Squalor (Housing)



Squalor (Housing)

In 1945 most of Britain’s cities still had slum areas and overcrowding was still a serious problem, made worse by bomb damage during the war which had destroyed some 700,00 houses. After the two-night Clydebank blitz of 1941, for example, only seven houses out of a total stock of 12,000 remained intact. Also the war interfered with the normal house-building programme. Moreover the slum clearing programme of the 1930’s had barely begun to touch the problem of sub standard housing. Cities across Britain suffered and as peace broke out a huge rebuilding programme was needed. Labour’s manifesto recognised the need. Labour’s pledge is firm and direct - it will proceed with a housing programme with the maximum practical speed until every family in the island has a good standard of accommodation.

The burden of tackling the problem fell on Bevan’s Ministry of Health, as Labour failed to create a Minister of Housing, but the ministry already had enough to do with setting up the NHS. His policy was to help those most in need i.e. the working class. Bevan’s first task was to house the homeless and to this end he continued the coalition government’s policy of putting up temporary factory built pre fabricated homes. This provided 157,000 homes between 1945 and 1948, too few to satisfy the country’s needs. The fact that skilled labour and building materials were not plentiful, and that economic conditions were not helpful, compelled Bevan to choose where to concentrate his efforts on conventional house building. The government aimed to build 200,000 a year. He put the emphasis on building council houses for rent, placing severe restrictions on private building. The result was inflation in costs and lengthy council waiting lists. People in homes which needed considerable spending on them to raise them to a reasonable standard got help from the treasury, but the fact remains that by 1951 there was still a serious shortage of housing in Britain.

Although only 55,400 houses were built in 1946, by 1948 over 280,000 were completed. Many were council houses for rent and of those many were ‘factory-made homes’, prefabs for short, which were quickly assembled on site. Even in 1951 Labour still averaged over 200,000 houses per year.

Cities became encircled with council owned housing estates providing new, quality homes for people moving from the inner cities. These homes were in many ways better than the overcrowded tenements left behind. On the plus side, the houses had separate kitchens, bedrooms and a living room. There was gas and electric power, hot and cold water, indoor toilets in a bathroom and most houses in the 1950’s were two stories high, usually with a garden front and back. The down side was that people were moved in before full facilities were available.

Overall, the new council estates were a saviour for people living in crowded tenements in the centre of Scotland’s cities. Not least among the advantages was the council’s role as a major landlord which protected people from unfair exploitation by private landlords. In the 1950’s council rent was one third of that in the private sector.

Unfortunately, nobody had foreseen the huge demand for housing after the war. The increase in marriages, the rapid increase in the birth rate and the reluctance of families to continue living as extended families in cramped conditions all combined to swallow up houses as fast as they were built. Newspaper stories of families ‘squatting’ in disused army camps while they waited for housing, as at Duddingston in Edinburgh, all added to the impression that Labour had failed in their promise. In spite of Labour’s undoubted achievement, given the difficult economic conditions, there was still a serious housing shortage in 1951 and long waiting lists for council housing.

As part of the vision of a New Britain, and also to provide space for the increase in house building, a New Towns Act of 1946 gave the government the power to decide where the new towns should be built and to set up development corporations to carry out the projects.

The aim was to create towns that were healthy and pleasant to live in as well as being geared to the needs of the townspeople, unlike the random, uncontrolled growth of Britain’s 19th century industrial cities. In Scotland, East Kilbride and Glenrothes are examples of post war new towns along with Livingston reflecting the vision of the New Towns Act although not growing until the 1960’s. Some new industries moved to these new towns but they often became places where workers lived whilst commuting to the older towns and cities for work. Altogether 14 new towns were established before the end of the Labour government in 1951.

The Labour government’s record on house building does not compare well with pre war levels or with the achievements of the Conservative governments of the 1950’s. Poor housing and homelessness were still serious problems at the end of the Labour period. The 1951 census revealed that there were 750,000 fewer houses than households in Britain. This was roughly the same level of homelessness as in 1931. However, given the scale of social and economic problems facing the government in 1945, historians have tended to judge Labour less harshly than the voters did in 1951.

The government ended before really massive signs of what it proposed were visible, but in the following years the rebuilding of old communities and the creation of new ones went ahead on the basis of those post war plans.

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