Kevin McCloud's experience of staying with a family in an Indian slum made fascinating television when I caught up with it last Saturday night. One of the most interesting aspects of it was that it challenged whether 'slum clearance' and new public housing leads to improvements in the lives of those concerned.

He found much to be appalled by in the slums but also much to admire and even envy.

Plague, cholera and TB abound, but its citizens are among the happiest and most beautiful I’ve seen.

This entirely echoes the discoveries of researchers in Britain when they got close to the removal of so-called slums here and their replacement by planned, architect-designed council housing. Michael Young, who had written the 1945 Labour Party election manifesto, joined by Peter Wilmott studied a slum in great detail and then also a council estate. They found that contact with extended families fell by as much as 75 per cent after the move to the estate.

George Orwell, another Left-winger, when he lived among the poor also found that much was lost when people moved to council estates. What are the most important things? I suspect that two are among them: a strong sense of community and family and a sense of being responsible for one's own actions. The idea of community and the benefit it gives is well known. What is less commented on is the impact of independent action. I struggle even to find a language to write about it.

It is illustrated at its best by the daughter of the family in the overcrowded, rat-infested slum building where McCloud stayed. She emerged looking immaculate each morning in her school uniform. She was evidently bright and one believed she would succeed when she said she aimed to be a lawyer. How did she come to be ambitious and work hard? Because she knew very clearly that if she did not work, she would never emerge from the slum and grim. long hours of manual labour. Compare her with the offspring of a household in Britain where no adult works but the flat or house is paid for by the state and they get income support. The children learn that you can get a tolerable life style without really bothering and if anything is wrong, in the house or the education or healthcare they get, it is all down to someone else. Life it not what they make it. It is what the state makes it. That takes away from them a self-respect and a sense of being able to make a difference to their own lives.

"Slumdog Millionaire" was a superbly made film and one can understand the power of the story of the TV quiz changing everything in the hero's life. But the more important story is of the thousands of girls like the one in Kevin McCloud's film who was going to change her life through a decision in her own mind to work. The state changes the condition of people's minds. That is the way it tends to do the greatest damage.

ps The name that was not mentioned, as far as I know, in the programme was Hernando de Soto who is a leader in this field and who has argued that the key thing for economic growth is to give property rights to slum dwellers.

pps Much more about the damaging effects of council housing - and their possible causes - is in the housing chapter in The Welfare State We're In.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime • Housing

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