Back to an old passion

Thanks to Peter Cahill and Chris England I returned to an old passion today.

They run the three year old Newport Housing Trust (NCH). They asked me to speak at their Annual General Meeting. Housing was the theme of my maiden Commons speech in 1987 and the reason I was expelled from Newport Council Labour group in 1977. Other issues have crowded out housing recently.

 The NCH mission is, ' Delivering excellent services  and improving homes and neighbourhoods  while adding value to residents and the city'. Have we all learnt the errors of the past? The legacy of housing in Newport is a mixture of calamities and triumphs. Some policies were at their self-gratifying worst and others at their visionary best. Architecture sometimes at its most sensitive inspired subtlety and at most bovine lazy incompetence. 

Of course. views on housing are relative. David Cameron defended his friendship with a Murdoch insider on the grounds that he is a 'neighbour', 'He lives two or threes miles away from my home'. Most of our neighbours live two or three yards away.

 

 In the forties and fifties politicians measured their virility by the total of houses they built. It was quantity not quality were the only criteria.. There was a master plan in the late forties to build half million pre-fabs. Instant homes, cheap and quick to build, a concrete base than the segments were delivered with plumbing and electrics installed. The most advanced feature of the prefabs was a coal fire with a back boiler that heated the water and circulated warm air to the bedrooms. The bathroom and kitchen units were built back-to-back for economy of space. All that was needed was to bolt them together. Only 150,000 were built with a planned life of 10 years. In Newport many lasted 60 years. They were replaced in defiance of the wishes of their tenants and owners. 

 

Now I find myself in the extraordinary position that having seen and approved plans for housing from glossy brochures in the seventies, some of those houses are candidates for demolition.   Alma Street in Pillgwenlly were razed to the ground. Identical homes in the so-called Twilight Zone of Baneswell were spared.The Baneswell  homes survived and are much sought -after, valued urban cottages. 

Doctors can buried their mistakes. Architects can demolish theirs. Newport fell for many of the foolish architectural errors of the half a century ago. Open plan estates had no defensible space. The star shaped blocks and the deck access flats  were conceived as a result of an idealised view of human nature. The district heating in Duffryn were meter-less in the belief that tenants would not use radiators as clothes dryers on hot July days. They did of course. The star shaped blocks depended of the faith that large communal space would be cleaned in turn by responsible tenants. They were not. The star shaped blocks and the deck access flats have been demolished.

 There is also a legacy of fine courageous micro-surgery of decision making by generations of councillors, architects and planners in Newport. It was benign and non-doctrinaire. 

The Newport authority  has been Labour for all but eight of the past 62 years has been selling council houses since the sixties.  Its reasons for doing so are not the Thatcher reasons. It is not done as an act of social engineering, a self-motivated act designed to win people to its side. It has always been part of the history of the Socialist movement—going back on the continent to the Swedish Socialists, and in this country to the Rochdale pioneers and the early guild Socialists —that home ownership is the cornerstone of Socialism. We have always considered it right for a person to own his home; what we object to is the belief that it is right to own someone else's home.

The reason that we in Newport have sold council houses for all this time is that we have seen the dilemma of housing in its long-term aspect. Too often, it is forgotten, or seen as a temporary, short-term problem. But when we decided on our answers to housing problems, we are looking for solutions that will not merely last for the life of a Parliament or a council, but will stand firm and good for 60 or even 100 years. The decision to sell council houses in Newport was made, and the sales were continued, to create stable, mixed communities, and because, in these inflationary times, it is not property but rent that is theft.

 

A great Member of Parliament for the county of Gwent — Aneurin Bevan—when he was Minister of Housing. He said that his finest ideal—what he hoped above all else to create in the new estates that were being built in the late 1940s—was the reproduction of what he described as the most lovely feature of English and Welsh village life in which the farmworker, the lawyer, the blacksmith and the doctor lived side by side in the same street. He wanted to create the rich tapestry of a mixed community. That is a high ideal that we have rarely achieved.

Do we see the picture of that tapestry, a balanced picture of harmony and order, or do we see something else? What we see in London is not a tapestry, but an ugly jigsaw broken by lines of division and injustice. We are seeing the creation of ghettos. On one side are those whose estates are shunned: they are places of fear, crime and neglect. The other, almost equally worrying, piece of the jigsaw shows the privileged estates behind barricades with security fences and guards in front of them.

Newport City Homes deserved congratulations for adapting the distract heating system at Duffryn to match the practical expectations of human behaviour. It have saved on bills, on COs emissions and  and improved customer satisfaction. Perhaps the best legacy are the extra-care homes of Wellwood, Willowbrook, Glyn Annwen, Capel Court, Aneurin Bevan. Newport were first to build extra-care scheme in Wales in 1988. They are still delivering.

 

Tentative  Commandments of Housing.

Any form of home ownership improves well being more than any form of landlordism.

The further house design diverts from traditional two storey semi-detached with back and front garden the worst habitat it provides.

Property is not theft. rent is.

Estates of owner-occopied houses  improve. Those of rented homes deteriorate.

Avoid idealistic expectations of human nature.

 

 

Comments

[Valentin Kovalainen]

For me it is good to see a home that has 2 to 3 yard away from the other home.No wonder they really deserve an congratulation.In Finland country many of home are develop through luxury one that's why many of them are really expensive they also made in quality and quantity which people love to hear in that place.Glad you share this one.

[Paul Flynn]

The consequences of your argument to divide into single tenure communities of rented and owned is the hell of London. Sink estates continue on a unstoppable decline: Gated communities hide behind security fences.

The greatest failure of housing now is that most young people cannot afford mortgages without help from parents who have benefited from rising housing values. Renting should NEVER be a forced option - it's suitable only for those with short term housing needs.

The social housing groups must be made to work. Newport has £100 plus million to spend. Other Welsh town rejected stock transfers for unfounded suspicions of malign intentions.

Council management of housing was never more than a partial success. We can do better.

[MM]

NCH isn't doing all this as a favour. There is money to be made or they wouldn't be doing it. We need more 'council' housing,because the Tories are set on making the poor poorer, and forcing many into losing their homes, the potential for civil strife is there.

All those people will want accommodation and the rental area is where they are forced to go, and rent is as you say wholesale theft,and tenants with nil security of tenure either.

Are not NCH updating all these properties simply to sell off afterwards for more profit ? we are hearing of NCH wanting to move familes out so they can sell off the updated homes. Social housing is getting smaller and where will these poor families go ? Nobody has money to buy homes, and the Banks ave their money for corporate handouts to failures.