Death in Derby

A sixth child has died following a house fire in Derby last week.

The head of the household, Mick Philpott, has been the subject of media attention in the last couple of years for being an unemployed father of fifteen children with his wife and girlfriend and has appeared on cheap - in both senses of the word - TV programmes fronted by the odious Jeremy Kyle and Ann Widdecombe.

Whatever you think of Philpott's lifestyle and what it says about the benefits and education systems, it cannot be right that eight people, including six children, were living in a three bedroom semi-detached house. It seems that the family had been on Derby council's waiting list for rehousing for some time.

The Government's decision to cap housing benefit can only lead to more situations where families are living in overcrowded housing, especially in London with its sky-high rents, and more firefighters facing the grim task their colleagues in Derby experienced last week.

Hattersley the musical

BBC North West Tonight has been showing clips this week from Songs of Hattersley, a new musical film set on one of the overspill estates built around Manchester between the 1930's and 1970's.

The overspill estates were seen by the people who moved onto them as an escape from overcrowded and unhealthy housing in inner city Manchester, even though many of them lacked transport connections and facilities like shops and pubs.  The estates reflect the areas of Manchester they are nearest to: Hattersley near Hyde mainly rehoused people from Bradford, Beswick and other parts of East Manchester, Langley in Rochdale people from North Manchester and the biggest estate Wythenshawe people from South Manchester districts including Moss Side and Old Trafford (from where my grandparents moved to it in the late 1930's).  People in Hattersley are still distinguished by their Mancunian accent as opposed to the broader Lancashire and Cheshire accents in nearby towns (the boxer Ricky Hatton is the most famous person from the estate).

The housing stock on the estates was allowed to decline and some tenants also exercised the right to buy in the 1980's. Most of the overspill estates are now owned by private housing associations and in many ways they are a reflection of British politics in the second half of twentieth century, from public provision to individualism and private profit.

You can watch a clip from Songs of Hattersley here.

Racking up rents

It looks like there will be a mini-revolt on the Government benches in the House of Lords later today over the Welfare Reform Bill. Lib Dem peer Paddy Ashdown has said he will vote against proposals to cap benefits at £26,000 per household per year and others are likely to join him, including it appears at least some of the twenty-six Anglican bishops who sit in the Lords.

The Government are appealing to a number of right-wing tabloid myths in the Welfare Reform Bill. Ashdown's specific objection is to the capping of Child Benefit which in the Tory mindset is about stopping the feckless poor overbreeding and punishing the moral failings of single mothers. The Bill is essentially a divide and rule tactic, telling workers that their enemy is not the bosses but other workers who are living it up at their expense by having lots of children or swinging the lead on Incapacity Benefit.

£26,000 is equivalent to £500 a week. A large percentage of that will be taken up by Housing Benefit. Nowhere in all the media coverage is there any discussion as to where that money goes, not to benefit claimants but to their landlords. The root problem is not that benefits are too generous but that rents in private rented accommodation are too high.

The situation is especially acute in London, especially in central London where demand for housing far outstrips supply. Two things could be done to tackle this: regulation of the housing market by the Government introducing strict rent control and building more council houses.

Another point overlooked by the media is the circular relationship between the Government, banks and private landlords. The boom in building private flats in the 2000's was funded by credit and many of them were bought by private landlords on buy to let mortgages so at least part of the money paid out in Housing Benefit ends up via interest payments in the hands of banks bailed out by the taxpayer.

Warehouses for the poor?

Neither of housing minister Grant Shapps' announcements on New Year's Day, that the Government intends to prosecute council house tenants who sub-let their homes as well as increasing rents for well-paid tenants, were that surprising.  What did bring me close to putting my fist through the TV screen though was the subsequent discussion on the BBC news channel.  Two journalists - neither of whom I'd guess has much experience of social housing - homed in on the twenty thousand or so council tenants who earn £100,000 and agreed with each other that "council houses weren't meant for people like that".

By "people like that" they meant skilled workers and they are completely wrong.  The idea that council houses were built only for jobless, poor people to live in is not only historically inaccurate but politically poisonous, implying that society has no responsibilty to provide housing for anyone but the most desperate and in doing so should spend as little as possible.

The two things that drove council housing building between the late 1930's and early 1950's were slum clearance and bomb damage in the Second World War.  When my own grandparents moved to the Wythenshawe estate in South Manchester, they saw it as moving to the countryside from inner city Old Trafford.  Manchester City Council even called what would eventually become the biggest housing estate in Europe its Garden Suburb.  My grandad worked as a toolmaker at the giant MetroVicks engineering factory in Trafford Park, my grandmother behind the bar in a pub and later on school dinners.  Like their neighbours in the full employment and increasing affluence of the 50's and 60's, they bought a car, a TV and a fridge and saw their children go on holiday abroad. The idea that they constituted a social underclass is a joke.

The idea that only unemployed or poor people should live in social housing has two roots.  One is the United States where public housing in cities like New York and Chicago was designed, as the poet Carl Sandburg put it, as "warehouses for the poor". The other dates from the Thatcher government of the early 1980's which simultaneously ran down manufacturing industry and sold off council houses so that in the end many estates did become largely peopled by deprived and jobless tenants.  The idea that that was the intention from the beginnning is far from the truth though and the BBC housing correspondent who claimed that it was should read about the history of what he purports to be an expert on before he speaks.