A council house should not always be for life

When my parents migrated from Northern Ireland to England in the early 1960s, we lived for several years in a house owned by the council on a small estate in Kent.

It was the heyday of what we now call social housing provision, which had begun in the late Victorian era (though there have been almshouses for the poor since the 10th century) and peaked in the middle of the last century. These houses provided low-cost, rented homes for families often in a state of transition. Unlike many sprawling inner-city developments, the smaller estates offered a sense of neighbourliness and what has come to be known – though wasn’t then – as “community”. There was even a police house on the estate.

But however convenient and cheap it might have been to live there, it never crossed my father’s mind that it was anything other than a temporary base for his family. Once he had established himself in a job and could afford a mortgage, he bought his own home and we left the estate. This story has been played out umpteen times over the years. It was never envisaged that subsidised housing should provide a permanent base for those who for one reason or another found themselves as social tenants. Why should someone whose prospects have improved to the point that they can afford to rent in the private sector, or get on to the housing ladder, stay in a house that may be desperately needed by a less fortunate family? More to the point, why should it be possible to bequeath a council house to the next generation of the same family, regardless of their circumstances, especially when there is such a shortage of suitable homes? Some 90,000 family members still live in accommodation whose original tenant has died.

Yet the Government’s efforts to apply a bit of common sense to this system have triggered outrage in some quarters, and not just on the Left. Yesterday, Grant Shapps, the Housing Minister, outlined what seemed be perfectly reasonable proposals for reform only to be greeted by claims that he would destroy “community cohesion” and force the nation’s poor to wander the streets. BBC radio carried a tendentious news feature that gave the impression that people who had lived in their houses for years would be evicted. But even if an argument can be made for asking some sitting tenants who no longer need social housing to relinquish their home for someone who does, that is not what the Government is suggesting. Under the plans outlined by Shapps, no one currently in a council house will be affected, only new tenants from next year.

The system of housing welfare in this country is dangerously unbalanced. It is immensely expensive, costing some £6.5 billion a year, discourages mobility and entrenches dependency. Critics, including some Tories, who say that removing guaranteed permanent tenancies will wreck the very community spirit that the Coalition says it wants to foster are both mistaken and patronising.

People move in and out of neighbourhoods all the time without destroying a sense of ”cohesion”; why should it be any different because you rent your home from a state agency rather than a private landlord?

Shapps’s reforms seem pretty unexceptionable. They even meet many of the objections about severing the links people have with a particular area, by giving councils greater freedom to allocate social housing to those with strong local connections.

Instead of secure tenancies for life, rental contracts of two years or more will be introduced. Assessments will be made of the circumstances of renters before deciding on whether to renew the contract. So if a council house has three or four tenants, each of whom are earning – as these houses sometimes do when children grow up – then it might instead be earmarked for a more needy family. Many European countries operate systems where the income of municipal tenants is annually assessed and if it has risen, so does the rent. This might actually be a better approach than ending secure tenancy, since it both offers the choice of staying put while tending to encourage people to move on.

Critics who maintain that ending the home for life will act as a disincentive for a tenant to find well-paid work are engaged in a counsel of despair, an assumption that most of those living in council housing should stay there. At least Shapps has some faith in people to improve their lot. Undeniably, there are problems of high rents and over-valued properties in the private sector that make it hard for young families in particular to get a home. But their position is not eased by placing insurmountable blockages in the network of social housing when five million people are already on waiting lists, despite £17 billion of public investment since 1997.

From Herbert Morrison’s promise to “build the Tories out of London” in the 1940s, through Cathy Come Home in the 1960s and on to the Right to Buy scheme in the 1980s, social housing has been a toxic political issue, and remains so. But the system does not work, is too expensive and favours those in possession rather than those in need. Reform is long overdue.