Possibly the most depressing thing about Channel 4’s latest delve into the world of council housing, is that the only person who might have made a difference had to pull out after one day.
As David Cameron’s social policy guru, and a man who has had a fair bit to say about social housing, Iain Duncan Smith was in a good position to use his experiences.
In the past his Centre for Social Justice think tank has issued reports advocating an end to secure tenancy for life, and using social housing as a ‘lever’ to get people into work.
We’ll never know if spending a week on the Carpenters estate in east London would have reaffirmed these views, or caused IDS to reassess them, as he sadly learnt his wife had cancer and was forced to leave after one day.
The remaining three politicians, Tory Tim Loughton, Lib Dem Mark Oaten, and Labour backbencher Austin Mitchell, acquitted themselves with varying degrees of success.
Oaten was shocked by the state of the Dagenham tower block in which he found himself, and set about organising a petition to get it knocked down, before admitting: ‘If someone said to me you have to stay here for two years, I don’t think I could cope.’
Mitchell fared less well, seeming rather taken aback by the reality of living on a drug-ridden estate in Hull – despite chairing the Parliamentary group on council housing, insisting on living in his own council house rather than sharing with a tenant, and disappearing off for dinner with friends on the second evening.
Loughton looked very lost as a posh white guy stuck in a poor black community in Birmingham, and looked like he knew it, but he did make himself useful as a baby sitter.
One of the opening questions the programme makers ask about the MPs is ‘will they find any solutions?’ With IDS they might have done, but without him it seems doubtful.
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