Past Talks
Homes fit for Heroes: The Centenary of Council Houses
Date: 21st March 2022
Speaker: Sheila Allcock
Homes fit for Heroes – The Centenary of Council Houses
Sheila Allcock 21.3.22
We welcomed Sheila Allcock to the first face-to-face talk of 2022.
Sheila’s talk had been put together in 2019 to commemorate the centenary of the first council houses.
The Housing of the Working Classes Act 1890 gave local authorities powers to build council houses, although this were not compulsory. The need for additional housing was often the consequence of slum clearance, but houses were constructed in inadequate numbers to meet the need and rents could be high, as no government subsidies were available at this time.
The end of the First World War created a huge demand for working-class housing in towns throughout the UK. The Tudor Walters Committee, headed by Sir John Tudor Walters, an architect turned Liberal MP, was tasked with establishing how many houses were needed; where they should be located; what they should look like; who should build them and how they should be financed. He recommended subsidised building of high-quality properties, which were sometimes larger than privately-built dwellings, at no more than twelve per acre.
In 1919, Parliament passed the ambitious Housing, Town Planning etc Act which promised government subsidies to help finance the construction of 500,000 houses within three years, built to Tudor Walters’ standards. However, the economic downturn of the 1920s meant that only 213,000 houses were built, as government funding was cut.
The 1919 Act - often known as the ‘Addison Act' after its author, Dr Christopher Addison, the Minister of Health - was nevertheless a highly significant step forward in housing provision. It made housing a national responsibility, and local authorities were given the task of developing new housing and rented accommodation where it was needed by working people.
In 1920, the London County Council (LCC) introduced housing bonds at a guaranteed return of 6%. A total of £4m was raised to build new public housing.
1923 saw the withdrawal of subsidies and, additionally, permission was granted to local authorities to sell off their housing stock and build houses for sale. This was swiftly reversed in the following year, by the incoming Labour government.
The 1920s were a major period for council house building; the Becontree estate in the Essex parishes of Dagenham, Barking and Ilford was started in this period and by 1935 had grown to 27,000 homes, making it the largest council estate in Europe. Houses were supplied with gas, electricity, bathrooms and front & back gardens. Tenants were expected to adhere to strict rules concerning pets, house & garden maintenance, housework and their children’s behaviour.
The outbreak of the Second World War effectively put a stop to house building. As the war drew to a close, Britain faced its worst housing shortage of the twentieth century. Part of the initial response to this problem was a programme of short-term repairs to existing properties and the rapid construction of ‘prefabs’ – factory built single-storey temporary bungalows. They were expected to last for only 10 years, but they proved very popular with some residents particularly as, unlike some traditional houses, they had fully fitted kitchens and bathrooms. To further meet the shortage and bring the cost of housing down, a new form of construction was pioneered, commonly called ‘PRC’ (Pre-cast Reinforced Concrete). They required less skilled workers to construct. The city of Leeds led the way with the highest number of PRCs built.
To add a local note, PRC-constructed houses developed problems in the early 1980s and part of the solution was the addition of a brick skin, which radically changed their appearance. One of the few remaining houses where the original construction is still visible is situated in George Street.
In the decade after 1945, 1.5 million homes had been completed and some of the demand for housing had been alleviated. The percentage of the people renting from local authorities had risen to over a quarter of the population, from 10% in 1938 to 26% in 1961.
Looking at the Oxford area, in July 1920 Headington Rural District Council completed the first of twenty-four council houses in the Barton Road/London Road area, described by John Betjeman as, “A neat council house scheme.”
There followed the Gipsy Lane estate in the late 1920s and by 1939, 2000 houses had been built, including those at Rose Hill.
The Blackbird Leys estate was built in the 1950s & 1960s in response to slum clearance in the Oxpens area of the city. It covered 260 acres previously occupied by a sewage farm and housed many workers from Morris Motors. The first residents moved in in 1958.
The Parker Morris Committee drew up an influential report in 1961 that specified standards of building for council houses, entitled Homes for Today and Tomorrow. Its report concluded that the quality of social housing needed to be improved to match the rise in living standards, with the result that the standards were often higher than those adopted by private builders.
People’s attitudes towards council houses varies. Some people feel that to have a stable home is a right for families, whilst others consider the provision of social housing to be welfare. The system is seen by some to favour those who have already secured a tenancy, even when they are no longer in dire need. Additionally, security of tenure and subsidised rents mean that there is little incentive for tenants to downsize from family accommodation when children leave home, leaving those in greater need on the waiting list without the prospect of obtaining a property. The Cameron government took steps to address this situation with the under-occupancy penalty in the British Welfare Reform Act 2012, whereby tenants living in social housing with rooms deemed "spare" face a reduction in housing benefit.
The Cutteslowe Walls were built in 1934 to divide the City Council's Cutteslowe estate from private housing to the west which was developed by the Urban Housing Company, the developers fearing that their houses would not sell well because of the adjacent social housing. After escalating public protests and several unofficial attempts, the walls were eventually officially demolished in 1959 after the council compulsorily purchased the land on which they stood.