For the Novice Student of Housing, There Is Perhaps No More Regularly Encountered Assertion

Housing: the wobbly pillar of the British welfare state?

JD Carpentieri
28 November 2005

Introduction

For the novice student of housing, there is perhaps no more regularly encountered assertion than "Housing is the wobbly pillar of the welfare state" (Torgersen 1987). In this essay I will address two key questions arising from this statement: “Is housing actually a wobbly pillar of the welfare state?” and “If so, why?”For reasons of length, I will limit myself to a discussion of housing in the UK; an analysis of housing's status within other welfare states would demand a much longer treatment.

Is housing wobbly?

There is an old saying that tells us that if something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a safe bet that it’s a duck. How do we know if we can justifiably call a pillar wobbly? The key question here would seem to be, "When pushed, does it move?"

By this criterion, it would seem that housing is a very wobbly pillar indeed, as its status within the British welfare state has moved a great deal over time. In 1945, just before the founding of the Beveridge welfare state, public housing accounted for only 12 per cent of all UK dwellings. Slightly more than three decades later, that figure had soared to 32 per cent. (Malpass, 2005, p. 3) Now, less than three decades after that late-1970s peak, public housing's stature has fallen significantly, with only about 14 per cent of UK households residing in council housing as of 2002, with an additional seven per cent in Housing Association stock (National Statistics Online, no date [online]) .

The residualisation of the tenure has been even more marked. Originally conceived of as what could have been called a “good service for good people” – i.e. a relatively high quality service for the upper tier of the working class – public housing is now widely viewed as a poor service for poor people. In general, it is a tenure of last resort, with fully 50% of council households now dependent on Housing Benefit. In housing associations, that figure climbs to 65%.

The retrenchment of housing as a government service is particularly noteworthy when one considers just how difficult it has proven for even the most neo-liberal welfare states to push back other forms of state provision. As Paul Pierson has noted, it is generally very difficult to retrench services in a mature welfare state. Despite modern “small government” myth making within the Republican party, for example, Ronald Reagan found it well nigh impossible to cut social services during what was supposed to be a small government revolution in the 1980s. Though the American public had elected him at least partly on a platform of social service cuts, they accepted only one year of retrenchment before realising that they had grown quite used to big government services, thank you very much. Throughout the final seven years of Reagan’s presidency, government social provision continued the expansion he had inherited (Pierson, 1996, p. 151-152).

Despite her comparatively greater power, Thatcher too struggled to retrench. When she pushed Samson-like (albeit with more firmly set hair) against the pillars of British welfare provision, only housing and transport truly moved. And while the latter is still the subject of impassioned debate over the appropriate level of provision, with much of the UK calling out for much more government involvement, public housing has gone far more gently into that good night.

Why has housing been a wobbly pillar?

Public housing has been a wobbly pillar for several reasons, most importantly its: commodification; residualisation; failed industrialisation; and unique history as a component of the welfare state.

Commodification

Of all the welfare services, housing is by far the most commodifiable. In contrast to other key social services such as healthcare and education, the majority of the population manages to meet its housing needs through the marketplace, with nearly seven out of ten households (69 per cent) currently in owner-occupation,up from 49 per cent in 1981 and only about 10 per centin 1914(Malpass, p. 143).And owner-occupation is not just a tenure of the middle classes.More than half of all households in the lowest income decile are home owners, as are 61 per cent of workers whose jobs are classified as semi-routine or routine(ibid, p. 147).

From a government perspective, the steep rise in home ownership over the twentieth century was far from accidental. Beginning in the 1920s, private subsidies brought down the cost of building for owner-occupation, and for much of the twentieth century, mortgage tax relief subsidised woner-occupation. Even when the Thatcher government made home ownership less attractive by revoking this mortgate tax relief and Housing Benefit for mortgage payments, however, the public's desire to own their own homes continued unabated (ibid, p. 148-158).It could evenbe argued that the heightened risks associated with home ownership since the 1980s have served as a successful test of the British public’s commitment to home ownership. In reference to my initial question regarding wobbliness – If something is pushed, does it move? – the cultural ideal of owner-occupation appears very un-wobbly indeed, with home ownership now at an all-time high and just under nine out of ten (89 per cent) of Britons reporting that they hope their own children will become owner-occupiers (Lupton and Power 2002, p. 127). However, it should be noted that, with such intense government focus on extending owner-occupation, the socially acceptable alternatives to this form of tenure are minimal, if they exist at all.

Residualisation

As public housing has grown more residualised, it has become a less attractive option. Households with sufficient bargaining power to opt out of the service have done so, which has further fueled the residualisation process. This cycle, which leads the median voter to see public housing ever less as a universal service that might benefit “us” and ever more as a residual service that only benefits “them”, has furthered housing's marginalisation as a key pillar of the welfare state.

Failed industrialisation

The flip side of so many individual households' ability to meet their own housing needs through the market has been the government's conspicuous struggles build mass public housing that satisfies the public’s needs. While this essay is by necessity too short to address this issue fully, I will briefly try to sketch the impacts that governmental bumbling has had on housing’s status within the welfare state.

As noted earlier, healthcare and education are far more resistant to commodification than is housing. In order to be affordable by the majority of the population, healthcare and education need to be provided on mass scales, and have in effect been industrialised: provided or overseen by very large, very complex organisations, with the aim of meeting the needs of entire populaces through relatively homogenized services. While everyone needs a home (probably even more so than education or healthcare),it has proven uniquely difficult to industrialise housing so that the government can meet the housing need for the majority of its populace. Contrary to Le Corbusier's visions of clean, attractive, mass-produced dwellings on massive scales, industrial home building in the UK has been an expensive flop.

As noted by Kemeny, housing differs from other pillars of the welfare state - social security, education and healthcare - in being characterised by very high capital intensity (2001, p. 54). In the UK, successive governments have sought to reduce this capital intensity by cutting corners on quality. With the government unwilling to invest sufficient resources in high quality provision of mass housing, the mass housing that resulted was all too often of the very worst quality. Insufficient inputs resulted in substandard outputs, with the effect of making public housing a poisoned chalice. In many cases, the only people to benefit from the UK's attempts at industrial home building on the cheap were developers and less than honest local government officials. As documented by Cole and Furbey, the malfeasance and incompetence at the heart of industrial home building in the UK would be comic, were its results not so frequently tragic (1993).

Through this combination of poor building and generally non-existent management (Power 1987), successive UK governments may have inadvertently developed a perfect formula for ensuring that public housing would become marginalised. Because they under-invested, they could deliver only a poor service. Because the service was poor (yet still cost quite a lot), much of the public then concluded that housing was a service that governments cannot effectively provide, and which thus must be left to market forces. In the United States, where a conscious and publicly stated use of this tactic underlies much current Republican policy with regards to all pillars of the welfare state, this is known as “starving the beast”. While “starving the beast” does not appear to have been an overt strategy in the UK with regards to housing, it does appear to have been part of the problem.

Housing's unique history as a pillar of the welfare state

Given that the boom in social housing happened at the same time as the advent and rapid growth of the welfare state, most observers assume that housing is a natural facet of the welfare state and was conceived of as such when the welfare state was being planned. However, is it possible that while the mass provision of social housing coincided with the development of the welfare state, it was not meant as an integral part of it?

The post-war establishment of the welfare state took place in the context of severe housing shortages (Kemeny 2001, p. 53). While some of this shortage was the result of WWII bombing, the majority of the shortfall in decent housing in the UK was attributable to longstanding weaknesses in the homebuilding market. In this context, it made sense for post-WWII governments and citizens to view mass housing as a need that could only be met with a great deal of governmental help.

However, does it necessarily follow that the post-WWII government that inaugurated the welfare state saw housing as a long-term, large scale social service on par with, for example healthcare and education? According to Malpass, the answer to this question is no. “Building a lot of council houses was not the same as reform on welfare state lines”, he argues, pointing out that even when public building was at its highest, governments still saw the market as the best solution for the majority of households. This is in sharp contrast to the universalism of other key pillars of the welfare state.

Malpass shows that Beveridgean housing policy was developed separately from – and indeed well before – the rest of the welfare state. As a pillar of the welfare state, housing was not meant to conform to the pattern established for the rest government social provision. It was “following its own, different logic; its subsequent annexation by or to the welfare state should be seen for what it is: an understandable piece of political rhetoric, which has misled scholars for half a century” (ibid, p. 71-72). Housing walked like a duck and quacked like a duck, but turned out not to be a duck after all.

Conclusion

In the three decades following WWII, public housing grew alongside the more universal governmental services. This, argues Malpass, caused most observers to conflate housing with other pillars of the welfare state. They mentally moved housing into a more central role than it actually occupied. Since the late 1970s, as the rest of the welfare state has continued to grow, public housing has shrunk, and, as a social concern, has moved away from the centre of government interest. Housing has, in a sense, been moving all the time: first pushed in where it did not fully fit, then pushed back out. Is it any wonder it appears wobbly?

<words: 1955

References

Cole, Ian and Furbey, Robert (1993) The Eclipse of Council Housing, Routledge,

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Le Corbusier (1923) from The City of Tomorrow and its Planning, In: A

Companion to the City (Eds Bridge, G. and Watson, S.), Blackwell, London.

Lupton, Ruth and Power, Anne (2002) ‘Social exclusion and neighbourhoods’, In: Understanding Social Exclusion (Eds Hills, J., Le Grand, J. and Piachaud, D.), Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 118-140.

Malpass, Peter (2005) Housing & the Welfare State: The Development of

Housing Policy in Britain, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.

National Statistics Online (no date) ‘A summary of changes over time: Housing tenure [online] Available from [Accessed 28 November 2005]

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England: Property, management and context’, Housing Studies: 13 (3): 391-414.

Pierson, Paul (1996) ‘The new politics of the welfare state’, World Politics, 48 (2):

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Power, Anne (1987) Property Before People: The Management of Twentieth-Century Council Housing, Allen & Unwin, London.

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Kemeny, J. and Lundqvist, L.), Almqvist and Wicksell International ,

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