We owe it to the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire to ensure we live up to our obligations to those in social housing, argues Progress strategy board member Christabel Cooper
Unlike many cities in the world, London does not banish its council estates to the outskirts of town. At the heart of the city people from very different backgrounds and with wildly different levels of wealth and income live cheek by jowl. But as the tragic events at Grenfell Tower demonstrated, the fact that diverse people occupy the same physical space does not necessarily mean that they feel a sense of responsibility towards each other. I live in the borough next to Kensington & Chelsea; my nearest tube station sits between a row of terraced houses which are worth millions of pounds on one side, and a large council estate on the other. Residents from both sides will travel back on the same tube train – they could possibly even work in the same office – but the moment they turn in different ways out of the station, they might as well be entering different universes.
We will need to see the results of the public inquiry before we can start ascribing blame for the sickening loss of life at Grenfell Tower to any particular individual or organisations. But it is clear that a general attitude of indifference to the safety of the people who lived there, played a huge part. When an old woman dies on a trolley in a hospital corridor we are outraged, when children are taught in shoddy buildings in large class sizes, we denounce it as unacceptable. By contrast, there has been relatively little concern about the fact that so many people in Britain are living in housing that is either squalid or dangerous or both.
This was not always the case. Large-scale social housing building projects were carried out after the World Wars by governments from across the political spectrum. They were meant to provide for ordinary working families, replacing houses that had been reduced to rubble by bombing or filthy slum-dwellings that were cleared to make way for the new estates. At the heart of this project was the idea that everyone should have somewhere decent to live and that it was the government’s duty to ensure this happened.
By 1979, 42 per cent of the British population lived in council housing. At this point it was clear that many estates had been poorly-designed, were difficult to maintain and were potentially dangerous without significant modifications. The Right to Buy scheme introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s government exacerbated these problems by taking much of the better quality council housing stock into the private sector, leaving the state with the rest – together with less money to keep them going. Furthermore Right to Buy played into a mindset that owning your own property was something everyone ought to do, fatally undermining the notion that housing people decently was everyone’s responsibility.
Today only eight per cent of people live in council homes. Many people simply do not know anyone who lives on a council estate, so it is hardly surprising that attitudes can be influenced by crude and untruthful stereotypes. The attitude of the wider community matters because social housing tenants have to trust that the wider community will keep up its obligations towards them. At Grenfell Tower that trust was betrayed in the most catastrophic way imaginable, but smaller betrayals happen up and down the country on a daily basis. Cleaning companies failing to fulfil their obligations and leaving communal areas dirty and stinking, vital repairs in individual properties not being carried out, reports of anti-social behaviour being met with a shrug of the shoulders.
The problem is not with social housing in itself – there are examples of well-designed, well-maintained estates with active residents associations which have developed a strong relationship with local authorities. Neither do tower blocks have to be dangerous, no one seems particularly concerned that the penthouses at the top of the Shard are in imminent danger. The problem is that in some places, there is a lack of will to make things better.
After Grenfell this must change. The general election saw a visceral rejection of ideologically-driven Tory austerity by millions of people, and a return towards the idea that the government of a proud and wealthy country like Britain should be properly looking after everyone who lives within its shores. Days later, the Grenfell Tower disaster saw an incredible response from the public. Crude stereotypes had suddenly turned into real human beings: amongst the dead and missing are an emerging artist whose work is showing at the Venice Biennale, a Syrian refugee who – along with his brother – was planning to celebrate the life of Jo Cox at the Great Get Together at the weekend, two Italian architects who had been entranced by the incredible view across the city from their flat near the top of the tower and a five year old little boy called Isaac.
We must use this anger and this renewed sense of community to start holding the individuals and organisations which manage social housing to account. If existing structures make this difficult, then we must push for those structures to change. We owe this much to the victims of Grenfell Tower.
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Christabel Cooper writes a regular column on the Progress website. She tweets at @ChristabelCoops
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