Council housing is not and never was for the "bottom of society" It was and is for anyone who applies and meets the criteria and is next on the (long) list.
My father was a teacher, my mother a cook. I lived with them in council houses in four different cities, and my parents were still in one years later. The neighbours worked at all kinds of jobs - I remember a naval officer and his family, a young lawyer and his wife and child, a driving test examiner, a postman, several nurses and nursing assistants, office workers, sales assistants, a bus driver, labourers, gardeners. Not people to be treated patronisingly as the bottom of the heap. There was also people with no work, some actively looking for it, some not, and in some parts there were anti-social idiots who were not liked by the others. A microcosm of society as a whole, in fact. I didn't know of any millionaires, but there may have been some somewhere.
I am now an owner-occupier (not in an ex-council property) Some of the people I meet in the area have never lived anywhere but in a pleasant suburb, and have this same blinkered view of council tenants. One informed me that her neighbour, a nice chap who had committed the sin of parked his car outside her house, "Came from a scheme, of course, so he has no idea about being considerate"
