Single Aspect Blog

16 November 2013 11:42am

Of course not, but you can often blame architect for problem estates. Here’s a little anecdote.

As the most junior lettings officer, I was given the task of filling the empty block in the Stevenage town centre. It had one benefit to the locals: instead of being let to people moving out of London I was allowed to let them to local couples who “fell pregnant” with no other prospect of their own home. I was told to promise them they would be high-priority transfers when the child was three. Then Heath won the 1970 election, budgets were cut, and many of them were still there a decade later, but with more kids. Older couples suited to the estate moved out because of the noise.
The Chief Architect planned a tower block in each neighbourhood:”like a church spire in a traditional village”. My response that people don’t have to live in a church spire fell on cloth ears.

And an anecdote on architects in general. I attended a course on residential densities at the Architectural Association. One of our test exercises was a disused dock backing onto a 1930s LCC estate. Apart from mine and a planner’s from Islington, every design submitted included a big wall between the older council estate and the new homes.

https://discussion.theguardian.com/comment-permalink/28933440

It was deliberate policy of the Thatcher government to remove full security of tenure and allow rents to rise in the private sector,and to force council and housing association rents to rise in the public.
The result was that Housing Benefit “took the hit”. (I would say see my evidence to the commons social security committee 1996 but I can’t find the link for the moment). This was seen as an inevitable cost of forcing up rents. The neo-cons believed that eventually there would be a resurgence of the private landlord.
The same belief underpins the current coalition plans for “near-market rents”. The problem is that this time all the family sized dwellings are going to be above the benefits cap etc..

And the “flood of immigrants” around the millennium was a temporary phenomenon caused by the accession of the eastern block to the EU with full rights to live and work anywhere within the EU. I make no comment on the rights and wrongs, or losses and gains to the UK, involved in that treaty. I simply observe that the Accession Act 1996 put into UK law the Maastricht Treaty which gave those countries equal rights with other EU citizens to enter the UK. 1996 was the seventeenth year of a Conservative Government.