ANOTHER VOICE
A second shot at solving the housing problem
AUBERON WAUGH
Last week a pretty, medium-sized house in Regent's Park was advertised for sale at £30 million. At the same time I was hearing of flats for sale in the hideous new Chelsea Basin development at prices rising to £15 million. It occurs to me that my earlier solution to the problem of housing shortage — and the consequent cost of housing — in the south-east ignored one factor. Since it is a factor which everyone else seems to have ignored, too, I suppose I had better set it down here, even though I am by no means sure that I have found a solution for it yet.
My earlier solution, which also solved, en passant, the problems of unemployment and class resentment in a technological age, may be remembered by one or two readers. It was quite simply to make wages of live-in domestic servants tax-allowable. This would have been even more attractive as a proposition when I advanced it, with the highest tax rate at 60 per cent, than it is today, at 40 per cent, but the principle remains the same. Before the last war, domestic service was the biggest single employer of labour in the country, accounting for over three million full-time employees. Outside central London, hun- dreds of thousands, if not millions of people live in houses which were built to accommodate one or two live-in servants whose bedrooms are now empty, or used to store rubbish. If only one million people moved into these empty rooms, the press- ure on housing would be eased, prices would come down, young, dispossessed professionals would no longer be tempted to adopt half-baked left-wing opinions, more middle-class housewives would be freed for useful employment, a new con- cordia ordinum would be established and we would all live happily ever after.
Or so the argument ran. Those who objected to my argument, claiming that the encouragement of domestic employment would affect only a few people, ignored the fact that in earlier times it was not just toffs like the Meachers who had a live-in ser- vant. So did the Charles Pooters of Brick- field Terrace, Holloway. So did a very substantial proportion of lower-middle- class households. But of course this argu- ment concentrated on the pressure coming from below: the shortage of housing at the bottom of the market which has raised the price of a basement bed-sitter in Notting Hill from £15 to £75 a week to rent, and from £22,000 to £85,000 to buy in the space of eight or nine years.
What it ignored was the pressure coming from above: all the billions and billions of pounds of new wealth which has no exist- ence outside flickering green digits on a VDU screen until the moment comes when somebody presses a button on the side of the unit and all the money pours out, as from some diabolical fruit machine. At least that is what I suppose happens. But my impression is that the only point at which this funny money — spending most of its time bouncing between VDU screens in London, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Wall Street disguised as cotton futures, spot rubber and shares in General Occidentale — actually joins the real world is when its manipulators decide to buy a house. Then there is so much money available that it makes nonsense of the real money being earned by salaries. If someone is going to pay £15 million for a flat on top of the hideous new development at Chelsea Basin, someone else £10 million for the flat underneath it, £5 million for the flat under that and so on, the inevitable result is that nobody can buy a flat within half a mile for under £220,000. Where does this leave the ambitious young solicitor who may be earning as little as £20,000 three years after coming down from Oxford?
And even now, at twenty five He has to WORK TO KEEP ALIVE!
Yes! All day long from 10 to 4!
For half the year or even more, With but an hour or two to spend At luncheon with a city friend.
The doctrinaire free-market solution of removing all development restrictions and allowing the entire Green Belt to be covered with repulsive ranch-style bunga- lows like the Duke of York's is unaccept- able in a Conservative democracy for the simple reason that most Conservative vo- ters already have houses and it will not just be Mr Ridley's kidneys they will demand for breakfast if they see their environments destroyed by development. Those of us who already have houses have nothing to worry about in the spiralling prices, since we can always sell our grotty old houses to buy some more. In a population which is scarcely rising at all, there would be no problem accommodating the tiny growth. The only problem concerns young people leaving their parental home before the parents are dead.
The great objection to developing the Green Belt or building five 'Garden Cities' around London, and so flooding the mar- ket, is that almost all building nowadays is revoltingly ugly; like the Duke of York's monstrosity at Bracknell, once it is up, it is up for good, the patch of countryside is lost forever and laughing Ceres will never, never reassume the land. Planning controls must stay. Their removal should be re- sisted every bit as much as a German invasion.
My tentative suggestion for solving the problems of that poor young solicitor whose parents are still alive is based upon a memory of how extraordinarily popular the old post-war prefabs were among those who lived in them. Many refused to be rehoused for 30 years. What I am propos- ing is that planning permission should be given for high density encampments of temporary accommodation — call them young persons' shanty towns — where young adults could live in Portakabins or wooden huts until such time as their parents died and they could join the property-owning democracy.
Each encampment would be restricted to tenants of a particular age-group. As each Portakabin or hut became vacant the site would be cleared and planted with magno- lia or mulberry trees, syringa, rose bushes and climbing wistaria. As the birth-rate declines, there would be less and less need for this temporary accommodation and land unwanted for agriculture would be turned into acres and acres of deserted garden.
Bit by bit, the population would return to live in the houses which were properly constructed before the war, and the build- ing industry could devote itself to works of maintenance and restoration. As the 'working' class phases itself out, with only its most recalcitrant and unreconstructible members surviving in spacious modern prisons on the Isle of Man, we might then apply ourselves to knocking down all the post-war housing estates and planting lime avenues. But perhaps that is a distant dream.
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