The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State. Nicholas Timmins
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leaflets and 25 codes of instruction for the staff had somehow been prepared and printed. Sixteen thousand of what by early 1949 was a 39,000 strong staff had been sent on training courses. Griffiths, determined to break from the atmosphere of the Poor Law, had also insisted on plain English, courteous and friendly service, and ‘as good a standard of decoration as the austerity of the times would permit’. Both these achievements faded as the system became more complex and overburdened, and as breaking from the physical atmosphere of the old poor law took a lower priority in government spending.
Like the creation of the National Health Service, it had been a massive act of faith. ‘Only with an immense effort [were] the lines cleared and the great new vessel of social insurance slid down the slips [on time],’ Rhodes recorded. Those undertaking such an exercise, he added, had to be ‘brave optimists who never take no for an answer’ – displaying a blithe faith in an uncertain future that was not to be seen again until the two Kenneths, Clarke and Baker, revamped health and education in the 1980s. ‘In the earlier stages of a large-scale organisation,’ Rhodes said, in words their critics would happily have applied to the Kens, ‘detail is the deadly nightshade.’
But if social security and health were to prove the biggest of the giant services of the welfare state, they had not been at the top of the public’s list of concerns in 1945. Top priority in the opinion polls during the election had been housing.
‘The Tremendous Tory’ – Housing
Housing … differs from other fields of social administration because the aspect of it which attracts the keenest attention – the building of new houses – is exposed to all the winds that blow in a draughty economic climate.
David Donnison, Housing Policy since the War, 1960, p. 9
If nothing else, I will go down in history as a barrier between the beauty of Britain and the speculative builder who has done so much to destroy it.
Aneurin Bevan, answering a censure debate on housing in 1950
BRITAIN EMERGED from the war with 200,000 houses destroyed, another 250,000 so badly knocked about that they could not be lived in and a similar number severely damaged. Millions of men and women were about to come home, and the marriage and birth rates were rising fast. The pre-war building labour force of a million men had fallen to a third of this number, mainly concentrated in south-east England in the path of the flying bomb and rocket attacks. The rents of privately owned houses had been frozen at their 1939 levels, and in England and Wales 71,000 houses had been requisitioned [for office use] by local authorities.’1
Thus David Donnison on the housing position Labour inherited. Over the course of war something like a quarter of Britain’s 12.5 million houses had been damaged.2 There had been much make do and mend when two-thirds of those with building skills were in the armed forces and the remainder were reserved for war work: the building of runways for bombers or camps for the armed forces took priority. The scale of devastation at times has to be reduced to smaller numbers to make it comprehensible. As late as June to September 1944, the V1 flying bombs and then the V2S completely wrote off 25,000 houses and at their peak were damaging 20,000 a day in London alone.3 Late in the year 45,000 building workers were drafted in from the provinces, but many had to sleep in Wembley Stadium precisely because there was no accommodation. The armed forces released some building workers early and by March 1945 nearly 800,000 homes had been repaired after a fashion. Even so ‘many bombed out families were living in huts erected with the help of American troops and former Italian prisoners of war’.4
It was hardly surprising that housing dominated both the election and the mailbags of the new Parliament’s MPs. Michael Foot, newly elected for Plymouth Devonport, recalled: ‘The housing shortage caused more anguish and frustration than any other of the nation’s manifold problems … every MP and every councillor was being besieged by the endless queue of the homeless.’5 Amidst the confusion, however, Donnison records, ‘there was determination and high confidence, fortified by an underestimate of long term needs, a war-won capacity for bold decisions, and a strong sense of social priorities’.6
In March 1945, the coalition government had broken new ground with a White Paper which for the first time accepted the principle of affording ‘a separate dwelling for every family desiring to have one’.7 To achieve this the White Paper suggested that between 3 and 4 million houses would need to be built in the first 10 to 12 years after the war. The lower end of that target was achieved. But it would take six years to build the first million, three more to build the second and three more to complete the third8 – and the White Paper’s estimate of demand proved to be far from accurate. Against the last three years of peace, marriages were 11 per cent up in the first three post-war years, and births up by no less than 33 per cent.9 The post-war baby boom, which was to strain education, the health services and the social security budget as well as housing, was under way. In addition, under the strain of war, divorces in 1945 were 250 per cent up on 1938, splitting households and again increasing housing needs.10
During the election Labour had appeared to promise the earth. Bevin offered ‘Five million houses in quick time’ while being careful not to specify what ‘quick time’ meant.11 Stafford Cripps allegedly claimed that ‘housing can be dealt with within a fortnight’. Arthur Greenwood dismissed the coalition figures as ‘chicken feed’.12 It was a chicken that came home to roost.
Housing was then part of the Ministry of Health, so the task of providing the houses fell to Bevan, on top of the massive task of founding the NHS. Given the impact poor housing can have on health, there was an intellectual logic to this. After it was removed by Attlee and put in with local government in 1951, repeated arguments would be heard down the decades for reuniting the two. But, given the scale of the health and housing challenges in 1945, Attlee’s failure to split the department earlier, or at least coordinate the housing programme more effectively, is widely seen as his greatest administrative error.13 Bevan had to work not only with Dalton, who as Chancellor had to find the cash, but with the Ministry of Works which directed the building industry, licensed private builders (who were subject to controls) and controlled building materials. The Ministry of Supply, however, also had its fingers in the materials pie, of which there were far too few slices to go round. Steel, wood and almost everything else ran desperately short, while Britain had few currency reserves with which to pay for imports after the war. The Board of Trade was thus at times involved, while the Ministry of Labour, in 1945, still had powers to control and direct manpower. In addition, the Ministry of Town and Country Planning could refuse sites for housing or anything else. Scotland was run separately. Picture Post at one point calculated that there were ten ministerial cooks attempting to make the broth.14
Bevan’s chief agents for house building were the local authorities – all 1700 of them, ranging from the London County Council, with a long and fine tradition of public housing, to tiny authorities that had hardly ever built a thing.
None of this was a recipe for rapid progress. Bevan did himself less than justice by jibing years later that while at health he spent only five minutes a week on housing,15 when at times the doctors complained that he spent too much time on housing and not enough on them.16 He inherited plenty of figures from the coalition government, but little by way of a plan. Lord Portal, the Minister of Works, had promised half a million of the pre-fabs, compact pre-fabricated bungalows, which from 1944 had started appearing on bomb sites. Steel for their frames could not be spared, however. Aluminium and concrete alternatives were designed, aircraft factories were turned over to their production, and although 125,000 were erected by 1948 they cost two-thirds more than the original estimate. Bevan hated them, describing them as ‘rabbit hutches’, although they proved in practice cosy and surprisingly popular. Isolated examples still existed in the 1990s, despite their ten-year life expectancy,17 with some even being proposed for preservation orders.
Housing