PLAYING AT HOUSES
NEVER before, the Manchester Guardian's parliamen- tary correspondent complained, had anything like it been heard in the House of Commons : 'A most un- pleasant experience, for booing like this carries such a suggestion of a mob that is out of hand that it degrades what is supposed to be the first Deliberative Assembly in the world.' He was referring to the reception given to Mr. Duncan Sandys, announcing the revision of housing subsidies in Parliament last week. Mr. Sandys has a way of rousing his opponents' wrath; and the Labour Party was also celebrating vociferously the success of the operation which has divided the Butskell Siamese twins. But these things alone would not account for their insensate rage. What, then, was'the reason?
It is not necessary to lean backwards, only to look back- wards, to understand why Labour MPs' fury, so long and so unhappily diredted inwards to fellow-Socialists, should have spilt over on the Tories on this subject. Too many of them remember clearly and bitterly the day, not so distant, when the notion of council housing met with Tory ridicule. The rehoused slum-dwellers, they were assured, lost no time storing coals in the bath. It was not the rehoused slum-dweller, but the raconteur—or his environment—who stood condemned by this sort of story.
The event proved, too, that slum-clearance was, a very profit7 able investment. Most of the dire and expensive consequences of overcrowding, TB and infantile mortality among them, were substantially reduced by rehousing; and it is at least arguable that the cost of subsidies has been more than repaid by the amount they have saved in ill-health.
But these arguments are no longer relevant. The situation has entirely altered since the early days of housing subsidies. Then, accommodation was desperately scarce. Council houses represented a small proportion of the total, and most of them were occupied by families 'genuinely in need—their tenants were unemployed or wretchedly paid. Today there are still not enough houses to satisfy the demand, but that is largely because the demand is inflated by maldistribution of the accommodation available. Subsidised rents on council houses and controlled rents on privately-owned houses have put a premium on misuse of room-space. Where it is cheaper. for tenants to stay in houses too big or in other ways unsuitable for them, rather than move to houses better designed for their needs, they tend to stay; and needed flexibility is lost.
There might be some excuse for the present system if the worst-off members of the community benefited. They do not., A recent investigation revealed that the number of really needy families in council houses is proportionately low compared to the number in privately-owned houSes. Even if the stories circulating about council-house tenants requiring parking places for the Jaguars are in jest, it is certainly true that the majority of council-house tenants pay a low rent relative to their means.
These facts are perfectly well known to both political parties. But so far, the housing myth left over from the Thirties remains stronger than the present-day reality. The Conserva- tives must themselves take some of the responsibility for perpetuating the myth. It was they who put up the 300,000- houses-a-year target, ignoring economic arguments which cried out for a more sensible allocation of building resources. And they put up the housing subsidies soon after they came into office, at a time when the economic situation was no healthier than it is today. Naturally this helped to widen the gap between economic and actual rents; and the wider that gap becomes, the greater is the vested interest of its bene- ficiaries in the preservation of the subsidy system.
The Government need not be surprised, therefore, if the howl with which Labour MPs greeted the news of reform is taken up by tenants. But need it be alarmed? On most council estates the objectors will be in a minority. The average council. house dweller, even if he does not wish to pay a higher rent himself, would be delighted if a few of his new-rich neigh- bours were caught for their fair share. Where differential rents have been tried, they have not proved political suicide. Even the means test objection has lost its force; too many families suffer a means test each week for income-tax purposes, and have come to accept it as a matter of course.
The need to revise the subsidised and controlled rents system should, therefore, have been put forward as a matter of corhmon sense. It can be justified equally as well on Socialist to-each-according-to-his-needs grounds as on Tory principles. In presenting it as part of an emergency economy Budget Mr. Butler was psychologically badly at fault. It has nothing to do with the current economic difficulties. If those difficulties were sufficiently serious to justify an emergency assault on housing subsidies, then they were certainly great enough to justify a reduction of the subsidies on bread. But so far from reducing the present grossly extravagant State expen- diture, designed to keep down the price of bread, Mr. Butler actually raised it by another couple of million pounds—a foolish action which has not had the attention it deserves. But this was not, of course, an emergency decision on housing. Mr. Sandys was promising a revision of the sudr.idy system long before the autumn Budget was even thought of. Besides, it is too easily open to misrepresentation. The intention of the Budget was to blow the froth off the country's sound economic 'brew. In so far as housing subsidies are undoubtedly wasteful, `froth' they can be called; but it should have been obvious that to bring the subject up in this context would be to encourage the belief that the Tories consider housing is froth.
Houses, in fact, have been dragged back into use as a political plaything at the very time when they ought to have been taken out of politics. Mr. Gaitskell has been enabled to say that this, of all Budget changes, was the one that most angered him—and he is now reaching the stage of political maturity in which he is capable of looking as if he really believed it. Perhaps he really does believe it.
Previous page
