder adding,year by year, to the nation’s stock of houses.

When the slum clearance campaign was first announced, in Houses the Next Step (1953), the Conservatives had not yet recovered their faith in

the market forces. They were ‘anxious to encourage home-ownership’,but they still accepted the post-war view that local authority building alonecould meet the requirements of the greater part—‘perhaps necessarily thegreater part’—of the population,40 and they disavowed any intention of making slum clearance the main form of public housing, as it had been inthe thirties: local authorities had to meet a variety of needs, and ‘toconcentrate suddenly and exclusively on the slums would be as wrong asto go on ignoring them’.41

In the middle of the 1950’s, the Conservatives seem suddenly to haveshaken off the anxieties and uncertainties of the post-war years and they no

longer felt obliged to disguise as amendment the traditional measures towhich they now belligerently and rapidly returned. Once again, as in thethirties, they made an absolute divide between slum clearance, which they

But Nothing Happens

38‘Rent control as we have it is essentially an emergency measure. It is a productof the war . . . a product of the temporary derangement of the relationship betweendemand and supply which the war inevitably brought with it.’ Enoch Powell, Hansard ,Vol. 560, Col. 1760, 21st November, 1956, Second Reading of the Rent Bill.

39‘This figure of 80,000 represents the largest number of houses ever built in any one

year in the palmy days of housebuilding before the War: and it probably therefore isconsiderably in excess of the actual need in any one year, and even to-day, because atthe beginning of the war, although the figure had fallen off, there was a considerable num-ber of empty houses in existence . . . the supply of houses has been greater than thedemand for a number of years. Therefore this figure of 80,000 is altogether too large . . .I am very well satisfied to find that even already we have so large a number of houses incontemplation as nearly 16,000.’ Neville Chamberlain (Minister of Health), Hansard ,Vol. 165, Col. 209. Housing (No. 2) Bill Third Reading, 25th June, 1923.

‘The total rate of building had reached between 140,000 and 150,000 houses a year.That was not only the greatest number ever built in this country in a year, but wassubstantially in excess of the number required to meet the current needs of the nation.’Neville Chamberlain. Times, 12th March, 1923.

‘We are now in sight of, and should in 12 months’ time or so be level with, an equationof overall supply and demand. Enoch Powell, Hansard , Vol. 560, Col. 1760, 21st November,

1956. Second Reading of Rent Bill.‘The gap which we inherited between households and houses has been closed, though

not closed nearly so fast as we should like.’ Dr. Charles Hill (Minister of Housing),Hansard , Vol. 652, Col. 1507, 2nd February, 1962.

40‘While anxious to encourage the spread of house ownership, Her Majesty’sGovernment have been equally conscious of the need for houses to rent to meet therequirements of the greater part—perhaps necessarily the greater part—of thepopulation . . . In 1951, 172,280 houses were built to let in Great Britain, 22,500 to sell.In 1952 the corresponding figures were 205,600 and 34,320. For 1953 the estimatedcompletions will be 245,000 to let and 55,000 to sell. This dual policy seems to be atonce fair and sensible. It will be continued.’ Houses the Next Step, Cmnd. 8996, HMSO,1953. p. 4, The reference to ‘houses to rent’ is slightly ambiguous, since the governmentstill hoped to encourage private builders to build for letting.

41

ibid p. 11.


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55

assigned to local authorities, and ‘general needs’ which were apportionedto private enterprise and the open market.42

The start of the campaign coincided with a government attack on thelevel of council house building, and its abolition of the ‘general needs’subsidy. The preponderant place which, by the later ’fifties, slum clearancehad come to occupy in public policy was due not to the urgency with whichthe task was approached, but to the concentration of dwindling allocationsupon a single problem (see Table 8).

Table 8 Decline in Local Authority BuildingYear Local authority Private1955 162,525 109,934

1956 139,977 119,5851957 137,977 122,9421958 113,146 124,0871959 99,456 146,4761960 103,235 162,1081961* 92,880 170,366

*The 1961 figure is an estimate based on the first nine months of that year. Source: Housing Return for England and Wales 31st December 1961,

Cmnd. 1619.The return to tradition was slow in coming, but when it came it was

complete, and more so in housing than in any other branch of the Welfareservices. Armed with renewed confidence, surrounded with the familiarpenumbra of traditional doctrine, the Conservatives pursued the tenetsof their re-discovered faith with dogmatic and stupid confidence.

The more Conservatives contemplated the housing situation, the moreit seemed to them to shrink to manageable proportions. There was slumclearance, for which special provision should be made, but this apart there

were no needs which could not best be met by unshackling the marketforces and leaving rent to pursue its therapeutic work. It was not morebuilding that was wanted, but a ‘proper use of existing resources’.43 If houses were falling into dilapidation it was because the landlord had neitherthe means nor the inducement to carry out repairs. If shortages seemed stillto exist it was because they had been created and perpetuated by rentrestrictions, which were ‘artificially inflating the apparent shortage’,44

42‘Local authorities and local authorities alone can clear and rehouse the slums,while the general housing need can be met, as it was to a great extent before the war,by private enterprise.’ Harold Macmillan. Speech at the annual conference of the

Urban District Councils Association, 6th June, 1954.43‘The coming reform of the Rent Restriction Acts will need to be drastic enoughto secure a proper use of existing housing resources, so that excess house building canbe seen to be the wasteful extravagance that it is.’ Economist , 27th October, 1956.

‘Rent restriction is itself responsible for creating an artificial shortage by encourag-ing under-occupation and discouraging letting. Sooner or later this vicious circles mustbe broken. It is unfair that people with young children should have to double up withtheir in-laws just because others were holding on to cheap rent-controlled houses withmore room than they needed.’ Duncan Sandys. Speech to Conservative Conference atLlandudno, Financial Times, October 10th, 1956.

44‘The frozen rent distorts our whole economy, not only by nourishing false standardsof value, engendering misuse of the national stock of dwellings, and artificially inflatingthe apparent shortage, but also by hampering the movement of workers to jobs outsidetheir localities.’ Leading article in The Times, 13th July, 1956.


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by encouraging under-occupation and discouraging letting. A ‘nationalsufficiency of housing’ already existed: a return to ‘economic’ rents

would allow housing policy to be directed at real problems, instead of at a‘much larger and spurious general shortage’.45

It was on under-occupation that the Conservative mind now dweltobsessively. If shortages still existed, the fault could be put down topeople who were holding on to ‘far more accommodation than they needed’,a ‘magic circle’ of controlled tenants enjoying in the venomous phrase of The Economist ‘squatter’s rights’.46 There were ‘far too many large familiesin small houses, and too many small families in large houses’.47 Dwellingswhich might be made available to people who really needed them were

being occupied by people who were perfectly well able to look afterthemselves.48 Old people in particular seemed to enjoy a disproportionateamount of space, and were preserved in under-occupied buildings whenthey ought to retire to the country.49 It was unfair that ‘children shouldhave to double up with their in-laws just because others were holding on tocheap-rent controlled houses with more room than they needed’.50

And these were seen not as mere anomalies, but rather, as The Economistdramatically conceived them, immense social shadows cast by theRent Restriction Acts, ‘stretching in all their injustice and waste

across the whole balance of living standard as between generations’,51

condemning people to live in squalid and overcrowded conditions, andpreventing private enterprise from effecting, in housing, the large revolu-tion it had achieved in consumer durables.

45Houses to Let by Geoffrey Howe and Colin Jones, Conservative Political Centre,1956, (pp. 28). The writers cast a cheerful eye over the census tables and conclude thatthe country’s housing shortage is ‘almost at an end’. ‘Over the country as a whole,housing demand and supply ought to be in rough balance by the end of this year’(p. 27). ‘Subject to certain exceptions, there is little reason for believing that a markedgeneral shortage of housing still persists’ (p. 18).

46

Economist, 24th September, 1960.47Economist, 5th January, 1957, and, among many statements of the same view:‘Many tenants are remaining in houses which are too big for their present purposesbecause of the extreme difficulty of obtaining other rented accommodation . . . It hadbeen estimated that 56 per cent of all rented accommodation is under-occupied.’Financial Times, 8th November, 1956, and Enoch Powell’s speech on the SecondReading of the Rent Bill, describing the ‘widely recognised evils’ that rent control hadproduced: ‘The first is the waste of accommodation . . . For example, the 1951 Censusshowed that there were 1¼ million households with three or more rooms per person, andthe probability is that the under-occupation which these figures indicate has increasedrather than lessened since 1951.’ Hansard, Vol. 560, Col. 1761, 21st November, 1956.

48‘The Rent Act aimed gradually to unfreeze rented property so that dwellings nowheld, because their rent was such a bargain, by people who could perfectly well look afterthemselves, or who needed less accommodation, might be made available for those whoneeded them more.’ Sir Keith Joseph, Hansard, Vol. 618, Col. 797, 26th February,1960.

49‘In any other age it would be regarded as ridiculous that, thanks to the long historyof rent control and squatter’s rights, so many of the people who live nearest to CentralLondon have retired from working there, while young workers (sic) commute a longway, perhaps spendiug three hours a day in the train Economist 27th October 1960.

‘As some members of the household die off, as grown-up children move away to startfamilies of their own, the remaining members of the household do not move into smalleraccommodation. They stay in their old buildings, sometimes rattling around like peasin a bucket.’ ‘Retired folk who, in any other age and at present income levels, reallywould choose to live on the Essex coast, are encouraged to sit tight in the great smokeof Holborn and St. Pancras.’ Norman Macrae. To Let, 1960. pp. 28–30.

50Duncan Sandys: speech to Conservative conference at Llandudno, October 10th,

1956.51Economist, 13th October, 1956.

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57

The Rent Act of 1957 was designed to cut through this strangling growth.The rise in rents, the Conservatives believed, would initiate a general

movement and re-adjustment of tenancies, at the end of which it would beobserved that ‘the right sized family’ had been fitted into the right sizedplace.52 It would release additional accommodation which was under-usedor ‘wasted’ by encouraging people in accommodation that was too largefor them to move to smaller units. By making rents ‘economic’ onceagain, it would increase the number of dwellings to let: landlords wouldlet buildings which previously they would have sold, thus checking thesale of rented property to owner-occupiers. They would no longer leavehouses empty waiting for a purchaser, but would let them as soon as atenancy became vacant. And owner-occupiers themselves would provide

more accommodation now that their tenancies had been decontrolled. Thedecay of old homes would be arrested because landlords would have themeans and the incentive to carry out repairs. And the private buildermight eventually be coaxed into returning to the market for rented homes.53

These were not merely the aims of the Act, they were the certaintieswhich inspired it. For it was not as practical men that Ministers approachedthe Rent Act debates, or as cautious administrators, but as full-bloodeddoctrinaires, and it was in a prophetic spirit that they explained theworkings of the Act to the House (the following quotations come from

the debates on the second reading of the Rent Act, November 21st–22nd,1957):

‘The capital value of a house is the capitalisation of its market rent.The inducement to an owner to attempt to get the current value of hishouse by selling it will disappear. He will have the object of letting thathouse again as soon as possible.’

Enoch Powell ‘Once the house is decontrolled, the landlord will obviously no longerhave the same urge to sell as he has at present.’

Duncan Sandys‘I believe that decontrol will encourage owner-occupiers to make avail-able very much more accommodation that has been available in the past.’

Sir Keith Joseph‘Houses . . . will no longer be held empty month after month waitingfor a purchaser, although quite unsuitable for an owner occupier.

52By decontrolling rents ‘We get more flexibility, and once we have flexibility weincrease the total number (of houses), if we can get the right size family into the righthouse.’ James Maclay, Secretary of State for Scotland. Hansard , Vol. 567, Col. 1419.

Rent Bill, Third Reading, 28th March, 1957.53‘Private enterprise . . . can meet the nation’s need for housing with greater flexibilitythan local authorities and at no cost to the public purse. Its role will be extended first of all in the field of middle-class housing, but it is to be hoped that the restoration of themarket and the elimination of indiscriminate subsidies will gradually persuade privateenterprise to return to the construction of working-class houses.’ Howe and Jones op cit ,p. 36. This has been the forlorn hope of the Conservatives throughout the fifties. Whenthe private builders failed to return to the rented market, despite the 1957 Act, TheEconomist concluded that it was because rents had not yet risen high enough; they wouldhave to reach 3½ times the pre-war figure ‘the minimum level needed to set a new com-petitive drive afoot in the provision of new houses for rent.’ Economist , 24th September,1960. In Housing in England and Wales 1961, the government return to the theme,describing their £25m. subsidy to co-operative housing associations as ‘essentially a

pump-priming operation’ which they hope will serve to show the way to the investmentof private capital once again in building houses to let.’ op cit , p. 10.


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Those houses will now be let . . . . Because, in future there will be nodifference between the value of the house with vacant possession and

the house with tenants’ Enoch Powell ‘By allowing rents to be charged which are more in keeping with realities,the Bill should ensure that most landlords will put their houses in goodrepair where that can be done at reasonable cost.’

Duncan Sandys‘In the vast majority of cases the object of the owners of these houseswill be to ensure that they are not vacant of a tenant . . . they will have tocontinue to let them at a market rent at which they can find tenants.’

Enoch Powell ‘(This measure) will halt the drain upon rented accommodation, it willrelease additional accommodation which is under-used or wasted, itwill arrest the deterioration of millions of houses for lack of main-tenance, and it will give to persons who are moving or setting up homethe opportunity to find accommodation in the market.’

Enoch Powell Not one of these things happened.54 Under-occupation actually increased

in the two years following the passage of the Act.55 The number of renteddwellings did not increase; it declined.56 The trend to owner occupationwas not checked or reversed; it continued.57 The number of houses stand-ing empty did not fall: it multiplied 58. The amount of accommade avail-able by owner occupiers did not multiply: it remained unchanged.59

The government, however, as always, were quick to congratulatethemselves on their success. They did not wait to analyse the workings of the Act; it was enough that its provisions were sound and its principlesunimpeachable. It must be working, Ministers seemed to believe, in the

54The Social Survey inquiry into the working of the Rent Act, published as a WhitePaper in 1960 shows that the government over-estimated ‘by a factor of about two’, thenumber of people who would be automatically decontrolled under the Act, and under-estimated by almost two thirds the number of people who would be affected by ‘creepingdecontrol’: i.e. decontrol upon vacancy. The government had forecast that 750,000would be automatically decontrolled: the number was in fact between 367,000–391,000;they had forecast that creeping decontrol would release about 125,000 houses a year: therate was in fact about 320,000 p.a. for the first two years after 1957. Rent Act , 1957,Report of Inquiry, Cmnd. 1246, HMSO, 1960, pp. 21–22. Similar findings are reported inD. V. Donnison, Christine Cockburn and T. Corlett Housing Since the Rent Act ,Occasional Papers on Social Administration 3, 1961, pp. 29–33.

55‘There has been a slight increase in the group of rateable units which might beconsidered to be under-occupied’. Rent Act , Report of Inquiry, p. 17. Cf. alsoDonnison op cit p. 84. ‘The Act appears to have had no effect on “under-occupation”.’

56‘The Inquiry found that out of 317,000 dwellings let unfurnished in 1957 and de-controlled under the Act, only 237,000 were let in this way in 1959. Table 3, p. 22,shows what had happened to them.

Estimated No. (England Percentage of Position in 1959 and Wales only) total Owner-occupied 38,000 12%Rented furnished 2,000 1%Empty 25,000 8%Dwelling changed, not comparable 15,000 4%Rented unfurnished 237,000 75%

57See table above.58Inquiry, Table I, p. 17 shows increased vacancy for almost every size of dwelling.59

‘Between 1957 and 1959 there was no measurable increase in the number of owner-occupiers with tenants.’ Inquiry p. 20.

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way they had foretold. Only ten months after the Act had been passedthe Minister of Housing felt confident enough to inform a luncheon of the

Land and Property Owners that the Rent Act ‘was steadily achieving itslong-term purpose of improving the housing situation throughout thecountry’: ‘under-occupation is being reduced’, ‘more accommodation iscoming on to the market’, ‘the premature decay of good homes has beenstopped’.60

Fundamental conservative axioms had been invoked, and funda-mental conservative sentiment inflamed. There was little place, in theensuing welter of strong feeling, for the normal processes of reasoning.They had not studied the facts of housing need—they had simply latched

on to whatever available information seemed to support the introductionof economic rents. Thus they brandished the Census figures for under-occupation, without noticing that the same Census tables showed thatthere was a net shortage of small dwellings 61 and they have gone on claim-ing that the Act was a success, even after the White Paper survey showedit to have been wrong in every forecast.

When the Conservative approaches the housing problem, he is notconcerned with facts at all; he is acting according to the tenets of a faith

which has been passed from one generation of Conservatives to another,and his judgments are quite impervious to the infiltration of evidence. Itis doctrine which guides his way from one impasse to another, and dogmawhich holds sway over his understanding.

His starting point is the landlord. He is not much concerned with land-lords as individuals, or even with landlords as a class, but conceives thelandlord rather as an ideal type, a careful husbandman, guardian of property and custodian of capital, the steward of his inheritance. Thelandlord is a man who does repairs. He is a man who, by definition, wants

to do repairs, for his house is his capital, and he must do everything toprevent it depreciating in value. He is also a constant improver, since hisown interests, and those of his house, exactly coincide. The landlord is aman who feels thwarted and frustrated if he is deprived either of themeans or of the inducement to do repairs. Thus it was that Ministers did notneed any evidence about how the Rent Act was working: they knew that thelandlord was going about his work of repair, because it was in his nature,as a landlord, to do so.

60‘It is now ten months since the Rent Act came into operation. It is steadily achievingits long-term purpose of improving the housing situation throughout the country. Indeciding to deal with the old stagnating problem of rent control, the government had,you will remember, two main objects. The first was to make possible and encouragethe proper repair of rented houses and flats. The second was to bring about a betterand wiser and fuller use of existing housing accommodation. Both these things arehappening. Landlords of houses still under control are able to do and are doing therepairs necessary to qualify for the rent increases permitted. Under-occupation is beingreduced, and more accommodation is coming on to the market. As a result, morepeople are being given a chance of getting a house or fiat who previously had none.’Henry Brooke speech at a luncheon of the Land and Property Owners, 14th May, 1958

61 J. D. Cullingworth shows that in the 1951 Census there were over 5½ million

one and two person households, but less than 2 million dwellings of three rooms or less.Housing Needs and Planning Policy, 1961, pp. 35–36, Table 11.

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And if it were objected that while a priori, there is no reason to doubtthat a landlord is a man who does the repairs, there is some evidence

that this is not always the case, the Conservative might reply, in the wordsof the landlord’s ideologue, Mr. Norman Macrae, that ‘The right standardof repair is that which tenants in a competitive market are willing to payfor and which landlords in a competitive market find themselves obligedto provide’.62 The Right State of Repair is thus, on the strict Conservativeview, a purely relative term, which has no meaning independent of themarket mechanism itself. If it were further objected that English housinglegislation63 is filled with attempts to force the landlord to do what on thisdefinition, he was bound to have done already, the Conservative would

probably reply that, while this was true in the past, it was different to-day,and he might point triumphantly to the tiny number of certificates of disrepair issued after the 1957 rent increases, as proof that 99 per cent of rented homes, were in a proper state of maintenance:

‘Much more money was being spent on repairs because the landlordscould now afford it . . . In the first year of the Act applications (forcertificates of disrepair) totalled only 2 per cent of houses still control-led—88,000 out of 4,250,000. In more than half these cases—45,000—the landlord undertook to do the repairs and no certificate had to be

issued; only 30,000 certificates were issued, less than one per cent.’Henry Brooke 1958.64

Rent, in the Conservative’s view, stands in the same relation to need asthe landlord does to his house: they fullfil one another. The Conservativebelieves in rent in the same way that some people believe in full employ-

62Norman Macrae, op. cit . p. 23.63Part II of The Housing Act of 1961 for instance is designed to force

landlords of ‘multi-occupied dwellings’ to provide their tenants with elementaryamenities. The failure of the 1954 Rent and Repairs Act, announced by Mr. Macmillan as‘The biggest comprehensive attack on the housing problem for 15 years’ ( Manchester Guardian, 25th March, 1954) is significant here. It was virtually unused because it tiedrent increases very firmly to repairs: ‘Her Majesty’s Government intend that a land-lord will be permitted to claim a repairs increase only if the house is in good generalrepair as respects both structure and decoration. If the house is not already in such astate of repair, the landlord must put it right before claiming a repairs increase . . .Further, Her Majesty’s Government intend that no repairs increase shall be allowedunless and until the landlord can show that he has actually spent money on repairs.’Houses, the Next Step, p. 7. The point was emphasised by Mr. Macmillan when heintroduced the Bill to Parliament: ‘We have tried to secure that the increase shall,in fact, go to the repair of the house and not towards the income of the landlords.’Hansard , Vol. 520, Col. 182, 4th November, 1953. The 1957 Act, by contrast, nolonger tied rents to repairs but simply specified that a house should be in good repair

for the landlord to have the permitted increase. The onus of proving disrepair wasplaced on the tenant, who had to apply for a certificate of disrepair. Evidence aboutthe effects of the 1957 Act on repairs is more scattered than it is on under-occupation, butnone of it supports the government’s claims. The Inquiry found that many landlordswere not responsible for repairs at all, or else shared it with the tenants. In Londonthey were an actual majority among landlords of property that had been decontrolled(Inquiry, p. 29, Table 8). The Rowntree Trust Study found that in the two years afterthe Act there was ‘a slight but significant shifting of responsibilities for repair in privateproperty’—from the landlord to the tenant (Housing Since the Rent Act , p. 55);that ‘very few’ improvements had been made, and that ‘virtually none’ were paid for by thelandlord (ibid p. 60). In controlled accommodation, over one-third of the tenants whohad asked for repairs had failed to get them done (Inquiry, p. 30, Table 9(b)) thoughmany of them were paying the newly-fixed rent limit (ibid p. 32). The number of Improve-ment Grants obtained by private landlords remained virtually unchanged, rising by 888between 1956–7, and falling by 1,888 between 1957 and 1958.

64Henry Brooke. Speech at Worthing. Observer , 26th October, 1958.

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ment or national planning. His main view about rent is that people do notpay enough of it, and that the housing situation would be vastly improved,

if they could be induced or enabled to. Sometimes the Conservative per-suades himself that people actually want to pay more rent, that deep intheir hearts, they are ashamed if they pay less than the full market rate.65

Wherever he looks about him he sees people paying unjustly low rents.It was ‘unfair’ he believed at the time of the Rent Act ‘that different tenantsshould be paying different rents for the same kind of accommodation,66

and it was a ‘social evil’ that the same kind of tenants should be payingdifferent rents for different kinds of accommodation.67 To-day he has founda new set of discrepancies: different kinds of tenants pay the same kind of

rent for the same kind of accommodation, and it is to end this injusticethat he is urging the case for differential rents.68

His passions are genuinely roused by things like this. There is no mis-taking the fierce hatred with which he speaks of ‘ten million familybudgets based on artificially low rents’,69 or of the disdain with which herefers to ‘controlled tenants’ enjoying ‘squatter’s rights’ in somebody else’shouse; or of the contempt he feels for Council tenants whose rent issubsidised ‘out of somebody else’s pocket’. It is not merely that such thingsdislocate the housing market: they are morally and spiritually ‘damaging ’.70

The Conservative believes that rent, provided only that it is allowedto rise to its natural ‘economic’ level, will of itself satisfy every housingneed. The mechanism of the market is perfectly adjusted to secure, at anytime, an exact coincidence of need and of demand. It allows equilibrium

65 ‘I do not believe that in circumstances in which the people are able to commandan ever-increasing standard of living . . . they will not be willing or able to pay the currentvalue of the accommodation which they occupy. I do not believe that they will wish tocontinue to be subsidised by their fellow citizens through rent control, or becomeuniversal tenants of the local authorities.’ Enoch Powell, Hansard, Vol. 560, Col. 1776,21st November, 1956. Second Reading of Rent Bill.

66Duncan Sandys, outlining the new Rent Act to the Conservative Party Conference

at Llandudno. Financial Times, 10th October, 1956.67 Howe and Jones were complaining in 1956 that council rents alone had risen, and

were concerned at the inconsistency between the protected and the council tenants: ‘Whilethe former were totally shielded up to 1954 from the post-war rise in housing costs, thelatter have had to bear several increases in rent . . . As a group, therefore, council housetenants are now paying relatively more for their accommodation—even though theirhouses were meant to cater for families unable to afford the economic cost of housesbuilt to modern standards. Geoffrey Howe and Colin Jones, op. cit. p. 30.

68 Four years later Mr. Howe was working the equation backwards; now it was theprivate tenant whose rents had risen while those of council tenants had remainedunfairly stationary. ‘The housing subsidy now serves to reduce the rents of 2/5 of rentedhouses, while the remaining 3/5 are let at an economic price to occupiers who arequite indistinguishable as a class from council tenants. This expensive lottery cannot be

allowed to survive.’ Geoffrey Howe: ‘Reform of the Social Services’ in Principles in Practice, Bow Group, 1961, p. 72.69 Enoch Powell, The Welfare State, Conservative Political Centre, 1961, p. 13.70 ‘All subsidies should be regarded as a temporary but necessary evil. . . . I do not

believe that it can be socially or morally right for the rent of a house to be concealedto the extent that it now is.’ Henry Brooke,‘It is time the government considered abolishing the £100m. a year subsidy to counciltenants. The present subsidy is incompatible with the sort of free economy that thegovernment is endeavouring to establish. The council house system today is morallyand socially damaging, and I think we ought to do something about this nuisanceduring the life of this parliament.’ Enoch Powell. Speech at Hitchin, Nov. 1959.‘The effect of subsidising house room is to divert purchasing power to less essentialgoods and services, and so to distort the scale of values of the recipient . . . People whocan afford market rents but are supplied with house room on the cheap are not learningto use their judgment as are those who make the choice on where and how to live.’Arthur Seldon introduction to Macrae op. cit. p. 4.

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to reveal itself; it is the way in which the overall balance of supply anddemand can be enjoyed by the whole nation. It follows from this that rent

restriction harms everybody’s interests. It is against the interest of thelandlord, of course, but it is also against the interest of the tenant:71

it is against the interests of young people, whom it forces to double upwith their in-laws, but it is also against the interests of old people, whowould be better housed if they could be persuaded to remove themselvesfrom the ‘great smoke of Holborn and St. Pancras’.

It was in the grip of concepts like these, self-enclosed and self-confirming,that the Conservatives argued the case for decontrol. The doctrines wereutterly remote from the world of ordinary things and they were also,

at certain points, cruel. No one in their right mind would think it asensible, let alone a beneficial thing to turn old people out of their homes.And if they were told that this was the only way to ‘solve’ the housingproblem, they would probably reply, if they accepted the premise, that itwere better left unsolved. But the Conservative did not merely considerit was a possibility: he argued vehemently in favour of it. It was oldpeople whom he held primarily responsible for under-occupation, and hewas so obsessed by this, that he seemed to forget the human meaning of what it was he wanted to happen:72

‘May I say in particular how sorry I am to hear that some of thetenants in these decontrolled flats are old age pensioners who have done

71 ‘In the long run, rent control is against the tenants’ interests since it reduced thesupply of freely-available rented dwellings.’ Geoffrey D. M. Block, Rents in Perspective,Conservative Political Centre, 1961. The Economist took the argument so seriously thatin September, 1960, it urged tenants associations, which had been formed to combat rentincreases, to agitate instead for the extension of decontrol: ‘If only all these privatetenants’ associations could get together as a pressure group urging that decontrolbecome more general, they might arrive somewhere. Instead, they are all saying thatcontrol should be re-extended to them.’ Economist , 24th September, 1960.

72 We reprint here a story which we happened to read in a local newspaper while wewere writing this article:

Couple Evicted: Husband Died—Council’s efforts to buy house.

‘Soon after a couple—both aged 76—were evicted from their home in Southgate Road,Dalston, the husband died in hospital, it was revealed at Hackney Council’s meetingon Wednesday. Councillor A. W. Linzell chairman of the Housing Committee, des-cribed the Council’s long and untiring efforts to purchase the house so that the coupleneed not be evicted . . . Councillor Linzell said the house was sold in 1947, and notice toquit was served by the new owners under the Rent Act on February 10th, 1958. Theybrought proceedings for eviction. The Court Order was suspended until August 12th,1959, and five further suspensions were given by the Court, which allowed the tenant toremain until January 4th, 1962. On January 22nd a Shoreditch County Court bailiff warned the tenant’s wife that he had been instructed to evict the family on February 5th.He did not do so on that date because no one was present from either the landlords or

their agents formally to take possession of the premises. On February 16th, when theeviction was actually carried out, the tenant was in hospital, and his wife, because of thethreatened action by the bailiff, was living with relatives in another part of London.Three days after the eviction the husband died, said Councillor Linzell. He said it wason May 4th, 1961, that the Housing Committee resolved to try and purchase the housein order to protect the tenant. Letters were sent to the landlord offering to negotiate,but no acknowledgment was received . . . when the threatened eviction was known,urgent representations were made to the owners to open negotiations. The firm’ssecretary refused to withdraw the bailiff’s instructions . . . The owners have at all timesbeen aware of the Council’s anxiety to negotiate for the purchase of the property inorder to avoid the eviction of this elderly couple, and in view of the Council’s firm under-taking to offer to purchase the premises at market value, there could have been no validreason for evicting this elderly lady when her husband was dangerously ill in hospital,and when a postponement for another seven or fourteen days could easily have beengranted by the landlords without prejudice to their position.’ Hackney Gazette, 2ndMarch, 1962.

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just what the government want and have given up surplus space tomove into smaller space. It is admirable. It is just what we want, and it is

a very sad result that they should now be in this situation. I say this inno attitude of condescension or patronage. I hope they will not despisethe help of the National Assistance Board which can be of use to themin this situation.’

Sir Keith Joseph ( Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Housing ) ,February, 1960.73

‘Doubtless the change will cause some hardship among old age pension-ers and other special groups for whom an adjustment in socialsecurity payments will be necessary’.74

Economist , 1956The Conservatives are trying to extend the principles of the 1957 Actfrom private to public housing. To-day it is the introduction of differentialrents which they believe will solve the housing problem, encour

raphael samuel but nothing happends

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