Social movements behind the struggle for housing

Social movements behind the struggle for housing

Building Societies

• 1775 Birmingham

• Mutual, self-help to let the better off working class own a house

• Longbridge Building Society 1793: weavers, yeomen, stonemasons, carpenter, cotton spinner

• “Terminating” or “Permanent” Societies

• Management professionalised

19th century

• New Lanarkshire

• Chartist cottages

• Peabody

• Guinness

Peabody Trust 1862: philanthropy

Artisan’s and Labourers’ Dwellings Act 1868

• Control on slum landlords

Guinness Trust Housing 1890

Royal Commission on housing of the working class1885

• “Common practice in London for each family to have only a single room, for the rent of which nearly 1/3 of them paid between 25% and 50% of their wage.”

• Bourneville 1893

• Port Sunlight 1899

Garden city movement

Freedom, cooperation and country: Ebenezer Howard: 1850-1928

Glasgow rent strike• Rent strikes against private landlords

• Blocking evictions

• Led by Glasgow Labour Housing Association

• Street Committees mostly led by women

• Shipyard workers have wages seized to pay rent

• Widespread strike in the yards then general strike: stops munitions manufacture: government caves and...

1915 Act

• Introduces tight rent controls freezing rents at pre-1914 levels

• Before this 90% of housing by private landlords

Homes fit for heroes

• Addison Act: 1919: funds for Council housing

• -1939: 1 million homes, 10% of stock

Why council housing?

• Either– The free market in private rentals had failed: 1914

accounted for 90% of housing– Income too low to pay for decent housing– State has to intervene

• Or– Rent controls had made the private sector

unprofitable and so had stifled investment – Rent controls continued

The 20s and 30s

• Expansion of owner-occupation funded by Building Societies

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18978075

Prefabs

Squatting

• Post WWII Army camps

• Unallocated Council housing

• Houses due for demolition for flat building

1964 17 stories

Tower blocks

Shelter

• Cathy Come Home

• 1966 St Martin in the Fields

Housing Finance Act 1972

• Raise both private and Council rents

• Rent tribunals to set market rents

• Rent rebates for low income Council tenants means tested

• If Councillors refused to implement the Act they would be fined individually and a Government-appointed commissioned would implement the Act

Clay Cross• Derbyshire small town: 11 councillors, all

Labour

• Refused to implement or cooperate with Commissioner

• No higher rents collected

• Council abolished in reorganisation

Thatcher sell off

• 1980 Housing Act: right for council tenants to buy

• A property-owning democracy

• Low prices for longer serving tenants: 60% discount for 30-year tenants in houses; 70% for 15-year tenants in flats

• 1.2 million council dwellings sold 1980-89

• Collapse of Council new build

Housing Associations

• Lot of Council flats left in public ownership handed over to housing associations

• Housing Corporation (only England)– Regulator and– Subsidies: £2 billion pa– About 50,000 a year at its peak– Abolished 2008 in the bonfire of the quangos– Homes and Communities Agency and Tenant

Services Authority

1986 Building Societies Act

• Lets BSs become banks:– De mutualise and float shares

• Northern Rock– 1965 Merger of two North East BSs– Invested in US sub primes– Run on NR