All over London, as well as towns and villages in Britain, are housing estates built by local councils with Government funding. They are not being built now.
Since the dark days of Thatcherism, housing has come bottom of the priorities of succeeding governments. They preferred to give the money to nuclear weapons capable of destroying a country many times over (only four needed for this country, but at the last count we had 160 deployed strategic warheads. As Gordon Brown said when he was Prime Minister, "And of course we support our independent deterrent.")
It was in the 'sixties that the revelations came of slumdwellers harrassed by landlords for high rents, then evicted on to the streets when they could not pay them. The Labour government of Harold Wilson changed that. He appointed as housing minister Bob Mellish, a tough London guy who was ruthless with any council which did not reach the new housing targets he set. The tower blocks went up, stripped in the end of the special effects which would have made them pleasant to live in - playgrounds on every floor, accessible shops - but still homes for those who had nothing, like those living in back garden sheds now (in the 'sixties I interviewed a couple with children begging to be allowed to go on renting a garage as their home.) And there were smaller well-designed estates throughout the country, designed by planners who cared about the amenities of people who would live there.
Look around and you can see the estates in the most expensive parts of London - Hampstead, Notting Hill, and acres of well-designed flats lining the roads into the centre. It is the same in other cities.
And we can see the huge estates built by our ancestors, the Victorians, who, it seems, had far more conscience about the poorly housed than this generation. No realistic housing targets now, no priority for housing as an urgent national necessity ranking with the NHS. At least there is now a minister in charge of housing and there are targets. The Guardian has reported a survey into present housing conditions which in come cases rank with the lowest in the world. But what will be the result of the survey? A new revolution in housing, a stoppage of council house sales, punishment for landlords making profits out of homelessness, control over rents and, at last, an adequate programme of new housing? Will we see unused, empty buildings taken over, new council flats going up, as they did in the past, a few minutes from Buckingham Palace and Knightsbridge? It's 90% unlikely. The time has come to demand change. ends