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.

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There have been 20 occasions since 2004 on which gang members have fired guns in the Croxteth and Norris Green areas where Rhys Jones was killed. The gang members start as early as 12. They come from broken, workless homes and start out as couriers or look-outs for the older members. Then they progress up the pecking order, their rising status measured by the viciousness of the crimes they have committed.

Sean Mercer, the youth who killed Rhys Jones, has been stopped by police on an astonishing 80 occasions by the police. He scorned them and their lack of ability to arrest him and other gang members.
It is surely impossible to deny the association between the social breakdown – the unmarried parenting and the worklessness in Norris Green and Croxteth – and the development of these gangs.

In Norris Green, more than half the people are in social housing and the workless rate is 35 per cent – far above the national average. A worrying number of council house and housing association estates have turned into ghettoes of hopelessness, vandalism, crime and fear. A poll by YouGov on behalf of the Centre for Social Justice found that a third of social tenants nationwide feel that where they live is not ‘reasonably safe’. Nearly half won’t say that they trust their neighbours and 40 per cent don’t believe that the local schools provide a good education.

The underclass has grown and become concentrated in many council estates. What are we going to do about it?

Yes, of course we can start by tightening up the weaknesses in the policing, prosecuting and sentencing. These communities have a crisis on their hands and it is offensive that police time is taken up with so much paperwork. It is absurd that the police should have had such knowledge or the wrongdoings of Sean Mercer yet been somehow unable to send him to a corrective institution. The weakness of our justice system – and those who made it so weak – bears a responsibility for the death of Rhys Jones.

So, yes, it would help if Labour finally fulfilled its long-ago promise to be ‘tough on crime’. But we need to go much deeper. One of the major causes of crime is the way many estates have become centres of unemployment and unmarried parenting. There is plenty of evidence that unmarried parenting leads to a greater likelihood of children becoming delinquents. Add that to a concentration of unemployment on a council estate and the result can be extremely toxic.

Council housing has been around for well over a century. Originally it was allocated to the respectable and even prosperous working class. It was a reward and a privilege for people considered worthy of it. It was also for those who had been compulsorily or otherwise moved out of housing areas designated as slums.

But then in 1949, the allocation of council housing began to change. It began to be granted to people on the basis of need rather than worth. In 1977, this way of doing things became compulsory. And so began the downward spiral of Britain’s council estates. Sir Robin Wales, the Mayor of Newham described it like this last year: “If you walk in and say ‘I’m homeless’ you get a greater priority than if you walk in and say ‘I’ve managed to do something for myself but I’m still looking for a council property’”. I could add that if you walk in and say, “I’m homeless and I’ve got a baby” then you jump ahead as if you were playing snakes and ladders.

So the system now makes the life-choice of being unmarried and workless easier to fall into. Not actually attractive, but less obviously awful. Worse still, it makes it almost impossible to get out the trap. Once you have council or social housing and are in receipt of housing benefit and council tax benefit you will find it difficult to discover a job which would bring in much more money after you are obliged to give up these benefits.

Housing benefit is the dark secret of the whole benefits system. People often say the Jobseekers’ Allowance and Income Support are tiny. They say no one would be discouraged from working because they get one of these benefits. Perhaps. But once you add on housing benefit and council tax relief and other so-called ‘passport’ benefits, the maths change substantially. The council estates have become quagmires from which few escape. Would you like to guess how many people move out of council estates each year? It is mere four per cent. Once you are in, it is practically for life. A large minority of people are living in these estates, subsidized by everyone else and living low-quality lives.

Reform is desperately needed. But even after 11 years in power, Labour is still in the position where it is only promising a green paper next year. In other words, it has not thought the unthinkable. It has buried its head in the sand.

What should be done? First, one must surely allow those of retirement age to live out their lives in peace in the council homes they have known for years. But after that, we should no longer be content to let this disastrous social experiment continue as it is. Those of working age should be required to seek work if they get subsidised rents or housing benefit. The tenancies should not be for life but for limited periods – an idea that is being taken on in the Netherlands. Tenants should be given every encouragement to become the owners or partial owners of their properties. Unmarried parents should no longer jump up the housing lists compared to those who have worked and planned for their futures.

Such a programme – allied with a more purposeful justice system - could make a dramatic difference. Some may say the government would need a lot of political courage to do such things. But many of us – especially those in council estates – will need a lot of courage to face the future of increased unemployment, crime and fear that will result if we do nothing.

The above is the original draft of an article which appears in today's Daily Express.

Thwe full report on housing by the Centre for Social Justice is here.

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

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A Daily Telegraph leader on Saturday puts the case for tough welfare reform. Of course it is a case with which I agree and it is satisfying, well over 15 years since I conceived the idea of writing The Welfare State We're In to see one of the main contentions of the book supported in a major national newspaper. But, as I have said before, our best chance of a major advance will be when the Guardian and even presenters of the Today progamme or Newsnight take the same view.

The conclusion of the Telegraph leader:

Ten years ago, Labour identified a moral case for welfare reform, but, like so much with this Government, it was mere rhetoric.

Another attempt is to be made in the current parliament, but it offers no greater prospect of success than the last.

Unless a far tougher approach is adopted, another generation of children will be born into this cycle of state-sponsored hopelessness.

Sadly, Polly Toynbee in the Guardian appears unwilling to accept that things are getting worse or that welfare and housing benefits are the root cause. She wrote on Saturday:

But this is not a story of broken Britain going to hell in a hand cart; it is a picture of small but deep and persistent dysfunction passed from generation to generation. Social historians looking at Charles Booth's maps of poverty in Victorian Britain find the same areas still in deep poverty, often the descendants of those he studied. The seven Matthews children or Baby P's siblings have a slender chance of growing up to be good parents, as abuse, neglect and lack of love are passed on indelibly.

I would urge her to read the Duncan Smith article below which offers at least some evidence that this constant level of people in great difficulties that she suggests does not actually exist. The levels of dependency, worklessness and crime have all risen dramatically. Moreover the evidence from Charles Booth is not all as most people suppose as this earlier post reveals.

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If you read little else on this website, I hope you will at least read this extract from an article by Iain Duncan Smith in the Saturday Daily Telegraph. It describes the problem well and with some data which I had not seen before.

Britain is witnessing a growth in an underclass whose lifestyles affect everyone. Perhaps the reason why most people haven't been aware of the extent of this is because housing policy has, over 20 to 30 years, ghettoised many of these dysfunctional families.

In the Seventies, only 11 per cent of households on the estates weren't working; today barely a third of working-age tenants have full-time work. Less than 15 per cent are headed by a couple with children. Two-thirds are occupied by lone parents, lone men or lone women.

On such estates, few children see a positive father figure, with young men having children by different mothers, with the state covering the cost.

Small wonder that alcoholism rates are high and drug dealers ply their trade in full view of young families. This social breakdown leads far too many young boys into street gangs.

Although gangs are criminal and bound together by harsh discipline, the leader acts as an authority figure and the gang's strong ties and loyalties perversely replicate the family they never had. As gangs clash, residents suffer from the violence and high levels of crime.

These young boys are on their way to a life of crime. You don't have to take my word for it - look at the background of those who as young offenders end up in custody.

Over three-quarters of them are from broken homes, just under half of them experienced violence in the home and half of them have educational levels below an 11-year-old.

Girls suffer too. Many have grown up in dysfunctional families where their mothers had children as teenagers and they have shared the house with a string of "guesting fathers". Too many will repeat the lives of their mothers.

Families like this are much more at risk of abuse than any other. Recent NSPCC research has shown that a child growing in such a family structure is up to six times more likely to suffer abuse, which is why the social services are under growing pressure.

The cases of Baby P and Shannon Matthews have led to demands that more children be taken into care, yet in the past ten years 20 per cent more children have been taken into care. Furthermore, the outcomes for those youngsters are appalling.

Nearly half of all the under-21s in the criminal justice system have been in care, only 12 per cent gain five A-C GCSEs and a third of all homeless people have been in care.

When social services do take the child, too often the young mother goes off and has another child, which will more than likely end up in care as well.

The full article is here.

Here is a link to the Centre for Social Justice report on "housing poverty".

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime • Housing • Parenting • Welfare benefits

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On Newsnight last night, I was in a discussion that included the minister, Yvette Cooper (the only one who got TV make-up), Professor John Hills (who wrote yesterday's report on council housing), Lynsey Hanley (author)and Shaun Bailey (excuse me if I have mispelled his surname).

There was a moment to relish when Yvette Cooper was talking earnestly about the importance of mixing up the rich and poor. It all sounded very admirable and important. The interviewer, Emily, was taking it in very seriously and not challenging her in the least. Then Shaun Bailey, who lives on an estate, said it would make no difference. You could put the rich and the poor next to each other but they would still be living "in different worlds".

It is probably true that concentrating those with major problems in one housing estate does tend to compound these problems. But it is also true, as Mr Bailey said, that you can have rich and poor very close together without talking to each other for decades. I live in a street with a council estate. I know of no interaction between the rich and the poor on this street over many years. The only exception is via the porter of a luxury block of flats who speaks easily to everyone and - in his amiable way - ticks off council children if they deal in drugs in the estate garden or otherwise misbehave.

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For today, at least, and perhaps for the next week, it is possible to listen to the debate I took part on the Today programme. Here is a link. The discussion was a 7.55am on Tuesday 20th February.

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The Today programme interview went off tolerably. In preparing for it I came across the remarkable fact that even Will Hutton, the left-wing writer for the Guardian, has decided that council housing has been a disaster. His article is here.

He mentions a book called Estates, Britain's own special ghettos by Lynsey Hanley, who has written for The Observer. He says her book is "passionate and engaging" and it certainly sounds worth having.

On re-reading the chapter on council housing in my own book, I was particularly struck by the fact that in the sixty years up to 1911, 21 million more people came to live in cities in Britain. Without any planning or state housing of substantial size, this massive increase in the city population - a tripling - was successfully catered for.

There were no massive building projects, just thousands of builders building houses and flats to meet demand. Planning and building controls were, of course, much less of an obstacle and added expense than now. What is most impressive of all is that the density of housing - the number of people per dwelling - actually improved during this time. It fell from 5.46 to 5.05. (This from A Social History of Housing by John Burnett).

Another fact worth remembering is that after the second world war, the Attlee government was desperately keen to get new housing built. Council housing was thought to be the answer. Some four out of five buildings were built by councils. Private sector building was restricted to allow all the effort to go into council house building. And the result? Fewer houses were built than in the years after the first world war.

During the debate on the Today programme today, Alan Walter, for the lobby group Defend Council Housing, argued that huge amounts of money are being taken out of council housing. Rents and sales, he suggested, were bringing in much more money than the costs of maintaining existing council housing and new building.

I don't have figures available on this but I am deeply sceptical. The pace of selling council housing has slowed. The costs of renewing council estates that have gone wrong remain enormous. One of the cuttings I cam across stated that Birmingham has faced a bill of £1billion to renovate its council housing. In 2000, it said it intended to destroy 300 tower blocks. The North Peckham Estate - where Damilola Taylor was killed - has been renovated at vast expense. The rents in council accomodation tend to be well below market prices.

There are many ways of counting the numbers on such things. I very much doubt that, properly looked at, council housing has been anything but a financial as well as a social disaster.

One other thing: I notice, on the Defend Council Housing website, a statement by one of its supporters that goes like this:

"Our UNISON branch wish to fight. A lot of our members not only work in housing but we also live in council houses, so we're in double jeopardy."

It is signed, "Jane Moore, Cardiff UNISON".

This is an open, unabashed admission that part of the reason she wants council housing to continue is that she works in the business of council housing. One can't help admiring the honesty, but she is admitting that the 'great fight', in her case, is partly based on her own self-interest. Sight of this made me wonder where the funding for Defend Council Housing comes from. Is any of it from unions whose members work in council housing?

Correction: On buying the book by Lynsey Hanley, I find that the subtitle is "An intimate history" rather than "Britain's own special ghettos".

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My appearance on the Today programme (see previous entry) has been brought forward to between 7.50am today and 8.00 am.

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I have been invited to appear on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 tomorrow, sometime between 8.30am and 9.00 am, to talk about whether council housing has a future. Preparing for this, I have come across the remarkable information that, at its peak, social housing accounted for half of all households in Scotland. That proportion has now slumped to a quarter. And the Chartered Institute of Housing in Scotland has predicted that this will fall to only eight per cent in 14 years.

This is a measure of just how enormous was the faith once shown in the welfare state: to provide housing for half the population in Scotland, at least. And now that faith has enormously diminished. When was the last time you heard anyone suggest that the state should provide half our housing?

Housing is a part of the welfare state that is quietly being dumped. No government spokesman has ever stated this as policy. Quite the contrary. But this is what has been happening over a long period. (See the chapter on housing in The Welfare State We're In for details.)

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Many thanks to Phil Taylor for directing me to this article in the Sunday Times eight days ago.

Here is an extract:

The analysis of figures in 14 European countries found that Britain has by far the highest proportion of single mothers in the European Union.

The report says that in 2001, more than 8% of British households were headed by a single mother aged 18-35, while the UK also has one of the highest rates of benefits for single mothers.

In 1994 a single mother with two children who worked for about 18 hours a week could expect more than £2,000 a year in benefits. By 2001 the figure had increased to more than £3,500.

The researchers do not say outright that high benefits accelerate family break-up. Others, however, believe the study shows that generous benefits for single motherhood provide an incentive for women to have children alone.

Frank Field,

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David Blunkett wrote in the Sun last week (august 30,

All too often girls come to my constituency surgery demanding a house for themselves and their baby.

This just isn't on. If the family - and often their mothers are single parents too - can't or won't look after the offspring then we will simply have to go back to the idea of hostel accomodation.

The "give us a house" mentality has to become a thing of the past and be replaced by "give us respect".

It may sound harsh, but blaming the changes in society won't wash.

So there is a former senior minister calling for hostels for unmarried mothers instead of council flats. It is a sign of the changing times. I remember once suggesting to a Daily Telegraph features editor that offering free flats to unmarried mothers had substantially increased the numbers of children born out of wedlock. Out of concern for children, we should cease to do it. Possibly we should offer hostels instead but it was essential that single parenting was an unattractive route for a girl to take (as it naturally would be if the government did not get involved). Only that way would we reduce the number of children brought up in a way that makes them more likely to be unhappy, more likely to be abused, more likely to under-achieve academically and - indeed - more likely to go wrong and suffer in every possible way.

The features editor of that Conservative Party supporting newspaper was shocked. Now a senior Labour Party figure suggests it. It is progress of a sort - but it is painfully slow.

Further on, David Blunkett refers to a survey of 13 European Union countries "this week" which "tried to link the increase in lone parents with the rise in their benefits." He adds "it is true that lone mothers here are given more financial help than all but one of the other countries surveyed".

It is no surprise if the survey suggests a link between subsidies for lone parenting and increases in the incidence of it. But it would be interesting if it was actually commissioned by the European Union. And, in any case, I would be glad if anyone knows of this survey and could direct me to it.

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The government has a target to build more homes on 'brownfield' sites. This conjures up the idea that instead of beautiful countryside being invaded to create new homes, redundant industrial wasteland is being converted into new, attractive, residential areas.

In fact, as new figures have revealed, a significant proportion of new housing is being on town and city gardens. Our urban environments are having their greenery removed and replaced by blocks of flats. 15 per cent of new dwellings are being built on residential plots, including gardens.

Nobody wants to live without greenery around. But that is precisely the kind of environment towards which current government policy is taking us.

The figure is from today's Daily Mail (page 2) which cites Tory MP Greg Clark as the person who has found it out - presumably from the government. For good research and analysis on the subject, see Better Homes, Greener Cities published by Policy Exchange.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Housing

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The relevance of house prices to the welfare state might seem pretty weak. In fact, there is more of a connection than one might think. Centralised state planning of permissions for development was started, as I understand it, by the same post-war Attlee administration that was responsible for various other aspects of the welfare state. The restrictive planning was intended, like much else, for the benefit of the people. But it has resulted in property in Britain being phenomenally expensive. This is to the disadvantage, above all, of the poor. This fact may be only tangential to the article on trends in property prices below which I wrote and which appeared in the Daily Express today. But I am posting it anyway. I expect to write more on British housing policy later.

House prices are on the way up again. Hometrack says that they rose 0.6 per cent in April, the biggest increase in a single month since 2004. Across the country, the proportion of estate agents reporting lower prices has fallen from half, last Autumn, to less than five per cent now.

It is true that the Nationwide reported only a nominal rise in April. But its price increase for March was a big one. The exact timing does not matter. Overall, virtually all price reports now tell us that the property market is on the move this spring. Those of us thinking of buying should probably get a move on. Those thinking of selling can probably relax a little. The buyers are on their way.

How far can this new upturn go? Are the boom conditions of the past back or will it fizzle out? We need a bit of history to put it in context:

In 1995, only eleven years ago, the average price of a home in Britain was £51,000. The average price is now over £160,000. There has been a massive increase. In the second half of last year, the remarkable boom finally slowed down and then stopped. Property prices actually fell. In some areas, including London, prices fell quite noticeably.

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There's a real culture of dependency on these estates. One reason is because people expect to be housed and never to be kicked out....

Imagine you are a nine-year old boy living here. You see these groups of older boys. They seem to be tough. They seem to be having a good time. Nobody interferes with them. You want to be a man and these appear to be men to you.

These are quotes from a new pamphlet.There is a shortage of descriptions of the dynamics of life for those who become alienated and turn to crime and other forms of destructive behaviour. So the publication of No Man's Land: How Britain's Inner City Youth Are Being Failed by the Centre of Policy Studies is welcome.It is written by Shaun Bailey, a man whose mother tried to get him away from the council estate culture in which she lived. She succeeded but he has returned to try to help on an estate. He describes the culture there.

The first chapter is on the CPS website here. The full pamphlet can be bought via that website. There is a serialisation in the Daily Mail today.

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How many people, even in the Labour Party, have noticed the dog that didn't bark? On what has been one of the major parts of the party's social policy for decades, the government has gone very quiet.

The hush that has fallen is shown by two statistics: in 1953, local councils built nearly a quarter of a million council homes. Last year, they built a mere 250. The building of council homes has gone from being a major part of British life and politics, the stuff of headlines and passionate national debates, to a virtual irrelevance - a trifling thousandth of what it once was.

This is the beginning of an article I have written for The First Post. The full article can be found here.

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When the riots in Paris are reported, the most commonly mentioned factor is race. The implication is that this is a cause of the violence. No doubt racial conflict adds to the problem. There is also mention of people being poor.

But I suspect something different lies behind it all. The report in the Telegraph on Thursday by Henry Samuel referred several times to the places in which the riots took place:

The riots first broke out on the Chêne-Pointu council estate. Last Thursday, two adolescents from the estate died when they scaled the 8ft wall of an electricity substation to dodge police and were electrocuted.

....Chêne-Pointu typifies the problems of many of the urban ghettoes that surround Paris and other large French cities: a high immigrant population, soaring unemployment and drug dealing.

...."We're not dumb. Sarkozy has declared war on suburban youth," said Karim, 23. "Unless he apologises for the way he has treated us, then he can expect 40 nights of violence," he said.

But others around the estate back Mr Sarkozy. "What he says may be crude, but he's right. Drug runners and petty criminals have had it good too long around here.

....In the neighbouring Bosquet estate, Traore Gounedi, a 27-year-old worker in a local social centre, is incensed. "Ten years ago, Clichy was a real no-go area. But in recent years we had built up sports clubs and other associations and it had become calm...."

As night fell at Chêne-Pointu, sirens heralded the approach of two fire engines that positioned themselves in front of the estate awaiting the flames.

Notice the appearances of the word

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Another measure of how brutish Britain is becoming: DHL will no longer deliver to some areas because of the danger to drivers. Imagine what those areas must be like for the residents.

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Former Welfare Minister Frank Field is pushing for tough action to throw unruly tenants - responsible for social ills including noise, assaults and vandalism - off estates.

And he believes ministers should copy a scheme in Kamper, eastern Holland, where neighbours from hell have been moved into vandal-proof accommodation in steel containers.

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If you own property, the government is on your tail. The idea of increasing taxes on property has been building up for several years. Now the election is out of the way - and there is a big government budget deficit to fix - it won't be long now.

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I went to an event at the Institute of Economic Affairs last night at which several of the authors of a new book, Margaret Thatcher's Revolution, including Norman Tebbitt, spoke. Here are some of their remarks:

Dennis O'Keeffe: "much 'special needs' is about children who have not been taught to read".

David Marsland: Privatising the supply of healthcare (ie hospitals and doctors) is relatively easy. Privatising demand is more difficult. But a start could be made by using tax rebates to enable people to opt out of state-financed care.

James Stanfield: He went to a comprehensive school. He did GCSE in English Literature and did not do any Shakespeare at all. The year after he left, the headmaster was punched by a pupil as order faded. He reckons he got out 'just in time'. He wanted governments, if they are subsidising education, to subsidise the consumer, not the producer. He said he had been to Kenya and was appalled that the British government was exporting the failed British model of 'free and compulsory' education. He said, "British money is destroying education in Africa."

Norman Tebbitt talked of the huge transfer of assets that took place under Thatcher from the public sector to the private sector. He reeled off a list of companies privatised that was far longer than most of us can easily remember. On top of that was the sale of council homes. He said these things combined to make a big difference in social attitudes.

He admitted some failures.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education • European Union • Housing • NHS • Politics

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