But when Macmillan, the new housing minister, started to shift more sharply the boundaries between public and private provision the issue acquired a new ideological and political edge.
When Bevan departed, housing had been split from its fifty-year association with health. Macmillan, in evidence of intent over the 300,000 houses target set by the Tory party conference, promptly renamed Dalton’s Ministry of Local Government and Planning the Ministry of Housing and Local Government and set out to make his and the Tories’ reputation as guardians of the welfare state.4 He had not wanted the job, telling Churchill: ‘I know nothing whatever about the housing problem.’ To that the Prime Minister replied with considerable foresight: ‘It is a gamble – [it will] make or mar your political career.’5 For the next three years, with Churchill’s backing, Macmillan put housing at the head of the welfare state queue, beating other areas for resources and launching in earnest the numbers game that was to dominate housing policy for much of the next twenty years.
With the showmanship that was increasingly to mark him out, within three months of taking office Macmillan announced ‘The Great Housing Crusade’.6 He needed a crusade to protect him from the Treasury. For the first year of Conservative rule was a period of economic crisis, as officials warned the new Chancellor, Butler, that the blood was ‘draining from the system’ and that Britain was once again staring ruin in the face.7 The pledge to build 300,000 houses became Macmillan’s ‘sheet-anchor’ allowing him to ride out the economic gale8 and resist cuts through a mixture of elegant bullying, the odd hint at resignation and a reorganisation of his department on wartime-like lines of control. The net result, he noted, was ‘more than my fair share’9 of resources.
To reorganise a department ‘concerned with guidance, advice, supervision, sometimes even warning and reproof, but never with positive action’,10 Macmillan brought in as Director-General Sir Percy Mills, an industrialist who had been controller of machine tools during the war. The appointment caused no little friction in Whitehall, not least with Beveridge’s old adversary Sir Thomas Sheepshanks who was now Macmillan’s permanent secretary.11 Macmillan once brutally dismissed him as ‘useless’.12 The resentment of Mills was one of the early signs that a civil service leavened and enlightened during the war with outside expertise now once again regarded itself as the sole guardian of policy development and administration.
Almost everything except labour still remained in short supply – bricks, steel, timber, cement; Macmillan at one point complained that surely the last of these could be produced more quickly when all it amounted to was ‘Thames mud and chalk’.13 To hit 300,000 a year, Macmillan cut further the minimum size for council housing which Dalton had already eroded, encouraged the building of smaller two-bedroom houses by councils, and relaxed and then removed licences for private house building. His aim, he declared, was ‘to set the builders free’. He also allowed the first post-war council house sales, the aim being to cut Treasury subsidies for rents and to generate more capital.14 Some 3000 were sold by the 1955 election.15 Macmillan thus initiated a policy which in a different form would eventually become Mrs Thatcher’s icon. As he told the Commons in December 1951, in what was to become a recurring Conservative theme: ‘We wish to see the widest distribution of property. We think that, of all forms of property suitable for such distribution, house property is one of the best.’16
But as Macmillan himself made clear, crucial to the numbers game was the cut in the size of council houses. The smaller ones were now popularised as ‘The People’s House’ and promoted to the public on the grounds that while they might be smaller, their rent was lower. There were repeated exhortations to reduce the number of bricks and other materials used. ‘Unless we get the economies, we shan’t get the houses,’ he declared. Timber and steel shortages also saw the introduction of much more reinforced concrete and of steel-reinforced lintels, a permanent change in housing construction.17
‘The fierce and almost frantic pursuit of the housing target filled my mind,’ Macmillan remembered. The monthly figures provided ‘a scorecard on which the eyes of all the critics, friendly and hostile’ were riveted. Bets were laid between political colleagues on whether completion figures would be attained.18 It was not quite a case of ‘never mind the quality feel the width’; but it was heading that way as quality and quantity came into conflict. Macmillan’s resolution of the problem differed from Bevan’s, and problems for the future were created.
Quantity, however, was needed. By 1952, early returns from the first population census in twenty years indicated one million more households than dwellings, and more than two million dwellings which were shared by two or more families.19 This grim picture, despite a million houses having been built since 1945, was the result of demographic change. Since 1931, the population of England and Wales had risen by only 10 per cent, but the number of households had increased by 28 per cent, or nearly three times as fast: the result of more single elderly, survivors of the First World War, and the growing popularity of both marriage and smaller families. Thus over twenty years, the number of one and two person households had risen from 29 to 39 per cent of the total, while the number of big households (six members or more) had halved from 16 to 8 per cent.20 Macmillan achieved his numbers, helped in part by the ‘valuable inheritance’ of the New Towns, a development he regarded as showing ‘real imagination’ on Labour’s part.21 He was aided by Sir Percy Mills and the regional housing boards they set up, the drive of Dame Evelyn Sharp, an under-secretary who was shortly to become one of Whitehall’s few female Permanent Secretaries, and the ministerial expertise of the self-made engineer Ernest Marples, who shocked colleagues when he arrived in Parliament in 1945 sporting orange-brown shoes beneath his blue suits.22 Macmillan once acknowledged simply: ‘Marples made me PM: I was never heard of before housing.’23
The target was reached in 1953 when 318,000 houses were built and was comfortably exceeded in 1954 when another 357,000 were added. Moreover, more than a quarter of these new homes, against 15 per cent in 1952, were in the private sector.24 What had been a trickle of private homes was becoming a stream ‘to augment or even to some extent replace the rising river of subsidised housing,’ Macmillan noted.25 New housing, however, was only part of the problem. With the numbers rolling in, he turned his attention to the slums and the linked problem of rent which he described as ‘the most intricate and politically dangerous’ of the housing issues.26
In July 1952 a report from the Sanitary Inspectors’ Association had pointed out that houses were falling out of use as fast as they were being built, or faster.27 A key reason was rent levels. In 1951 in England, 53 per cent of houses remained privately rented and less than 30 per cent were owner-occupied.28 Many rents, however, had been controlled since 1939, some of them at levels set in the 1920s. The mesh of controls meant that rents could vary two-and-a-half-fold for identical houses in the same street with the same amenities.29 Frequently rent income was too small for landlords to finance repairs. Homes that had once been good were becoming slums, and slum clearance, the Luftwaffe’s contribution aside, had been halted by the war. Anything between 280,000 and 500,000 homes were calculated to need clearance, against the 140,000 slum dwellings whose demolition had been halted in 1939.
Macmillan therefore prepared to switch the programme’s emphasis to include repair, conversion and slum clearance. In 1953 he proposed that councils would be able to take over slums for their site value only, turning local authorities into slum landlords but ones charged with clearing them and able to set realistic rent levels for the replacement housing. Aside from the New Towns, which were taking overspill from the cities, councils were given bigger subsidies for slum clearance than for other forms of new building. And as part of this ‘Operation Rescue’ a limited rent increase, a ‘repairs increase’, was allowed in the private sector where landlords could demonstrate by certification that they had put homes into good repair in the past three years – this last to protect tenants who in despair had undertaken repairs themselves. In addition, all new private houses and flats would be free of rent control. ‘The opposition to this [the easing of rent restrictions] was considerable,’ Macmillan recorded. ‘But I felt it was another move to freedom.’30
Macmillan