The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State. Nicholas Timmins

The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State

blocks of Oak and Eldon Gardens in Birkenhead were subject to blackouts and flooding as the electrical and fire-fighting equipment was sabotaged and as children swung from balcony to balcony on the hose-reels. Two toddlers fell to their deaths and acts of arson led to repeated evacuations.⁴³ Even when vandalism did not reach that pitch, the long corridors and dark corners of deck access flats proved terrifying. Soon, Rod Hackney noted, ‘the only people giving awards and plaudits to architects were the muggers and burglars’.⁴⁴

This perception took time to grow, and for some tower blocks and the massive slab flats proved a success: single people, the childless and even better-off families can value them when they are built to a high standard and well maintained. The mighty towers of the Barbican development in the City of London remain popular. But for too many families the public developments proved a disaster. Mothers could not see children playing many floors below amid both poorly maintained concrete and a social mix that the very planning process had set askew. Long lost by the late 1950s and early 1960s was Bevan’s romantic vision of a socially mixed village. The slum terraces that were cleared often included privately rented, council and owner-occupied housing. However, once the intention to ‘improve’ an area by demolition and replacement was announced, blight descended, sales became impossible and prices slumped. For the council, this could conveniently cut the cost of compulsory purchase which might not be finally enacted for years. But as tower and slab blocks slowly gained their awesome reputation many of the most able fled the prospect of rehousing, leaving a mix of community that was far from balanced, and which was often rehoused with scant regard for placing people near neighbours and families. Housing ghettos in the sky began to be created.

Over time these conditions were to have a deeply corrosive effect on the public perception of council housing, both for those who lived in it and those who did not. At its peak, high-rise only accounted for well under 10 per cent of local authorities’ housing stock⁴⁵ – a figure which none the less meant homes for more than 1.5 million people.⁴⁶ But tower blocks, and the at times even more massive slab blocks, came to dominate city skylines. Jack Straw, Peter Shore’s political adviser at the Department of the Environment in the late 1970s and twice Labour’s housing spokesman, says that these developments ‘did for public sector housing. It was an alien form of housing which became intrusive to the rest of the population. Up to the mid-1950s council blocks in the main were four or five storeys, no different in style and scale from the private blocks in north Westminster, for example. Suddenly the skyline of every large town and city was disfigured by these “welfare blocks”. The middle classes didn’t mind paying for council housing. What they did mind was being literally overshadowed by welfare housing that was destroying their skylines.’⁴⁷

High-rise became an all-party disaster at both national and local level, but it was rent that was the chief source of party conflict over housing in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Compounding the problem of repairs was the fact that, while swathes of privately rented housing were appalling – well over a third of its households lacked hot water and one-fifth exclusive use of a lavatory⁴⁸ – people had got used to low rents. Real earnings had outstripped rent rises three-fold since 1938. By 1955 official figures suggested that on average less was being spent on rent than on either drink or tobacco.⁴⁹ Macmillan had lamented, ‘it is hard to get back the idea that the first thing on which the family income should be spent is living accommodation.’⁵⁰ A further complication was that council house rents, despite subsidies, were often more realistic than private ones. As a result, particularly in the more attractive housing, it was foremen and skilled workers who made up the largest section of council tenants, while the least well off often had to fall back on the worst of the private rented sector. In addition, amid full employment, the shrinking share of private renting was hampering labour mobility.

With well over a third of the houses and much more of the population renting privately, an instant free-for-all in rents was impossible when housing shortages still existed. The 1957 Rent Act, introduced by Powell and Sandys, carried through by Brooke and Reginald Bevins, produced staged decontrol. Rents at the top end of the market were deregulated over three years, affecting in the main, but not exclusively, the middle classes. Rents below that were raised, but remained controlled. As tenants moved out, however, rents could be re-set free of controls. With Labour’s official policy now municipalisation the parliamentary battle was furious, despite the Bill’s second reading in 1956 being overshadowed by the Suez crisis. Labour MPs denounced it as ‘vicious class legislation’ warning that tenants would be ‘thrown to the wolves’, left starving, or put on the streets by exploitative landlords who would do no repairs.⁵¹ Labour promised the Act’s repeal, the pledge becoming, in Keith Banting’s words, ‘a symbol of historic differences between the two parties’.⁵²

In practice creeping decontrol took time to take effect. Initially evictions were few, rent increases limited. At the end of 1958, the Manchester Guardian judged the Act to be working: ‘The general expectation seems to be that the Act will, as promised, make rather more accommodation available.’⁵³ Particularly in London, however, the demographic pressures continued to mount. The service industries, growing rapidly in the age of affluence, were pulling low-paid workers into the capital, among them West Indian immigrants encouraged to Britain to boost the labour supply. At the same time, slum clearance ahead of rebuilding was diminishing the stock. Housing shortages were growing. By 1960 and 1961, rents were rocketing on renewal, homelessness was rising, bishops started to march, and the ministry found it had no decent figures on the private rented sector with which to fight back against the numbers that social scientists at the LSE headed by David Donnison were collecting. These showed that the private rented sector was still shrinking, while the rate of repair was not improving.⁵⁴

Slowly and increasingly explosively, housing became a media story. What made it detonate in 1963 was Perec Rachman. A Polish immigrant after the war, he had started in 1954 buying up the ends of leases in big multiply-occupied houses in Notting Hill and other parts of west London. His methods of shifting tenants out of unfurnished rooms so that he could re-let them, nominally furnished and at uncontrolled rents, were never too gentle. Faced with a house full of statutory tenants paying protected pre-war rents, Rachman would combine racial prejudice with business, according to the Sunday Times account which eventually revealed his methods. He would let one room to eight West Indians, ‘all accomplished musicians’, and tell them he liked parties. Within three months the ‘stats’ – statutory tenants – would have left, replaced by ranks of West Indian immigrants or poor whites, desperate for housing and paying uncontrolled furnished rents amid appalling overcrowding. Alternatively, the house would be sold vacant for five times the sum Rachman had paid for it.⁵⁵ If tenants refused to move, the heavies – ex-wrestlers and boxers – would be sent in. On one occasion, Rachman simply took the roof off a house when some tenants refused to leave. Others were intimidated, physically assaulted, had their furniture destroyed, or found that all-night ‘clubs’ had been established in their basements. In St Stephen’s Gardens, Paddington, residents and tenants famously fought back, once flooding one of the clubs to close it and on another occasion sawing up a staircase and electrifying it with metal fittings to prevent Rachman’s roadies evicting a couple.⁵⁶ Attempts by the police and local and public health authorities to deal with him were defeated by a web of holding companies so complex that it was never finally established how many properties he owned, although the minimum estimate at his peak in 1959 was 150 involving at least 1000 tenancies.⁵⁷

Rachman had been at work since the mid-1950s and indeed had died in 1962. The fuse that was to explode his name into a permanent place in the English language was the knowledge held by one of his firmest opponents, Ben Parkin, the Labour MP for Paddington, that Mandy Rice-Davies had been his mistress. When Rachman’s name came up in one of the court cases around the Profumo affair in 1963, Parkin pounced – injecting Rachman, housing and intimidation into the already fetid tale of Mandy Rice-Davies, Christine Keeler, and the Secretary of State for War who had shared his mistress with a Russian spy. With Rachman dead, the libel laws which had held back his full exposure no longer applied and the link to Profumo provided scintillating topicality and a fresh breath of life to a fading story. A month’s worth of media exposure resulted, running on into the summer ‘silly season’ when newspapers are short of

Скачать книгу