The problem of housing the less-affluent working class.

By Eamon Dyas

We have now arrived at the point where the second Labour minority government took power in 1929. In terms of housing policy the most significant difference between this second Labour administration and its predecessor was the absence of John Wheatley, from Ramsay MacDonald’s 1929 Cabinet. Wheatley had never been an easy fit for MacDonald’s Labour Party. He came from an Irish and Scottish working class background and had been part of what was called “Red Clydeside” during the First World War. As a result, he was more at home with the radical Independent Labour Party (of which he was a member and which had amalgamated with the Labour Party in 1906). It was his influence in Scotland and his chairmanship of the Scottish National Housing Council that convinced Ramsay MacDonald to appoint him Health Minister with responsibility for housing in 1924. By 1929 with Labour’s reputation for housing provision having been established through Wheatley’s 1924 Housing Act, and with the issue of government spending assuming a greater importance, MacDonald no longer had any use for Wheatley, who by this time was even more at variance with his Labour Party.

The burden of local government expenditure on central government had grown since the erosion of local authority access to its own sources in the years prior to the First World War. Those local government resources had been made possible from the 1880s when something called ‘assigned revenue’ was formalised by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Goschen during the tenure of the Salisbury Government. Assigned revenue was discussed in part 11 of this series. It consisted of a revenue stream available to local councils on the basis of the functions or services they provided which were also deemed to serve a national purpose (roads are the most obvious example). On the basis of that acknowledgement a certain proportion of the taxation income accruing to central government from these activities or services was re-located to local authorities. In tandem with the growth of the income deriving from these assigned revenues the pressures on local government had been increased due to them assuming increased responsibility for things like social services in the areas of health and education. The predicament in which local authorities found themselves during the inter-war years as a result of the erosion of things like assigned revenue is explained by one commentator as follows:

“During the inter-war years growth in the social service functions of local authorities and the drift away from profitable activities continued to shift local government finances towards increased dependence on central sources of revenue rather than local funding. The consequence of such changes was a dramatic acceleration in the expenditure of local authorities after 1918, alongside a flattening of the revenue that they could raise from their own resources. Expenditure in Britain by local authorities rose from £147 million in 1919 to £416 million by 1939, even though there was a decline in the cost of living, due to the Depression, which will have more than compensated for population increase. The increase in spending on services controlled by local authorities in 1939 was, however, somewhat greater than these figures suggest if allowance is made for the transfer of most Poor Law expenditure, especially assistance to the unemployed, from the local to the national Exchequer in 1934. The services that most strongly account for the change are education, which has always been the largest source of local expenditure following the disappearance of the Poor Law responsibilities, and housing, which started from a negligible level of expenditure in 1918 to become a substantial item of local government activity by 1939. The considerable growth of expenditure also involved roads and highways. 

A rapid expansion in service provision relegated the assigned revenue stream to insignificance. In 1919, 23% of revenue expenditure was funded by grant aid, but by 1939 this had risen to 39%. A major new stream of grant aid accompanied the development of public-sector housing, and further funding was given to mental health and education services.” (Explaining local government: Local government in Britain since 1800, by J.A. Chandler. Published by Manchester University Press, 2013, pp.148-149).

Thus, by the time of the second Labour minority Government in 1929 the issue of local government expenditure was already becoming a major arena of party politics even aside from the impact of the economic depression. Consequently, there were always going to be significant constraints on what the MacDonald government could achieve in a situation where Labour was compelled to function as a minority government. In that situation there was no place for visionaries like John Wheatley. But aside from that John Wheatley’s absence from MacDonald’s 1929 Labour government was indicative of a notable shift in the party’s overall approach to housing expenditure. 

The 1930 Housing Act and attempts to make council homes affordable for all.

In terms of expanding the housing stock, compared to what was achieved by the 1924 Act the 1930 Act was quite a tame measure. But then again, the most significant aspects of the 1930 Act were not so much directed at increasing the overall housing stock but rather to ensure that more of the available public authority housing stock was used to accommodate a previously neglected element of the working class – those on low incomes. The financial architecture under which all previous housing legislation – including Wheatley’s 1924 Act – operated meant that the rents demanded for housing constructed under that legislation had to be set at a level that, to a large extent, precluded the less well-off members of the working class. The legacy of these constraints in terms of the demographic profile of council tenants meant that in 1931 the London County Council estimated that 37% of its tenants’ heads of household were white-collar workers while 34% belonged to the skilled working class. It was claimed that some families even had maids, though even if that was true it was exceptional. Nonetheless, 

“it was almost universally the case that council estates in their earlier years, and well into the post-1945 era, were the home of a (relatively) affluent and aspirational working class. Indeed, their success to a significant degree rested on just that. . . 

“That early success (of the 1924 Act) rested, however, on a degree of exclusion – of the poorer working class still living in the slums. The persistence of slum living undercut the ‘filtering up’ arguments common before the war that the poorest might improve their conditions by moving into homes vacated by the better-off working class as they moved into council accommodation. (Chandler, op. cit., p.47).

That this ‘filtering up’ was not happening was the issue that the 1930 Act attempted to address. The problem had arisen because under all previous legislation local authorities had been obliged to undertake slum clearances but were not obliged to re-house the displaced tenants of those slums. In fact, under the funding constraints imposed on them it would have been impossible to rehouse those displaced slum tenants. This was because to sustain any meaningful house building programme a certain component of the costs of that ongoing programme had to be made up from the rental income accruing from the housing previously constructed. To meet that requirement the rents had to be set at a level that only the more affluent members of the working class could afford and consequently out of reach of what was affordable for those previously displaced by the slum clearances. 

It was this legacy that the 1930 Housing Act sought to address by promoting additional slum clearance while at the same time placing an obligation on local authorities to rehouse all those affected by the clearances. As part of the attempt to obviate the inherited funding problem while also enabling local authorities to charge a rent that was within the means of the poorer displaced slum tenants a special subsidy was made available for the building of flats. This had the advantage over the previous concentration on house building insomuch as the same area of land on which ten houses could previously be built could now accommodate a tenement block (the term originally used to describe blocks of flats) which contained sixty flats. This meant that the unit cost of each new home constructed under the scheme was much lower than that previously incurred in the building of houses and this in turn meant that the local authority could set the rent at a corresponding lower rate and one within reach of those poorer tenants that had previously occupied the slums.

The ongoing implications of this in terms of the inner-city landscape was described by one commentator thus:

“The scandal of this [the exclusion of the less affluent working class – ED] was recognised in the legislation of the 1930s. First, in Labour’s 1930 Housing Act, which incentivised slum clearance and obliged local authorities to rehouse all those affected by it. The Act also offered a special subsidy to build flats in the inner city where the costs of acquiring and clearing land was unusually high. The pressure to build higher, which became near-irresistible from the 1950s, had been set in motion and thus by 1934 (the year they came to power in the LCC), Labour in London had so shifted from its previous blanket opposition to tenements that a party policy group concluded that ‘block dwellings [were] inevitable’ and that it was unwise to ‘dogmatise’ about their height. High-rise itself, at a time when lift provision was deemed unfeasibly expensive for working-class homes, was not yet an option. This would inevitably change.” (Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing, by John Boughton. Published by Verso, London, 2019, pp.47-48).

Although Labour’s housing policy continued to be heavily framed by the idea of homes consisting of houses with gardens, the 1930 Housing Act was significant in that, through its encouragement of the construction of council flats, it attempted to expand Labour’s housing policy to go beyond that traditional model. However, the preference of local authority tenants continued to favour houses over flats. In 1943, a survey by Mass Observation, revealed that while 80% of such tenants were satisfied with their homes and their modern facilities only 5% said that they preferred a flat to a house. This, and the perceived advantage of a house with a garden when it came to mental and physical health, was undoubtedly a factor in the tenacity with which Labour clung onto its preference for houses over flats. In the meantime, although Labour’s 1930 Housing Act represented the party’s shift to acknowledging the role of tenement blocks as part of the solution to the housing problem it was left to the Conservatives to champion this type of accommodation from the 1930s onwards culminating in Macmillan’s housing policy in the 1950s which relied overwhelmingly on the construction of blocks of flats. But the fact remained that with Labour pursuing a housing policy that favoured the house over the flat it continued to be lumbered with the inevitable implications of the higher cost per constructed unit that this brought in its wake particularly in the inner cities. It was this that was destined to result in the persistence of the higher rents being charged and the consequential exclusion of the poorer sections of the working class. 

Nonetheless, the 1930 Act acknowledged this limitation of the ‘house and garden’ model and sought to find ways around it that might bring the poorer working class within the reach of existing council properties without the need to abandon that model. It did this by directly addressing the most significant issue that had created this exclusion of the poorer elements of the working class from access to council houses – the relatively high rent. The 1930 Act attempted to do this by pushing a policy that it hoped would equalise the charged rent for existing council homes by damping down the higher rents being charged by local authorities for some of their higher cost housing stock. This was to be done through the introduction of what was called ‘differential’ rents.

“Each local authority housing development had a separate account setting the rent for each scheme but the Housing Act 1930 allowed these accounts to be pooled and ‘differential’ rents based on a means test, charged. Differential rent policy was promoted by the Conservatives throughout the 1930s. A variant was to charge ‘compulsory’ tenants – those displaced by clearance – a lower rent than ‘voluntary’ tenants – those rehoused from the waiting list.” (Housing Politics in the United Kingdom: Power, Planning and Protest, by Brian Lund. Published by Policy Press, University of Bristol, 2016, p.156).

The specific guidance provided by the Government under this Act was issued by Arthur Greenwood as a Ministry of Health Circular No. 1138, issued on 19 August 1930. This states, on the question of the use of differential rents for municipal houses: 

“The Act . . . contains an express provision authorising the local authority to charge differing rents for the houses provided under the Act, or to grant to the tenant of any house rebates from rent, but the method of doing so is left to their discretion. Rent relief should be given only to those who need it and only for so long as they need it; moreover, all the displaced persons will not necessarily go into the houses provided under the new Act: they may go into other houses owned by the local authority or into houses privately owned, in which event and to a corresponding extent the local authority will be able to accommodate in the new houses other persons requiring rent relief.”

So, while the Act provided local authorities with the powers to implement differential rent policies it did so while permitting those local authorities to decide themselves how they would put this power into practice. This left open the option of direct rebates or any other method by which they might meet their statutory object under the Act that compelled them to re-house those tenants displaced through slum clearance programmes. The rent rebate proved to be the most commonly used option for most local authorities, particularly Conservative local authorities, throughout the 1930s. However, there was one local authority that went on to introduce a housing policy that operated to a different interpretation of differential rents.

The significance of Leeds City Council’s introduction of differential rents in 1934.

It was in 1934 that the Christian Socialist, Reverend Charles Jenkinson, Chairman of Leeds City Housing Committee, formally introduced his plans to rehouse 30,000 households displaced from slum clearance programmes. At the time this constituted the largest slum clearance programme in the country and the aim was to achieve this in seven-and-a-half years. Jenkinson was the son of a London stonemason who also worked as a docker and had grown up in the cramped conditions of Poplar in East London. Like John Wheatley before him he joined the Independent Labour Party in 1908 and was a conscientious objector during the First World War. In 1921 he was ordained a clergyman of the Church of England and after a number of ecclesiastical appointments in 1927 he was moved, at his own request, to the parish of St. John and St. Barnabas in Holbeck, Leeds – an area that was reputed to contain the worst slums in the city. In 1930 he was elected to the then Conservative dominated Leeds City Council for the North Holbeck ward and set about agitating for his vision of a slum-free Leeds. His immediate obstacle was that the council was run by the Conservatives and he had to wait until November 1933 when Labour displaced the Conservatives as the local authority for the City of Leeds. After that he resigned his position as Vicar of St. John and St. Barnabas to pursue his ambitions for dealing with the slums of Leeds.

Initially, the new 1933 Labour administration in Leeds set about the re-introduction of a direct labour Housing Department by adding nearly 1,500 additional employees to its work force. However, it was then confronted with the challenge of composing and then implementing a housing policy that was consistent with a Housing Act introduced by a Labour Government in 1930 at a time when that Labour government had been superseded by a coalition government in 1931. The prevailing atmosphere confronting that Leeds City Council can be gauged by the fact that one of the most significant acts of that coalition government was the withdrawal on 7 December 1932 of the housing subsidies which had previously been available to local councils under the 1924 Wheatley Act (see previous article in this series). 

It was in this situation that the Rev. Charles Jenkinson came to introduce a new perspective on the perennial problem of the exclusion of low-income working-class families from local authority housing. Jenkinson first articulated his views on municipal housing in a ninety-page minority report entitled “Housing Policy in the City of Leeds” which he, and Fred Barraclough, ex-President of the National Union of Teachers, and a Mr. O’Donnell had originally produced on 22 February 1933, dissenting from the then Tory-dominated council’s unambitious official report on housing. At that time the existing Tory Council had 

“been reluctant to take advantage of the subsidies available for council house building in the 1920s and slow to react to the Greenwood Housing Act of 1930, even failing to produce the requisite housing survey and five-year plan for slum clearance and rehousing within a specified period.” (Dictionary of National Biography entry for Rev. Charles Jenkinson).

The housing survey and five-year plan were something demanded under the housing legislation and this failure was symptomatic of the dilatory way in which the Tory council treated the housing issue in the City. Jenkinson’s minority report sought to bring pressure on the council by proposing a policy of slum clearance at the rate of 3,000 per annum until l948 and that a Housing Committee be established with its own Chairman to oversee the implementation of the programme. His proposals were subsequently published in a Labour Party booklet entitled “Decent Houses for All” and became the basis for the housing policy of the Labour-led Leeds City Council from November 1933 to 1936. 

The most contentious part of his housing policy was the emphasis it placed on a housing programme built on the basis of a dissenting view from the out-going Tory City Council’s version of differential rent. At a subsequent public meeting with council tenants after Labour had won control of the council he explained what he was trying to do:

“Rev. Charles Jenkinson said he defied anyone to work the 1930 Act without differential rents and without providing varying accommodation for varying sized families. Many believed he was the author of the differential rents or the wicked confiscatory Labour party was, but they were introduced by Alderman Walker, the Conservative Chairman of the Improvements Committee, last July. The only question was whether the Labour party would continue them in the way they found them, and they decided they would not. If they were going to have differential rents, they must be governed by certain principles.” (“Differential Rents in Leeds: Mr. Jenkinson and the Conservative Policy”, Yorkshire Post, 5 March 1934, p.7).

The previous Tory administration, having in 1933 been instructed by the Government to make some efforts to comply with its obligations under the 1930 Act had attempted to do so by availing of the option of rent rebates to apply across the board for those who met the terms of a conventional means test. What Jenkinson envisaged was quite revolutionary at the time – a differential rent that relied on what he himself described as the Christian teaching “Bear ye one another’s burdens” but which turned out to be a variation on the socialist formula “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” as its starting point.

Realising that the people displaced by his ambitious slum clearance would be in no position to afford the rents that reflected the construction and ancillary costs of the new homes “to say nothing of the cost of a new housing management department with estate management officers, home inspectors, and gardeners to teach people how to maintain their lawns” (Lund, p.156) he sought to introduce standard ‘economic rents’ set at a level that would help subsidise the proportionate reduction of that rent for those who could not afford to pay a rent set at that level. In other words, the rent to be charged would reflect their ability to pay with those at the higher levels of income paying a rent that would subsidise the rent reduction to be charged to the less affluent tenants. His proposals even included the provision that in certain cases the rent should be set at zero. 

It was his ideas that came to dominate the new Labour-run Leeds City Council when it came to power in November 1933 and which resulted in him being appointed Chairman of the newly created Housing Committee. Implementing his idea of differential rents required a lot of ground work. First, a figure, based on the construction cost and the maintenance cost of a given property over the period of its rental life was established. Calculations based on this constituted the ‘economic rent’ for those properties. Officials from the Housing Department then spent two months devising a scientific scheme based on the British Medical Association’s Report on Nutrition prior to undertaking surveys of local shops in an area of existing (and planned new housing schemes) to establish the cost of living in those areas. Those two figures then constituted the parameters within which other factors like family size and household income were measured. It was on this basis that the calculation was made as to the rent any particular family was obliged to pay for their council home. A high income in relation to cost of living and size of family would mean that a tenant would have to pay the “economic rent” and a low income would mean that the tenant would pay a correspondingly lower rent on a sliding scale – with the possibility of some tenants not having to pay any rent being acknowledged and accepted. In this way everyone, irrespective of income, could be housed in decent council accommodation.

After completing this ground work Jenkinson and some of his colleagues on the Housing Committee then spent the first two months of 1934 on a public awareness campaign in Leeds. This campaign consisted of meetings with council tenants and other interested parties to explain the principles behind the proposals and the implications for those impacted by them. It was during this public awareness meetings that the challenges the policy would face came to the surface. What he found was predictably a division among the tenants between support from those who would be favoured by the scheme and opposition from those who felt that they may end up paying an ‘economic rent’ that was higher than their existing rent. The reaction of this latter category of tenant to the proposed introduction of differential rents was articulated by a number of tenants, some of whom described the scheme as one where the more frugal tenants would end up “paying for the cigarettes and ‘pictures’ of his neighbour.” Others said they were “not going to pay more rent so that some other man could live rent free.” The main criticism of the Conservative opposition was that the policy was bound to lead to the bankruptcy of the City as it would drive the more affluent working-class tenants out of municipal housing and the City would then find itself having to shoulder the full cost of the lower rents for the less affluent. This appeared to be confirmed by the comments of some who said “I can get a house from a private builder through a building society at a figure not much more than my rent and rates would be under this new wild scheme.” Further, “If my rent goes up I shall do the same as my brother is doing. He is buying his house through a building society, and all he pays is 17s. 4d. a week, not much more than I am paying now.” (See: Means Test for Corporation Tenants, Leeds Mercury, 22 January 1934, p.1).

The Leeds Housing Department also received objections that were not based on the proposed differential rent issue but had more to do with the scale of its slum clearance policy. For instance, the Roman Catholic Church, which had a significant number of parishioners in the areas targeted for clearance and Catholic leaders reminded the Council that the churches in those areas had been constructed with the subscriptions of the parishioners. The fear was that the displacement of those parishioners through the rehousing programme would result in their erosion as distinct religious communities. Jenkinson was not unsympathetic to this complaint and promised to rehouse those people in places that would minimise the disruption by ensuring that they remained as much as possible in contact with their churches. He also received objections from local small shopkeepers who had been an integral part of communities that were now to be rehoused but in this he could offer less in terms of a practical solution. All he could say was that he believed the days of the small shopkeepers were numbered anyway and likely to be replaced by the larger convenience stores and institutions like the Co-operatives.

A tale of two cities.

The inevitable result of this coalition of opposition to Jenkinson’s proposal was a rent strike organised by T.H. Gilberthorpe, President of the Leeds Federation of Municipal Tenants Associations which consisted of over 10,000 estate tenants who were members of 15 affiliated associations. Although the strike eventually petered out Jenkinson’s housing policies continued to be the main issue in the subsequent local council elections in 1935 in which the Conservatives defeated Labour. However, in the meantime, Jenkinson achieved quite a lot when it came to municipal housing provision in Leeds. Within two years of the establishment of the Leeds Housing Committee under his leadership and operating to his version of differential rents 6,000 slum dwellers (85%) were rehoused, mostly in houses on new green-field estates in new flats like the famous estate of Quarry Hill. The Quarry Hill estate became a flag ship for municipal working-class housing in the United Kingdom and attracted the attention of most pre-WW2 housing reformers. It was designed in 1934 by R.A.H. Livett who that year had been appointed Director of Housing by the incoming Labour Council. Two years earlier Livett had visited Vienna where he had been impressed by that city’s housing programme and in particular the Karl-Marx Hof estate. A later visit to the Cité de la Muette housing estate in Drancy on the outskirts of Paris also informed his design for the Quarry Hill estate. 

The design of Quarry Hill estate shows the influence of both these housing schemes in terms of the way in which it sought to emulate the amenities provided by Vienna housing and in terms of the materials used in its construction as exampled by the Cité de la Muette housing estate. 

“The range of planned facilities – playgrounds, bowling greens, tennis courts, a community centre, radio substation, even a mortuary – reflected Vienna’s communal ambitions.” (A History of Council Housing in 100 Estates, by John Boughton. Published by RIBA Publishing, London, 2023, p.78).

Unfortunately, the full ambition of Livett’s design was never realised as cost constraints and the arrival of a Conservative Council in Leeds in 1935 meant an inevitable cut-back in what emerged in the eventual construction. Nonetheless, it did include some radical modern features such as solid fuel ranges, electric lighting, a state-of-the-art refuse disposal system and communal facilities including a swimming pool. The estate provided 938 flats of varying sizes on a 26-acre site close to the city centre. The blocks ranged from three storeys (serving an elderly population) to eight storeys. They were staircase-access but the taller blocks were provided with lifts, 88 in all – something that was unique in British working-class housing at the time.

A comparison of the fate of the Quarry Hill estate in Leeds and the Karl Marx Hof in Vienna provides a useful insight into the relative difference in the fate of working-class housing in both cities. Despite its iconic place in the history of working-class housing in Britain the Quarry Hill estate was demolished in 1978 because of social problems and the failure to keep up the proper level of maintenance. The Karl Marx Hof in Vienna withstood a military attack, the change of political administration from socialist to fascist and the subsequent World War and has become an attraction not only for housing reformers but for tourism in general. The fate of these two working-class housing estates could be seen as a metaphor for the evolution of the different perspectives attached to social housing in both countries. 

The roots of those different perspectives also reflect the different evolution of the forces which have traditionally upheld the social fabric of working-class life in both countries. In Vienna the trade unions through the Chamber of Labour continue to exert a meaningful – though under the corrosive power of expanding corporate finance a diminishing – influence on government policies towards things like working-class housing while in the United Kingdom the previous influence of the trade union movement on such things has given way to the almost complete influence of corporate finance with housing now viewed primarily as a field for speculation rather than performing an important social function.

With regards to Charles Jenkinson his Dictionary of National Biography states:

“His slum clearance and rehousing initiatives which transformed Leeds between 1933 and 1939 from a notorious centre of inferior back-to-back housing into a city with an internationally acclaimed, innovative housing authority constituted a remarkable achievement for an Anglican priest who continued to engage in his parish ministry, demonstrating the public role a strong clergyman could still play within the local community in Britain in the 1930s.”

He remained popular with the unskilled and low-income elements of the working class in Leeds and in many ways it was his success in slum clearance that contributed to him losing his seat on the City Council in 1936 as those same clearances dissipated his core constituency. However, he continued to have an input into Labour’s policy on housing when he was made a member of the party’s sub-committee on town planning and post-war housing in 1941. This was followed in 1942 when he became a member of the Board of Trade advisory committee on utility furniture. He returned as a member of the Leeds City Council in 1943 and in 1947 became leader of the Labour group as well as chairman of the finance and parliamentary committee with responsibility for post-war housing policy. His final post was as Chairman of Stevenage New Town Development Corporation in 1948 the year before he died.

As to his particular policy on differential rents, that effectively came to an end as a serious attempt to solve the issue of the housing of the poorer element of the working class. What did survive was the means testing element which the Tories fastened onto in a big way. In 1938 the Conservative controlled Birmingham City Council attempted to introduce ‘economic’ rents as part of its obligations for rehousing tenants displaced through its planned slum clearance programme. This involved the use of a means testing arrangement in tandem with a rent rebate scheme rather than the “burden sharing” component of Jenkinson’s differential rent scheme. However, this too met with resistance on the part of the City’s municipal housing tenants. A well-organised rent strike of between 6,000 and 8,000 tenants lasted for 13 weeks and resulted in the Council being forced to abandon the scheme.

From the Labour perspective what the Leeds and Birmingham experience showed was the persistence of a significant division among the British working class between what can roughly be described as the skilled and unskilled element. The emergence of the unskilled trade unions in the late 19^th century and early 20^th century had to some extent overcome that division but what Leeds and Birmingham revealed was that it was one thing for the skilled and (relatively) affluent working class to show solidarity with their un-skilled colleagues in the arena of industrial relations but quite another to expect that solidarity to extend into the wider arena of their social lives. Any local authority that attempted to implement a housing policy that was seen to operate to the benefit of the unskilled working class – whether it was through a system based on “burden sharing” or directly funded council rent rebates failed to meet with the approval of the more affluent sections of the class. Little wonder then, that only a handful of local councils attempted to implement such policies between the wars. Instead, what survived these experiences was the lesson that any such assistance would have to rely on a source that was not directly answerable to the local authorities. In other words, such arrangements, if they were to have any chance of success, had to be taken out of the hands of the local authorities.

Consequently, the Labour Government in 1948 introduced what came to be the National Assistance Scheme that included housing benefit in its provision. It was not until 1982 that housing benefit was transferred from the Department of Health and Social Security to local authorities. This was possible at the time because by then the Thatcher Government’s housing policies had laid the groundwork that would eventually lead to the migration of the skilled working class from the public to the private housing sector. As a result of this, council housing tenants became increasingly associated with the unskilled working class while the more affluent members of the class became part of the “property-owning democracy”. It was this “clearance” of the skilled working class from council housing that left the way open for local councils to once again assume responsibility for directly overseeing the rental arrangements of its less affluent tenants.

The images show (top) Quarry Hill flats in the 1970s and (above) Karl Marx Hof council estate today.