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CHAPTER 8

‘The Tremendous Tory’ – Housing

Housing … differs from other fields of social administration because the aspect of it which attracts the keenest attention – the building of new houses – is exposed to all the winds that blow in a draughty economic climate.

David Donnison, Housing Policy since the War, 1960, p. 9

If nothing else, I will go down in history as a barrier between the beauty of Britain and the speculative builder who has done so much to destroy it.

Aneurin Bevan, answering a censure debate on housing in 1950

BRITAIN EMERGED from the war with 200,000 houses destroyed, another 250,000 so badly knocked about that they could not be lived in and a similar number severely damaged. Millions of men and women were about to come home, and the marriage and birth rates were rising fast. The pre-war building labour force of a million men had fallen to a third of this number, mainly concentrated in south-east England in the path of the flying bomb and rocket attacks. The rents of privately owned houses had been frozen at their 1939 levels, and in England and Wales 71,000 houses had been requisitioned [for office use] by local authorities.’¹

Thus David Donnison on the housing position Labour inherited. Over the course of war something like a quarter of Britain’s 12.5 million houses had been damaged.² There had been much make do and mend when two-thirds of those with building skills were in the armed forces and the remainder were reserved for war work: the building of runways for bombers or camps for the armed forces took priority. The scale of devastation at times has to be reduced to smaller numbers to make it comprehensible. As late as June to September 1944, the V1 flying bombs and then the V2S completely wrote off 25,000 houses and at their peak were damaging 20,000 a day in London alone.³ Late in the year 45,000 building workers were drafted in from the provinces, but many had to sleep in Wembley Stadium precisely because there was no accommodation. The armed forces released some building workers early and by March 1945 nearly 800,000 homes had been repaired after a fashion. Even so ‘many bombed out families were living in huts erected with the help of American troops and former Italian prisoners of war’.⁴

It was hardly surprising that housing dominated both the election and the mailbags of the new Parliament’s MPs. Michael Foot, newly elected for Plymouth Devonport, recalled: ‘The housing shortage caused more anguish and frustration than any other of the nation’s manifold problems … every MP and every councillor was being besieged by the endless queue of the homeless.’⁵ Amidst the confusion, however, Donnison records, ‘there was determination and high confidence, fortified by an underestimate of long term needs, a war-won capacity for bold decisions, and a strong sense of social priorities’.⁶

In March 1945, the coalition government had broken new ground with a White Paper which for the first time accepted the principle of affording ‘a separate dwelling for every family desiring to have one’.⁷ To achieve this the White Paper suggested that between 3 and 4 million houses would need to be built in the first 10 to 12 years after the war. The lower end of that target was achieved. But it would take six years to build the first million, three more to build the second and three more to complete the third⁸ – and the White Paper’s estimate of demand proved to be far from accurate. Against the last three years of peace, marriages were 11 per cent up in the first three post-war years, and births up by no less than 33 per cent.⁹ The post-war baby boom, which was to strain education, the health services and the social security budget as well as housing, was under way. In addition, under the strain of war, divorces in 1945 were 250 per cent up on 1938, splitting households and again increasing housing needs.¹⁰

During the election Labour had appeared to promise the earth. Bevin offered ‘Five million houses in quick time’ while being careful not to specify what ‘quick time’ meant.¹¹ Stafford Cripps allegedly claimed that ‘housing can be dealt with within a fortnight’. Arthur Greenwood dismissed the coalition figures as ‘chicken feed’.¹² It was a chicken that came home to roost.

Housing was then part of the Ministry of Health, so the task of providing the houses fell to Bevan, on top of the massive task of founding the NHS. Given the impact poor housing can have on health, there was an intellectual logic to this. After it was removed by Attlee and put in with local government in 1951, repeated arguments would be heard down the decades for reuniting the two. But, given the scale of the health and housing challenges in 1945, Attlee’s failure to split the department earlier, or at least coordinate the housing programme more effectively, is widely seen as his greatest administrative error.¹³ Bevan had to work not only with Dalton, who as Chancellor had to find the cash, but with the Ministry of Works which directed the building industry, licensed private builders (who were subject to controls) and controlled building materials. The Ministry of Supply, however, also had its fingers in the materials pie, of which there were far too few slices to go round. Steel, wood and almost everything else ran desperately short, while Britain had few currency reserves with which to pay for imports after the war. The Board of Trade was thus at times involved, while the Ministry of Labour, in 1945, still had powers to control and direct manpower. In addition, the Ministry of Town and Country Planning could refuse sites for housing or anything else. Scotland was run separately. Picture Post at one point calculated that there were ten ministerial cooks attempting to make the broth.¹⁴

Bevan’s chief agents for house building were the local authorities – all 1700 of them, ranging from the London County Council, with a long and fine tradition of public housing, to tiny authorities that had hardly ever built a thing.

None of this was a recipe for rapid progress. Bevan did himself less than justice by jibing years later that while at health he spent only five minutes a week on housing,¹⁵ when at times the doctors complained that he spent too much time on housing and not enough on them.¹⁶ He inherited plenty of figures from the coalition government, but little by way of a plan. Lord Portal, the Minister of Works, had promised half a million of the pre-fabs, compact pre-fabricated bungalows, which from 1944 had started appearing on bomb sites. Steel for their frames could not be spared, however. Aluminium and concrete alternatives were designed, aircraft factories were turned over to their production, and although 125,000 were erected by 1948 they cost two-thirds more than the original estimate. Bevan hated them, describing them as ‘rabbit hutches’, although they proved in practice cosy and surprisingly popular. Isolated examples still existed in the 1990s, despite their ten-year life expectancy,¹⁷ with some even being proposed for preservation orders.

Housing was to prove much less of a policy departure from pre-war days than health, education or social security. It was chiefly the emphasis that Bevan changed. The degree to which he did so, however, and the failure to build large numbers of new homes quickly was to cause controversy.

The two decades before the Second World War, despite the bitter disappointment over ‘homes fit for heroes’ had in fact seen the biggest output of new houses in Britain’s history.¹⁸ Local authority house building, whose origins stretched back to Victorian times, had become well established. Slum clearance had begun. Even so, council houses in 1939 accounted for only about one in eight of the stock. Three-quarters of the new homes between the wars had been privately built, the bulk of these for purchase rather than rent. In addition, growing numbers of tenants had bought their homes from their landlords. As a result the slow beginnings of the decline in the private rented sector, and what was to become a dramatic shift to owner-occupation, were already under way. The number of owner-occupiers had more than quadrupled between 1918 and 1938, even if that increase still left only just over a quarter of housing in owner-occupation, against 60 per cent privately rented and 13 per cent in council ownership.¹⁹

Bevan spectacularly reversed the balance between private and public in house building, while resisting the creation of some sort of nationalised National Housing Corporation to build the homes – a course urged by Morrison, Douglas Jay, who was Attlee’s economic adviser, and by Lord Addison, who had had his own troubles with local authorities as Lloyd George’s health and housing minister.²⁰ Bevan’s policy was to restrict severely private house-building, allowing only one private house for every four built by local authorities, to order local authorities to requisition empty houses and derequisition those it had taken over as offices, to toughen rent controls, put first priority on repairs to unoccupied war-damaged dwellings, and charge local authorities with the task of building, either through direct labour organisations or on contract with private builders. He persuaded Dalton not only to treble the subsidy for council housing and extend it from forty to sixty years, but to shift the balance so that three-quarters of the cost rather than two-thirds came from the Exchequer, and only a quarter from the rates.

This last provided the cash. Sir John Wrigley, the senior civil servant who was sceptical such a case could be won, recalled receiving a ‘sharp, almost supercilious refusal’ when he first put it to the Treasury. ‘Bevan thereafter must have had private talks with Dalton,’ Foot records. ‘Sir John was advised to reopen the question with all the blandness he could muster. “My minister,” he said at the next meeting of the committee, “still thinks that the figure of three to one would be appropriate.” “And my minister agrees,” the Treasury official replied.’²¹

The continued restrictions on private house-building, Bevan’s strictures on the unreliability of the ‘speculative private builder’, and the big expansion planned for council housing outraged the Tories, who took advantage of the pitifully slow progress in the early months to pillory Bevan. Churchill accused him of ‘chilling and checking free-enterprise house building which had always provided the bulk of the nation’s houses’. Bevan, he charged, was guilty of ‘partisan spite’ in refusing to enlist ‘all house building agencies of every kind’.²² In fact private builders got the bulk of the work. But they were building homes for rent for local authorities, not homes for sale to those who could afford to buy in the private sector.

Outside Parliament, the situation briefly looked frightening. ‘In the summer of 1946 it was possible for a family to find itself 4,000th on the local council’s waiting list. Some were ex-servicemen with young children who could not even find lodgings, because the landlord had a no children rule,’ Alan Jenkins relates.

Agitators took over, organizing mass meetings in Leicester Square, and ‘vigilantes’ went about cities looking for apparently vacant buildings, even if they had ‘sold’ [or ‘requisitioned’] notices outside … An empty Nissen hut at an airport could house two families, so if there was no one looking, you moved in. Landlords might cut off the water, gas, electricity; but in desperation you could use candles and spirit stoves. The climax was reached in the ‘Great Sunday Squat’ of September 1946 at Duchess of Bedford House, an empty block of flats in Kensington. Like so much Communist organisation, it was orderly, efficient and quiet. Elsewhere in the country, squatters occupied abandoned Army camps [more than 46,000 ended up in them]. They were not evicted because the Government suddenly realized that this was really rather a good idea which they ought to have thought of themselves.²³

The real problem was less the tool Bevan used to do the job – the local authorities – than the lack of the most crucial tools of all: manpower and materials. At one Cabinet meeting, Bevan exploded: ‘Where are all the people I need for my programme?’ Attlee drily replied: ‘Looking for houses, Nye!’²⁴

Housing was not the government’s only building priority. Scarce men and materials were equally desperately needed to get Britain’s factories out of wartime and into peacetime products and to build schools, hospitals and the long-promised health centres. It was the last two categories that suffered, and suffered heavily. Slowly the situation improved as Bevan’s ministry showered local authorities with circulars – five a week in 1946.²⁵ The figures rose from just 1000 houses and 10,000 pre-fabs completed by December 1945, together with 60,000 unoccupiably damaged homes repaired, to 55,400 house completions in 1946, 139,000 in 1947, and 227,000 in 1948.²⁶ The 125,000 pre-fabs (which continued to be put up until 1951) added to these totals.

If the game, from the point of view of the politicians, the press and the homeless, was about numbers, Bevan had two equally important ends in view: standards and mix. Had his successors had the political courage to hold to those principles, Britain’s post-war housing problem might have been massively diminished. His stance did involve a painful trade-off between quality and quantity, but he held rigidly to the view that: ‘We shall be judged for a year or two by the number of houses we build. We shall be judged in ten years’ time by the type of houses we build.’²⁷ And he held this line at the most difficult of times, when much real homelessness existed, not the 1970s redefinition of it as having nowhere suitable to live.

Bevan pushed up the old minimum standard for council housing from 750 square feet of room space to 900, with lavatories upstairs as well as down. He insisted that the Cotswold authorities be allowed to use the local stone, and that Bath be allowed to build stone terraces, despite the greater expense. And he wanted his new housing mixed. In 1948 he removed the requirement in pre-war legislation that housing should be provided only for ‘the working classes’. He had something close to a romantic William Morris aesthetic about housing, one of the few things he shared with Churchill. ‘We should try to introduce into our modern villages and towns what was always the lovely feature of English and Welsh villages, where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street. I believe that is essential for the full life of a citizen … to see the living tapestry of a mixed community.’²⁸

He railed against ghettos, whether for the working class or the aged. ‘We don’t want a country of East Ends and West Ends, with all the petty snobberies this involves. That was one of the evil legacies of the Victorian era,’ he said. And ‘I hope that the old people will not be asked [by the local authorities] to live in colonies of their own – they do not want to look out of their windows on an endless procession of the funerals of their friends; they also want to look at processions of perambulators.’²⁹ As he was repeatedly urged to cut standards in order to boost numbers, he equally repeatedly refused, declaring it to be ‘the coward’s way out… if we wait a little longer, that will be far better than doing ugly things now and regretting them for the rest of our lives.’³⁰ The results of Bevan’s policy can still be seen in the quality and size of housing constructed in the 1940s despite the formidable odds. Dalton was to cut the standards in 1951, dubbing the fiery Bevan ‘a tremendous Tory’ for his views on the need for three-bedroom houses and extra lavatories. Macmillan was to cut them further, Bevan’s successors increasingly indulging in the numbers game at the expense of standards, diversity and social mix. The consequence proved not great new housing for the people, but too many great new slums.

Standards and housing layout were strictly as much the business of Lewis Silkin at the Ministry of Town and Country Planning, but the two men fortunately got on. Silkin had been influenced by the Garden City movement, whose pioneer was Ebenezer Howard at the turn of the nineteenth century.³¹ Howard’s vision of ‘slumless, smokeless cities’ was realised in the greenfield private development sites of Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City, which began building in 1903 and 1919 respectively. Letchworth was designed by Raymond Unwin, the architect also of New Earswick, the model village commissioned by Joseph Rowntree near his cocoa works in York. Unwin’s work heavily influenced the more human-scale and village-like developments of local authorities both before and after the Second World War. It was this legacy which the Town and Country Planning movement took over, bitterly resisting the ribbon development of the thirties, and combining it with a more right-wing plea for green belt legislation in order to protect the countryside from the repulsive encroachment of the lower middle classes and from the unplanned loss of good agricultural land.³²

In 1946, despite ‘no whisper of the new towns in the Labour manifesto’,³³ the New Towns Act appeared. There were eventually to be twenty-five of them, housing two million people. Of the first fourteen, eight were built around London, surrounded by green belt to keep them free of the city: an extension to Welwyn, plus the new Crawley, Bracknell, Hemel Hempstead, Hatfield, Stevenage, Harlow, and Basildon (later to become the home of Essex man). Six more went to regional development areas: Corby in Northamptonshire, Cwmbran in what is now Gwent, East Kilbride and Glenrothes in central Scotland and Newton Aycliffe and Peterlee in Durham. Beveridge was appointed chairman of the last two and threw himself into the job with characteristic vigour; but he found their limited social mix of chiefly young skilled working class wearing. ‘The people are nice and the troops of children are lovely, but there’s no conversation,’ he was to complain. Macmillan eventually fired him in 1952 for being ‘too old’, earning Beveridge’s opinion that he was ‘a pompous ass’ with ‘no manners’.³⁴

Although the New Towns were mostly built on greenfield sites, in those that had village centres Silkin found himself pilloried by Home Counties residents with no more desire than the people of Hampshire in the 1980s and 1990s to allow even the skilled working-class decanted from the great city on to their patch. At Stevenage, Silkin was greeted with howls of ‘Gestapo’ and ‘Dictator’ and had sand put into the petrol tank of his car. Protesters later changed the signs at the railway station to ‘Silkingrad’.³⁵

The New Towns were to be one of the greater successes of post-war planning, but by the time Labour left office in 1951 most were still largely building sites, in part because just as the housing situation started to improve Labour faced its darkest hour. For the catastrophic winter of 1947 was followed by the convertibility crisis which shook the triumphant Labour Government to its core. As a condition of the $3.5 billion post-war loan, the United States had insisted that sterling held around the world should become convertible to dollars. That day was due on 15 July 1947. The big freeze had already crippled exports, the balance of payments deficit was soaring, and as convertibility bit millions of dollars from the loan drained away as investors swapped their pounds for dollars, rushing the country towards bankruptcy. In one month $700 million went, until in August the Americans agreed to convertibility being suspended – as it turned out, for eleven years.³⁶ The final £25 million of the loan was drawn down in March 1948. Only the simultaneous promise of help from the Marshall Aid plan, conceived in the early summer of 1947 by the former United States general and finally agreed in April 1948, bailed Britain out, in part by funding European economic revival and thus stimulating a better market for British exports. The price of the crisis at home was spending cuts, implemented first by Dalton and then by the austere Stafford Cripps.

Bevan had to agree to plans that were calculated to slash housing completions in 1949 to 140,000.³⁷ The lead-time in reducing capital spending meant that 1948 still saw 227,000 permanent houses completed – almost 90,000 up on the previous year – and the easing of economic conditions that year in fact led to 197,000 completions in 1949, not the cut to 140,000 originally planned. But under Labour the figures were not again to climb above 200,000, sticking at 198,000 and 194,000 in 1950 and 1951.³⁸ Housing was forced to take its place in the economic priorities, something Bevan found himself cornered into accepting in part because he did such a brilliant job of defending the burgeoning NHS budget. Sir John Wrigley gloomily told Bevan in 1947: ‘If we build more than 200,000 houses, I’ll be sacked by the Chancellor, and if I build less I will be sacked by you.’³⁹

Although the criticism of Bevan’s record on housing became less ferocious with the big rise in completions in 1948, Labour remained on the defensive. Even at the Labour Party conference, of which he was a darling, Bevan faced criticism. In 1949, in Blackpool, he argued that despite the huge waiting lists, swollen by demographic pressures, he had not only made good all the wartime destruction but had, by then, provided Britain with more houses per head of population than ever before. There remained, he pleaded defensively, great timber shortages. Had the timber been there ‘what would you take the building workers from to build more houses – schools … hospitals … mental homes … nurses’ hostels … the factory programme?’ Yet again, he rehearsed his refusal to cut the standard or size of homes. ‘We will not build houses today which in a few years’ time will be slums.’⁴⁰

Traditionally, housing has been branded the welfare state failure of Bevan and the 1945 Labour Government, chiefly on the grounds that too few houses were built. Certainly disillusion with the housing shortage contributed to Labour’s defeat. Between them, however, Bevan and Dalton provided more than a million good quality homes between 1945 and 1951, homes that were to be popular when the tenants gained the right to buy them in the 1980s. They also set the pattern of local authority building for rent that was to be followed for a generation by both Tories and Labour until, at its peak in 1979, a third of the stock was council housing. Given the way that preference for public over private turned out, it may be that rather than numbers which is the more questionable part of the record. Bevan and Dalton, however, cannot be blamed for the quality and style of housing that their successors adopted.