It was chiefly the emphasis that Bevan changed. The degree to which he did so, however, and the failure to build large numbers of new homes quickly was to cause controversy.
The two decades before the Second World War, despite the bitter disappointment over ‘homes fit for heroes’ had in fact seen the biggest output of new houses in Britain’s history.18 Local authority house building, whose origins stretched back to Victorian times, had become well established. Slum clearance had begun. Even so, council houses in 1939 accounted for only about one in eight of the stock. Three-quarters of the new homes between the wars had been privately built, the bulk of these for purchase rather than rent. In addition, growing numbers of tenants had bought their homes from their landlords. As a result the slow beginnings of the decline in the private rented sector, and what was to become a dramatic shift to owner-occupation, were already under way. The number of owner-occupiers had more than quadrupled between 1918 and 1938, even if that increase still left only just over a quarter of housing in owner-occupation, against 60 per cent privately rented and 13 per cent in council ownership.19
Bevan spectacularly reversed the balance between private and public in house building, while resisting the creation of some sort of nationalised National Housing Corporation to build the homes – a course urged by Morrison, Douglas Jay, who was Attlee’s economic adviser, and by Lord Addison, who had had his own troubles with local authorities as Lloyd George’s health and housing minister.20 Bevan’s policy was to restrict severely private house-building, allowing only one private house for every four built by local authorities, to order local authorities to requisition empty houses and derequisition those it had taken over as offices, to toughen rent controls, put first priority on repairs to unoccupied war-damaged dwellings, and charge local authorities with the task of building, either through direct labour organisations or on contract with private builders. He persuaded Dalton not only to treble the subsidy for council housing and extend it from forty to sixty years, but to shift the balance so that three-quarters of the cost rather than two-thirds came from the Exchequer, and only a quarter from the rates.
This last provided the cash. Sir John Wrigley, the senior civil servant who was sceptical such a case could be won, recalled receiving a ‘sharp, almost supercilious refusal’ when he first put it to the Treasury. ‘Bevan thereafter must have had private talks with Dalton,’ Foot records. ‘Sir John was advised to reopen the question with all the blandness he could muster. “My minister,” he said at the next meeting of the committee, “still thinks that the figure of three to one would be appropriate.” “And my minister agrees,” the Treasury official replied.’21
The continued restrictions on private house-building, Bevan’s strictures on the unreliability of the ‘speculative private builder’, and the big expansion planned for council housing outraged the Tories, who took advantage of the pitifully slow progress in the early months to pillory Bevan. Churchill accused him of ‘chilling and checking free-enterprise house building which had always provided the bulk of the nation’s houses’. Bevan, he charged, was guilty of ‘partisan spite’ in refusing to enlist ‘all house building agencies of every kind’.22 In fact private builders got the bulk of the work. But they were building homes for rent for local authorities, not homes for sale to those who could afford to buy in the private sector.
Outside Parliament, the situation briefly looked frightening. ‘In the summer of 1946 it was possible for a family to find itself 4,000th on the local council’s waiting list. Some were ex-servicemen with young children who could not even find lodgings, because the landlord had a no children rule,’ Alan Jenkins relates.
Agitators took over, organizing mass meetings in Leicester Square, and ‘vigilantes’ went about cities looking for apparently vacant buildings, even if they had ‘sold’ [or ‘requisitioned’] notices outside … An empty Nissen hut at an airport could house two families, so if there was no one looking, you moved in. Landlords might cut off the water, gas, electricity; but in desperation you could use candles and spirit stoves. The climax was reached in the ‘Great Sunday Squat’ of September 1946 at Duchess of Bedford House, an empty block of flats in Kensington. Like so much Communist organisation, it was orderly, efficient and quiet. Elsewhere in the country, squatters occupied abandoned Army camps [more than 46,000 ended up in them]. They were not evicted because the Government suddenly realized that this was really rather a good idea which they ought to have thought of themselves.23
The real problem was less the tool Bevan used to do the job – the local authorities – than the lack of the most crucial tools of all: manpower and materials. At one Cabinet meeting, Bevan exploded: ‘Where are all the people I need for my programme?’ Attlee drily replied: ‘Looking for houses, Nye!’24
Housing was not the government’s only building priority. Scarce men and materials were equally desperately needed to get Britain’s factories out of wartime and into peacetime products and to build schools, hospitals and the long-promised health centres. It was the last two categories that suffered, and suffered heavily. Slowly the situation improved as Bevan’s ministry showered local authorities with circulars – five a week in 1946.25 The figures rose from just 1000 houses and 10,000 pre-fabs completed by December 1945, together with 60,000 unoccupiably damaged homes repaired, to 55,400 house completions in 1946, 139,000 in 1947, and 227,000 in 1948.26 The 125,000 pre-fabs (which continued to be put up until 1951) added to these totals.
If the game, from the point of view of the politicians, the press and the homeless, was about numbers, Bevan had two equally important ends in view: standards and mix. Had his successors had the political courage to hold to those principles, Britain’s post-war housing problem might have been massively diminished. His stance did involve a painful trade-off between quality and quantity, but he held rigidly to the view that: ‘We shall be judged for a year or two by the number of houses we build. We shall be judged in ten years’ time by the type of houses we build.’27 And he held this line at the most difficult of times, when much real homelessness existed, not the 1970s redefinition of it as having nowhere suitable to live.
Bevan pushed up the old minimum standard for council housing from 750 square feet of room space to 900, with lavatories upstairs as well as down. He insisted that the Cotswold authorities be allowed to use the local stone, and that Bath be allowed to build stone terraces, despite the greater expense. And he wanted his new housing mixed. In 1948 he removed the requirement in pre-war legislation that housing should be provided only for ‘the working classes’. He had something close to a romantic William Morris aesthetic about housing, one of the few things he shared with Churchill. ‘We should try to introduce into our modern villages and towns what was always the lovely feature of English and Welsh villages, where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street. I believe that is essential for the full life of a citizen … to see the living tapestry of a mixed community.’28
He railed against ghettos, whether for the working class or the aged. ‘We don’t want a country of East Ends and West Ends, with all the petty snobberies this involves. That was one of the evil legacies of the Victorian era,’ he said. And ‘I hope that the old people will not be asked [by the local authorities] to live in colonies of their own – they do not want to look out of their windows on an endless procession of the funerals of their friends; they also want to look at processions of perambulators.’29 As he was repeatedly urged to cut standards in order to boost numbers, he equally repeatedly refused, declaring it to be ‘the coward’s way out… if we wait a little longer, that will be far better than doing ugly things now and regretting them for the rest of our lives.’30 The results of Bevan’s policy can still be seen in the quality and size of housing constructed in the 1940s despite the formidable odds. Dalton was to cut the standards in 1951, dubbing the fiery Bevan ‘a tremendous Tory’ for his views on the need for three-bedroom houses and extra lavatories. Macmillan was to cut them further, Bevan’s successors increasingly indulging in the numbers game at the expense of standards, diversity and social mix. The consequence proved not great new housing for the people, but too many great new slums.
Standards and housing layout were strictly as much the business of Lewis Silkin at the Ministry of Town and Country Planning,