Déjà vu

Any parent will know how difficult it is for their children to get their first foot on the housing ladder. It’s shocking, though hardly surprising, that the average age of a first time buyer is now 37.

My own borough, Barking & Dagenham, has the lowest house prices in London. Yet you still need a household income of £60,000 and a deposit of around £20,000 to buy a family size home - figures so far out of the reach of the vast majority of my constituents as to crush all hope.

History lesson

Historically, the option that many thousands of local people opted for when priced out of owner occupation was rented council housing. But when they join the council’s housing register now they find they are in the company of another 10,000 applicants.

So how and why do we find it so difficult to meet housing need in London and the south east?

After 1918 there was critical need for new homes to house the working-class heroes who had fought during the Great War. The concept of the Becontree estate in Barking & Dagenham was to do just that, moving overcrowded families from the slum conditions of London’s east end.

It was conceived in 1919, and just two years later the first 4,000 tenants had moved into their homes. When completed, 120,000 people were living there with GPs and senior managers living alongside assembly line workers at the new Ford car plant in Dagenham. It was about a lot more than just providing homes - it aimed to create better life chances for the people who lived there.

At the time it was seen as an exemplar. Of course, since then standards and expectations for our homes have risen. But contrast the scale of the task achieved by the former London County Council, not forgetting the fact that it managed to build this number of homes during the post-war gloom, with the failure of the house building industry, councils and governments over the past 40 years.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Not far from the Becontree estate is Barking Riverside. A £3.1 billion project set to deliver nearly 11,000 high-quality homes, as well as new schools, health facilities, community spaces and well-designed public space. For the first time it will give people access to a beautiful stretch of the Thames.

There is real opportunity here to build high-quality, well-designed and environmentally efficient housing at densities and styles appropriate to the needs and aspirations of different household types. An opportunity to bring superb open spaces - both wild and landscaped - into an urban setting to broaden our horizons about the way we live.

Another chance

We know how much creating quality homes within a well-designed public realm feeds our feeling of pride in where we live. This, in turn, leads to a sense of responsibility and ownership. We have a real opportunity to achieve this, not just in Barking Riverside but in a number of other areas.

Barking & Dagenham Council and I are determined not to squander these opportunities to build good homes, with proper facilities and in an environment which excites and inspires.

We want to provide homes which our children can not only afford, but also want to live in. Work is starting now on the first stage of Barking Riverside, a place which people will feel proud to call home and that meets the needs of a thriving 21st century community.

What we need is the kind of commitment at every level of government and in the housing industry that London County Council summoned up nearly a hundred years ago.

There are other sources of inspiration to draw on. Consider 65 years ago when the post-war Labour government had the political will to build.
Aneurin Bevan is so often remembered as the crusading minister who introduced the National Health Service. Let’s not forget though that at the same time he was a radical housing minister building hundreds of thousands of homes for rent. Again a question of political will.

Previous generations of politicians and public policy makers were inspired by the housing challenges they faced, not intimidated by them. Let’s just hope that over the next few years we confront the challenge rather than find yet more reasons for inactivity.

To quote the great Welsh thinker Raymond Williams: ‘To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.’ Bang on when it comes to British housing policy in 2010.

Jon Cruddas is Labour MP for Dagenham