10 FEBRUARY 1967, Page 9

Housing: The Real Failure

TWILIGHT ZONES

By JOHN REX

Iis a curious fact that in a welfare state the 'provision of the most elementary of services, giving people shelter, is so ill-organised. For the plain fact is that when we look at Cathy country we find a world of Dickensian squalor still flourishing in the 1960s. Only two years ago a Birmingham Corporation spokesman was quoted as saying, 'Hostel accommodation for evicted people is deliberately made not too attractive so as to make it not worth while being evicted.' We seem to be right back here with the spirit of the 1834 Poor Law.

The simplest response is to name a magic figure, 300,000 or half a million, and then to convince ourselves that the problem is in hand. Or, only slightly more sophisticated, to say, as Socialists, 'More council houses for rent,' or, as Tories, 'Set the private builder and landlord free.' But since neither of these policies seems to touch the man, woman and child at the back of the housing queue, they serve to do little more than cover up the squalidness of our failure.

My colleagues and I went to Sparkbrook, Birmingham, mainly to study the social life of immigrants, but we soon became aware that what we were studying was an area inhabited by all the kinds of people who have been let down by the housing policy of the welfare state. It was a world of degradation and despair, of racial conflict and vice. But what seemed to us most tragic about it was that its problems are likely to remain quite untouched by any housing and planning policy currently being pursued.

The present strategies seem to be these. Firstly, there is new building. We will try to deploy our available financial and building re- sources in such a way as to increase the stock of houses available to private purchasers and to council house tenants, and attempt a reason- ably just division between the two.

Secondly, there is slum clearance and re- development. However great the demand from new applicants, we will continue to recognise that there are some people who live in obso- lescent and unfit houses which must be eliminated and whose tenants must have special priority in rehousing.

Thirdly, there is the question of incentives to and control of the private landlord. On the one hand, he must be encouraged to convert and improve his house and be allowed a reward in rent for so doing. On the other, he must be pre- vented by rent tribunals from exploiting his tenants and by the public health department from overcrowding or mismanaging his house.

Finally, at the very bottom of the scale, we have to provide hostels to ensure that no one anywhere in Britain is forced to pass a night without a roof over his head.

It all looks good on paper, but all the time

John Rex is Professor of Social Theory and Institutions at Durham. The research referred to was financed by the Institute of Race Relations from a grant from the Nuffield Foundation. Its findings are reported in 'Race, Community, and Conflict,' by John Rex and Robert Moore (O.U.p., 504

we were in Sparkbrook we found ourselves ask- ing whether any of these policies was the least bit relevant to the conditions we were studying. Our conclusion was that none of them was and that we were in an area which fell right outside the provision of the welfare state and which seemed to be beyond the comprehension of those who made housing policy.

Few if any of the people of the area stand much chance on the private mortgage market. They are either too poor, too transient or just too coloured to be acceptable to the building societies. They are therefore utterly dependent on the council. But if they are newcomers they are handicapped, first, by the fact that points are given for residence; and, secondly, in Bir- mingham especially, by a rule which says that any newcomer must wait five years before he can even begin acquiring points. It is thus not possible to pretend that council houses are going to those in the greatest housing need.

Nor did these people stand to gain much from slum clearance. For those who lived in the most squalid conditions—usually £3 10s. for a room for the family with the use of a cooker on the landing—were living in houses which were not, technically, slums. The slums were small old cottages, scheduled for demolition because they were held to be physically obsolescent, even though they provided comfortable accommoda- tion for a single family. One of the lessons which we learned in Sparkbrook was that for many lodging-house tenants a move to a slum would have meant, relatively speaking, a transi- tion to paradise, with the hope, moreover, of better things to come. But so long as you lived in a big old lodging-house, you had no foot on the escalator to rehousing.

As far as the landlords were concerned, we found that they were nearly all small men. They were, in fact, simply those at the back of the housing queue who had had the necessary initiative to buy houses and provide accommo- dation for themselves and others. Many were single immigrants who had taken on short-term loans and assumed heavy repayment obligations which could be met only by charging exorbitant rents to other groups in a similar condition to themselves. They had no interest whatever in improvement grants, since in the long run they were prepared if necessary to write the house off as a capital loss.

The council, of course, punished them for bad management and 'landlords' courts' were a regular weekly ritual. Moreover, rent tribunals were available to the tenants. But the tenants showed little enthusiasm for these procedures, because they were no alternative to what their landlord offered: namely, a roof over their heads. And even if he was prosecuted for over- crowding under the 1961 Act, the local authority could not and did not want to demand that they should be evicted and rehoused.

Once there was a flicker of hope when the council announced a partial redevelopment scheme for the area. That would have meant council houses for some, at least. But the scheme was shelved as soon as the council added up the number of people it would have to rehouse. It appears doubtful now whether redevelopment can ever take place except in those areas which are not the most seriously overcrowded ones.

We waited with some interest to see what difference Labour would make in 1964. But its main response was the irrelevance of the White Paper on Commonwealth Immigration. This en- sured that in future multi-occupied squalor would be whiter and deprived the Cathys of this world of some of the immigrant landlords who had been able to give them accommodation in the early 'sixties. It also commended the Bir- mingham council's attempt to stop the spread of multi-occupation as a means of integration, even though the people in Birmingham's twilight zones saw Birmingham's efforts in this direction as an attempt to contain and segregate its 'problem people' in ghetto-like areas.

More important, however, was what the Ministry of Housing did and failed to do. Socialist instinct seemed to lie behind its first proposal to prevent evictions, but it was hard to see how the prevention of evictions would do anything to alleviate the problem of overcrowd- ing. Nor was it easy to see how an increase in council building would help the people of the twilight zones who, by definition, did not qualify to occupy them. In fact, improved government aid in this direction has made the circumstances of the well-established Brummy rather better than before, while leaving the lodging-house people exactly where they were. Yet the excuse given for the additional aid is that conditions are so bad in the overcrowded areas.

As far as doing anything to introduce a fairer and more economical housing allocation system is concerned, the ministry has thus far confined itself to chiding the local authorities about their excessive localism, but there has been no sug- gestion that if discrimination goes on subsidies will not continue to flow.

Three things are necessary if there is to be any hope for the people of Sparkbrook and other twilight zones. First, there must be estab- lished a code of fair housing allocation to which all local authorities must subscribe on pain of losing their subsidies. This code should be based on housing needs alone and thus ensure that council houses are efficiently and economically used.

Secondly, however, it must be recognised that providing council houses for a proportion of the population is not of itself a complete housing policy. You don't solve people's housing prob- lems by classifying them. And if housing policy assumes that those at the back of the queue must be housed in overcrowded conditions by private landlords, it is no use punishing the landlords for doing just that. Of course really bad land- lords must be punished, but until the Government or local authorities provide an alternative ser- vice they will have to accept the real contribution which the lodging-house landlbrd is making. One may not like such a man, but if he is driven out of business it is the hostels for the homeless which will have to cope.

Finally, we need to look at our priorities in the field of slum clearance and redevelopment. The fact is that slum clearance as we know it is not touching the worst of our housing con- ditions and that redevelopment areas arc skirting the most overcrowded streets. Almost the first priority in the housing drive should be to thin out the population of the overcrowded houses and save the houses themselves from destruction by over-occupation.

It is only when we begin to redeploy our resources in this way that some figure like 600,000 per year might give us hope that our more squalid twilight zones will disappear.