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Addison’s framework was scrapped but its legacy is more important than ever

The fortunes of council housing have ebbed and flowed ever since Addison’s programme was abruptly halted in 1921, writes Jules Birch

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The Alexandra Road Estate, Camden, London (picture:Getty)
The Alexandra Road Estate, Camden, London (picture:Getty)
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The Addison Act framework was quickly scrapped, but its legacy is more important than ever, argues @Jules_Birch #100YearsOfCouncilHousing #UKHousing

"The Addison Act’s legacy lies in the principles that it established to which future governments would return" – @Jules_Birch puts the Addison Act in historical context #100YearsOfCouncilHousing #UKHousing

Addison’s framework was scrapped but its legacy is more important than ever

Inside Housing is publishing a number of articles this month to mark the centenary of the Addison Act, which paved the way for large-scale council housebuilding.

 

As we celebrate the centenary of what was effectively the birth of council housing in 1919, it’s also worth remembering what happened just two years later.

Lord Christopher Addison was the minister of health in the post-war coalition government of 1919 and it fell to him to deliver on the promise made by the Liberal prime minister, David Lloyd George, of ‘a country fit for heroes to live in’.

The Addison Act – officially The Housing, Town Planning etc Act 1919 – that received royal assent 100 years ago this month (I started the celebrations early) was the landmark legislation that established the principles of council housing and also set out housing’s role in the wider health and well-being of the country.

As the King’s Speech put it in April 1919: “It is not too much to say that an adequate solution of the housing question is the foundation of all social progress.”

As seen at the time, especially by Lord Addison himself as a surgeon before he became an MP, that housing question started with the consequences for health of the insanitary conditions and overcrowding suffered by millions of people.

The Addison Act provided generous subsidies for new council homes, but it also set a framework that ensured that slum landlords did not profit from slum clearance.

Yet just two years later, in July 1921, the housing programme was abruptly scrapped. Only 213,000 of the promised 500,000 homes were delivered and central government assistance to replace and improve slums was reduced to a grant of just £200,000 (around £11m in today’s money) for the whole of Great Britain.


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These cuts were the result of a post-war drive against waste in public spending that culminated in the ‘Geddes Axe’, named after the businessman and Conservative politician who chaired the committee recommending what could be cut.

However, those whom Lord Addison called “the apostles of anti-waste” had a broader ideological agenda: to return the economy to ‘normal’ after increased state intervention during the war.

Addison resigned from the government in protest and eventually left the Liberals to join Labour. In 1922, he published his arguments for housing and against austerity in The Betrayal of the Slums.

In this righteously angry pamphlet, Lord Addison set out the insanitary conditions suffered by millions of people and the long-term costs to the country of poor housing.

At the time, there were 77,000 back-to-back houses in Leeds and almost a half a million people living in one or two rooms in Glasgow.

Under his act, the Treasury picked up all the costs of new council houses beyond what could be financed by a penny on the local rates.

He admitted that costs had escalated as a result of general inflation in building costs after the war, but said his warnings about the need for preparatory work to avoid cost increases had been ignored in the clamour for quicker progress.

Instead there had been a “sudden reaction”, he said. “Those who before had been loudest in their protests at the insufficient rapidity of our progress now became the foremost champions in the demand that the housing and slum reclamation projects should be abandoned.”

He also argued that costs were falling again by the time the programme was cancelled, and that they were in any case outweighed by wider benefits from employment and lower health and social costs.

As he put it: “It is difficult to argue how any body of rational beings could persevere in a policy of this kind at a time of such serious unemployment.”

Housing was trapped in a vicious circle. Private housebuilding could not revive in the face of continued restrictions on rents that were needed to keep them affordable in the face of a shortage of homes.

“Therefore, at one and the same time, the government prevents the accumulated shortage being made good by state or municipal assistance and, by prolonging the shortage, commits the community to the continued operation of that statute which effectively prevents its being met by private enterprise.”

The point of this historical diversion is partly to make the point that the framework established by the Addison Act only lasted for two years before being cut to virtually nothing. The fortunes of council housing have ebbed and flowed ever since.

The act’s legacy lies in the principles that it established to which future governments would return – notably the 1945-1951 Attlee government in which he served as a minister.

However, there is also a more contemporary point. The arguments that Lord Addison made are just as relevant now as they were then, especially when the austerity of the 2010s was the biggest squeeze on public spending since the anti-waste drive of the 1920s.

Austerity may be officially over and even Conservative politicians now say they are in favour of council housing. But a new prime minister, a new cabinet and Brexit lie ahead – who knows where that will lead?

“The act’s legacy lies in the principles that it established to which future governments would return”

The final chapter of Lord Addison’s pamphlet looks to the future. It starts with a quote from a letter from the town clerk of a metropolitan council to a man looking for accommodation for his family: “I have to inform you that there are at present no vacant houses on any of the council’s estates. Your application has been received, and these will be considered in the event of a vacancy occurring on any of the estates or when the houses now being erected are completed. There are at present about 6,000 applications on the file.”

If the echoes of contemporary waiting lists are hard to ignore, so too is Lord Addison’s portrayal of an £11m housing budget in 1922 (£600m in today’s money) of which half was subsidy to private builders – by comparison, expenditure on war services was £233m (£13bn).

The justifications for a social housing programme may be different now: the slums have largely been cleared and affordability and security are now seen as the biggest elements of the housing question.

But the case for decent housing and its wider economic and social benefits – not least for health – are just as relevant today as they were then.

And it’s hard to put that case better than Lord Addison himself did in 1922: “There is no direction in which the thrift, the contentment and the physical and intellectual capacity of our people can be more directly or plainly promoted than in this. It may be drab and unattractive in its detail, but in its nature and in its fulfilment, it is heroic. It is worthy of sacrifice and of all the powers of discipline and statesmanship that we possess.”

Jules Birch, award-winning blogger

100 Years of Council Housing: we want to hear from you

100 Years of Council Housing: we want to hear from you

To mark the 100th anniversary of the act receiving Royal Assent in July, we have a month of special activities planned, including interviews with senior council housing figures, exclusive debate and comment, and investigations into what local authorities, past and present, are doing to help provide housing.

This will signal the start of a stronger focus on local authority housing issues over the coming months on www.insidehousing.co.uk and in our weekly print and digital editions.

We want to hear from you about your local authority is doing to mark the Addison Act and about the housing issues in your area, email: editorial@insidehousing.co.uk

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Click here to read more about our activity to mark the Addison Act

More on the Addison Act

More on the Addison Act

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100 Years of Council Housing: what Inside Housing is doing

One hundred years ago, a piece of legislation led to the birth of council housing. Gavriel Hollander introduces Inside Housing’s celebration of the centenary of the Addison Act.

It is so ingrained in our national consciousness that it is hard to imagine just how radical the idea of local authority built and funded housing must have seemed a century ago. Before World War I, almost all housing in the UK was built by private developers (albeit with some notable municipal exceptions in major cities). Given this, it is unsurprising that both quality and consistency of delivery were variable.

The post-war introduction of subsidies for councils to solve the blight of slum estates was supposed to right a wrong and – in the words of then-prime minister David Lloyd George – provide “homes fit for heroes”.

The so-called Addison Act – the very first housing act passed in this country, named after its sponsor Dr (later Lord) Christopher Addison – received royal assent exactly 100 years ago this month.

It may never have achieved its aspiration of delivering 500,000 homes (something that may sound familiar to modern-day watchers of government housing policy) but it was the start of a movement.

New estates began to crop up across the country, built in accordance with recommendations from the Tudor Walters Report, which was produced to parliament in November 1918. This built on the ‘Garden City Principles’ and suggested a number of improvements to the standard of public housing. These included limiting the length of terraced-housing blocks, mandating a minimum number of rooms and providing indoor bathrooms.

“The post-war introduction of subsidies for councils to solve the blight of slum estates was supposed to right a wrong and – in the words of the prime minister David Lloyd George – provide ‘homes fit for heroes’”

Although the abandonment of subsidy in 1921 and a change of government the following year curtailed the immediate growth of council-built housing, the seed had been sown.

This month Inside Housing celebrates the centenary of the Addison Act with a month-long series of articles looking at how it transformed the social fabric of the country and created the housing sector we know today.

Over the course of this month, we visit four estates, each symbolising a different era of council housebuilding. We also take a look at whether new-found financial freedom for local authorities could be the catalyst for a new generation of estates.

To kick off the series, acclaimed social historian John Boughton visits one of the first estates made possible by Lord Addison’s historic legislation: Sea Mills in Bristol. We then travel to Stevenage to look at how the damage to Britain’s inner cities during the Blitz led to the new town movement and a fresh wave of estates through the 1950s and 1960s.

Martin Hilditch, editor of Inside Housing, takes a trip to Hulme in Manchester to examine how the private and public sector had to work together in the 1980s to deliver a regeneration project, which is still thriving more than 30 years later.

Finally, we go to Nottingham and look at one council with grand ambitions to provide housing to a new generation of tenants.

There may still be myriad challenges to face when it comes to providing good-quality, genuinely affordable housing for those most in need, but without the passing of an act of parliament 100 years ago, the sector we work in today may never have come to exist. That alone is worth celebrating.

To read more about the act, go to: www.insidehousing.co.uk/AddisonAct

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