There was a good, and well presented, documentary on BBC 4 last night "The Great Estate: The Rise and Fall of the Council House".
It presented a concise history of the council house from its beginnings in Shoreditch to the present day, and sought to understand why council housing has now become a byword for deprivation and social breakdown.
In a nut shell, the demise of council estates from homes that people were proud of and which they aspired to live in can be attributed to the following factors:
1 People are now better off, and take for granted TV's, indoor toilets, bathroom, washing machines etc. There is no folk memory of how bad things were before council houses.
2 The original council estates were highly selective wrt who was allowed to live there. Councils insisted that residents were employed, and that they maintained their property (wrt cleaning, grass cutting etc) according to a detailed rule book. The rule book has been all but abandoned.
3 The rule books used by the councils formed a contract between the tenants and the council. The tenants undertook to keep their homes in a decent condition, in return for which the council ensured that the environment surrounding the homes was properly looked after. Council tenants could pass on their homes to their children, thus giving them a stake in the community and a sense of belonging.
4 In the 1970s Labour changed the rules and allowed anyone deemed to be "deserving" to have a council house. The result being that local people were pushed aside in favour of people whom the councils deemed were "more deserving" (often based on a political agenda), ie the heart of local communities were ripped out and no one had a sense of belonging or responsibility towards the homes that the councils provided.
5 The quality of the council flats built in the 1960's and 70's were dreadful, they turned into the slums that they were meant to replace.
Councils have become the enemy of the people!
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Sadly, all you say is true; The only people that can get council housing in my area are single parents, ex psychiatric patients and former prisoners.
ReplyDeleteBy lumping all these people in one place, the kids grow up thinking that their peers represent a normal lifestyle and thus copy it.
Our council state that they don't give special treatment to single mothers but, the law states that they must put them into a B and B and once in a B and B, they then become entitled to a council home; special treatment through the back door.....More semantics by our local Nanny.
The local council estate here is basically a ghetto and, in my opinion, the kids growing up there have little to look forward to, in terms of a good career and lifestyle......I am generalising and I am sure that there may be "good ones" within the ghetto but, as the older, more traditional, decent tenants die off, they are replaced with more chavs.
Ken: Unfortunately, I have to agree with you, and you too, Tonk. Yet another fantastic idea ruined by political correctness and political interference. Funny, I cannot recall any of the political parties mentioning these changes in their election manifestos: I must have missed that!
ReplyDeleteA key aspect was that Council Houses were originally put up in the 1950's to meet the housing needs of respectable working class families. Later in the 1960's the concept moved into high gear - and thus the inevitable downward spiral - in accordance with some nebulous socialist theory requiring the creation of "communities in the sky": ergo today's high-rise "housing estate" urban slums.
ReplyDelete