New Housing Estates -

Oh M0nica, that song, I posted a link.

I was startled when I read your take on the song.

You may well be right.

I just remember it on the radio when I was in my teens as a catchy tune, a sing along tune. I suppose I was, and maybe still am, naive about it.

It never occurred to me that it was political, I had no thought of idea that it might be satire.

I was born in a council house and grew up in a council house, fortunately a post war new build in a rural area, so fine. It was an era when a young couple with a child who got a council house had a tenancy for as long as they liked and often people ended up living there for the rest of their lives. For ordinary people who had served in the war it was the peak of to what they could aspire at the time. Getting a council house was a pinnacle of achievement back then, it was just how it was. Lots of young people buying a house only really started around a decade or more later.

Big long gardens and they all got personalised in different ways, some had lawns, some had vegetable patches, some full of flowers, or rose bushes, a few kept pigeons and raced them. So not at all the impression of "grew up on a council estate" that the term is often deemed to be implying in some media these days.

I think that since the 1960s, the term council estate has come to mean rundown, crime ridden tower blocks, with the only greenery being the weeds poking through cracks in the concrete.

I currently live on a 1940s council estate, although many have been purchased now. The main issues we have now is the lack of maintenance from the local authority. There has been almost no investment in the properties for over a decade now and it shows, which is a real shame.

We all have gardens and nice big rooms, but we also have damp walls and defective guttering, roofs which need replacing and drainage which cannot cope with modern water usage (washing machines, showers, etc) so gullies regularly block and overflow. But despite the problems, we are loath to give them up as we know we'll be housed in shoeboxes with no storage space, no garden and no privacy.

Although people are social animals, we cannot live crammed so close together that we cannot escape our neighbours, without problems arising. New housing estates do not cater for individuality or privacy. They build houses with walls so thin, that you can hear everything two doors away, don't provide adequate spaces for children to play and grow and build them so far from public transport and services that all available outside space is taken up by cars.

Looking at houses last autumn, one was a 3 bed room refurbished council house, it was about 40% larger than the modern equivalents but there was so much wasted space. Front hall, back hall, awkward kitchen, also no en-suite, it’s only attraction was the larger garden albeit derelict and needed lots of TLC.

The other older properties looked “old” so less appealing than “new”

Savvy I agree that there was a time when council housing was everything you say, for the good reason that councils at that time did not maintain them well, but that view of them ended for most when council houses began to be sold, all of 40 years ago. Those that bought their council house soon spruced them up. I can remember, you could always tell when a council house was sold, as it acquired a new front door!

DD bought an ex-council flat, built in the 1950s on a small bombsite in South London as her first house and now lives in an ex-council house built after WW1 in Herts.

I was opposed to the selling of council houses. About a third of the population lived in council houses at their height and I think that one third of the population, for all kinds of reasons will always need subsidised housing. That was the point of council housing: good quality homes at an affordable rent for those who could not otherwise afford it.

Selling council housing and encouraging the false belief that everyone should be able to buy their own house, has made owning a house a marker for 'success' in life' and made still renting a house on your 40s and over, a sign of failure and that is not good for anyone and leaves thousands of families constantly striving to save money for a mortgage, when they would be better just renting and using that money to live a less straitened life.

In a three bedroomed house, why do you need an en-suite? More space in the bedrooms is much more use.

Hello M0nica, I was, and I am still in favour of selling council houses to tenants at a discount based on years of tenancy. However, each one sold should result in a new one being built, so that the process continues for people coming along.

In this road, all of the houses were council houses. At least 40% have been bought, at least 25% are now owned by a Housing Association as the council transferred all the unsold ones to the Housing Association in the 1990s. I don't know about the rest.

I applaud the socialist policies that help poor people, but they do tend, in my opinion, to tend to keep people in their place. The right to buy that was an electoral success in the 1979 General Election removed a lot of the cliff edge of moving from renting to owning. The people who benefitted from the large discounts were many ordinary people who had fought in the war and those who had done National Service and had seen a younger generation attain what they had not had the opportunity to do. Also people who had benefitted from education and, notwithstanding their working class roots that before the war would have held them back, had got a degree and a good job and though not having inherited wealth and the bank of mum and dad had saved and were then able to transfer from renting to owning. The mixing of owned and rented works well. People still have their culture.

In the early 1980s the Labour Party had a policy of compulsorarily purchasing them back but lost the 1983 General Election, though that may be have been more about a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament. Too many voters had been through the war and had known to what a weak military armament policy in the 1930s had led.

I am not party political. I remember that the Conservatives were opposed to the introduction of the minimum wage.

Earlier in this thread I wrote about my view of housing moving the green belt into large gardens. This could be done by a few changes to planning permission for land. If there were more categories of planning permission, for example "housing with at least 500 square metres of private garden per dwelling house" as a new category, then in my opinion the land price when converting from agricultural to that category would settle at a level.

There would also be a need to ensure more social housing being built, all with a right to buy at a discount to a sitting tenant after a good number of years of tenancy. Also provision such that a single person can get somewhere to live without the discrimination of society expecting him or her to live in a tiny fraction of the space in which a couple get as a society inflicted punishment for daring not to be in a couple.

Council houses should never have been sold cheap by Thatcher it was blatant buying votes. Of course if individuals benefitted they would disagree, it didnt help the next generation of house hunters though.

My daughter lives in social housing, a new build (2019), good size rooms, cloakroom and a medium garden. It’s a couple of minutes walk to a play area and football pitch in a group of six terraced. There is a first school and it’s on a bus route, no local shops, yet. So they’re not all bad and she is very grateful.

M0nica with three teenagers in a three-bedroom/one bathroom house we were mighty glad to be able to create a small ensuite by knocking the airing cupboard and a built-in wardrobe together!!
We've since added a downstairs toilet as well.

Katie59

Council houses should never have been sold cheap by Thatcher it was blatant buying votes. Of course if individuals benefitted they would disagree, it didnt help the next generation of house hunters though.

I don't disagree with the policy but the money should have been used to build more, decent social housing.

I will just say, though, that a neighbour bought an LA house and paid about one-fifth of the valuation at the time (and boasted about it).

M0nica

In a three bedroomed house, why do you need an en-suite? More space in the bedrooms is much more use.

Six people trying to get ready for school and work in the mornings can be difficult!

M0nica Council housing has been badly maintained for the last decade as the government forced local authorities to out source their repairs contracts. This has resulted in just the basics being done, on the cheap, and tenants being fobbed off with substandard service. This is why the issues of housing unfit to live in are now being reported in the news.

These contracts ended a couple of years ago and my local authority is now realising that they were lied to about the state of their properties. At least 5 properties in my small street has successfully challenged them on repairs and been awarded compensation for the loss of personal property due to damp etc. I know because we all used the same solicitor so they could no longer fob us off.

Its now costing them about £30k per property to put right a decade of decay, and on my estate alone they are having to refurb over 500 properties.

Katie59

Council houses should never have been sold cheap by Thatcher it was blatant buying votes. Of course if individuals benefitted they would disagree, it didnt help the next generation of house hunters though.

It needs to be remembered that if the right to buy policy had not happened, probably the vast majority of the people who bought them would have not bought a house somewhere else and would have just continued living there paying rent.

How do we know whether that would have happened?. It might have been quite different if those council tennants who could afford it bought a house on the open market, freeing up a council house for another family who needed it.

Any government policy has unintended and unforseen consequences. Because so many council tenants were able to buy their homes because they paid such unrealistic prices, many, once the statutory time they had to stay in the houses, especially if they lived in highly expensive areas like Westminster andd Chelsea, quickly sold them and made huge profits. It also misled many of their children to believe that they too should get on the housing ladder, when it would have been much more to their benefit to have been able to stay in the public housing sector as tenants

Savvy the only HA propeprties I know anything about are in DD's town, where her next door neighbour is a council tenant and where the local council built thousands of houses, like a ring round the town in the 1920s. I have neither heard or read, and neither has she, any problems with the maintenance of the public housing stock there.

Where I live, it is much the same. Witht all the new building going on every new estate has a substantial proportion of HA housing.

Our experience is at either end of the spectrum. Where the truth lies I do not know.

Whether it's our politicians themselves or their party’s donors, there's a sizable proportion who have a financial stake in the housing market.

This unhealthy reliance on a single sector creates the risk that personal interests influence housing policy.
A quarter of Tory MPs are private landlords
Exclusive: ‘Clear conflict of interests’ as 115 MPs earn thousands of pounds by renting out property

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