By Alicia Mortlock, independent social rights campaigner
I confess that I hate the term ‘silo’ with a passion. However, I’m aware of the power of insider jargon. I use it here in the same way I used it two weeks ago at a webinar to get the attention of people who use words like ‘silo’ because we need them to notice what we are saying if we are going to achieve our goals of better, healthier social housing!
It was the fatal need of those in charge to control the narrative which led to the tragedies of Grenfell Tower and the death of two-year old Awaab Ishak. I think it was a shock to most people to learn that tenants and residents in social housing were dying needlessly because they had no voice in the decisions made about their own homes.
My sadness is that, while we united then in the call for action, below the surface there remained among our landlords and our policymakers vestiges of contempt and fear which continue to block progress even today.
Perpetuating Ill Health and Poverty
As tenants and residents, we have all witnessed the ways in which disrepair affects us beyond the risks to our health. Poor physical and mental health among social housing tenants and residents leads to increased absenteeism at work while the perpetual struggle of families to make ends meet contributes to a weakened economy.
I know, from decades of working with young people, how substandard housing is a barrier to learning. For instance, children who are sleeping on sofas and floors because of damp and mould in their bedroom may face difficulties in concentrating on their studies, leading to a tangible gap in educational attainment.
Our children are more likely to grow into adults with limited access to employment opportunities, perpetuating the cycle of poverty. Before any government issues edicts about the need to get more people working, we need to persuade more people in power that an economically healthy nation starts with a healthy home.
Citizens UK report on the impact of substandard housing on children, June 2024.
As a campaigner for social change, I often look to the past for ways it can inform future social policy. Looking back to the introduction of social housing helps us to understand how a combination of public will, government policy and economic factors might determine social housing in the future.
Historic Problems and Solutions
The First World War brought housebuilding to a virtual standstill and by the time of the General Election of 1918 it was clear that we faced an acute shortage of housing. With inflated building costs as well as scarcity of workers and materials, the private developers who had previously supplied almost all new housing were no longer able to provide homes affordable to the average working class family.
The war focused the public on our national responsibility to provide homes and led to Prime Minister Lloyd George’s promise of ‘homes fit for heroes’. The Housing Act 1919 (known as the Addison Act after the then minister for health and housing) was seen as a milestone in the provision of council housing. It promised government subsidies to help finance the construction of 500,000 homes within three years. However, as the economy weakened in the early 1920s, funding had to be cut, and only 213,000 homes were built.
We often think we are facing something new when we are actually looking at the same old challenges, even if the ‘players’ might differ and the circumstances are distinct from those we faced before. I’m not sure there is presently the sort of public support for social housing of the kind which was widespread in 1919 to fuel political will for change.
I look at social media and see comments from those who believe that we already get ‘given’ more to us than we deserve, and that social housing tenants live in their homes rent-free. The evidence is there that we still face social stigma (for more, see the excellent research ‘Stigma and Social Housing in England’ by Dr. Mercy Denedo and Dr. Amanze Ejiogu).
Like many of their contemporaries, my parents moved into a council bungalow shortly after they were married. My dad met my mum while working as a plumber for the landlord, fitting inside ‘lavvies’ in Halstead Rural District Council homes. Some of my earliest and most precious memories are of the council housing estate I lived on for the first five years of my life. Like many others, I look back to the golden age of council housing with great fondness and a huge regret that we let it go. Because we did let it go.
Thatcher and Beyond
By the 1980s, many were already looking at data from the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys (OPCS) and realising that we were heading for a chasm in public funding. This was partly the result of Beveridge’s mistaken assumption that we would be able to fund the major welfare reforms he set out in the 1940s through increased tax income from full employment. But the goal of eliminating unemployment is something we have never achieved.
Back then, we might have had a meaningful debate on how we might continue to fund social housing, education, health services, and social care if more of those who used the services had found their voices. Instead, the Conservative government orchestrated and oversaw one of the most blatant acts of social engineering right under our noses.
Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government of 1979 undermined council housing through Right to Buy
The Conservatives took office in 1979 and set about undermining the ‘cradle to grave’ provision of welfare services that were free at the point of delivery, along with the sale of our public services such as water, gas and electricity. They also sold off entire estates of council housing to private organisations – housing associations – boosting their stock and power.
The Housing Act of 1980 also gave more financially able council tenants the right to buy out of social housing at a discount. By 1987, more than one million council houses in the UK had been sold to their tenants while those competing for the decreasing numbers of social homes were more likely to have existing vulnerabilities and additional needs.
The Double Whammy
We can’t make sense of the changes in social housing unless we consider the significant changes in health and social care policy happening at the same time. The National Health Service and Community Care Act 1990, also known as the Care in the Community Act, introduced a number of changes to our systems of health and social care comparable to those happening in social housing.
The aim of government was to create an internal market for healthcare, with the state acting as an enabler rather than a supplier, and establishing self-governing NHS trusts, which were responsible for managing and owning hospitals and other facilities. These trusts also had more freedom to raise revenue and borrow money. Sound familiar?
It was the combined impact of changes to both social housing and social care laws that have led us to where we are today – this couldn’t have happened because of changes in either policy alone. It is not a coincidence nor is it a measure of the lifestyle or lack of resilience among social housing tenants and residents that we have poorer physical and mental health and are at higher risk of respiratory conditions, cardiovascular disease and communicable diseases before moving into less than decent social homes.
The Imposed Negative Mindset
Social housing tenants and residents lived for decades with an imposed mindset which took the form of top-down interventions and a dehumanising tick-box culture. Until the very recent past, the one thing glaringly absent from decision-making has been the lived experience of the people actually living in the homes.
Beyond the negative impact of the condition of homes and its contribution to health problems, being ignored or gaslit has a depressing knock-on effect which blights our communities every bit as much as damp and mould.
Many tenants and residents still have little or no understanding of their rights under the current legislation. Perhaps the most heartbreaking aspect I still see on an almost daily basis is the inertia and sense of fatalism among those tenants and residents who have seen and heard so many promises that they have every right to tell me that things will never really change.
Many of us lack confidence in our ability to make decisions for ourselves in many areas of our lives. There is a sense among those of us who are now actively involved in campaigning for better social housing that we have inadvertently left some of our fellow tenants and residents behind.
We must acknowledge the existence of sink estates often associated with high levels of crime, poverty, family breakdown and welfare dependency. However, we must also communicate to a wider audience that this is the result of ineffective social policy and deliberately fencing in unresolved social problems.
The stark reality is that, by the time estates were transferred wholesale to housing associations, backed by the false promises of new kitchens, heating systems, and play areas for children, we were actually seeing the beginning of the end for the best period of social housing.
Housing associations became the providers of the state’s new arm’s length approach towards the lower cost rental market. Never intended to be a direct replacement for local authority housing, they were a softer compromise through which the government could win the assent of social housing tenants in light of opposition to the imposition of estate privatisations.
In other words, housing association homes were the bones we were thrown with the intention of fuller privatisation of public housing later down the line. We are faced with that reality right now with the rapid rise of ‘for profit’ housing associations like Sage Housing owned by investment company Blackstone, and L&G Affordable Homes backed by Legal & General bank.
Herein lies the quandary which threatens the loose alliance of social tenant campaign groups which have flourished over the past couple of years because while some of us strive to find ways to encourage our landlords to be more willing to talk with us, others see housing associations as part of the problem. Can we find a way to work with the devil we know?
Breaking Down the Silos
Meaningful tenant involvement and engagement is still perceived as a bit of a chore for many of our landlords and, implicitly, we are still perceived as one of the biggest barriers to their business plans.
If social housing tenants and residents are passive through years of being ignored, our landlords have developed an inherent compulsion to corral us into places they still control. We all face a time of great uncertainty and yet housing association executives are still too proud or disdainful to trust us with the truth about the current financial restrictions. In return, we still view everything they do through the very opposite of rose-tinted glasses.
At the time, none of us who embraced the new opportunities to engage in discussions about social housing policy and practice had any illusions that tenant involvement would remain near the top of the agenda unless we worked hard to keep it there. We have only got as far as we have because we were so overwhelmingly and unanimously underestimated.
While time is short if we are to avoid a catastrophe and the loss of the not-for-profit sector altogether, we should take a moment to look at the ways in which we have honed new tools. There have been new laws affecting the Department of Housing, Communities and Local Government, and we have influenced to some extent the work of bodies such as the Regulator of Social Housing and the Housing Ombudsman.
We are still learning new and innovative ways to use the crumbs which fell our way from the boardroom table to make more of our rights. How might we use this new knowledge and expertise to negotiate a better deal?
The legislation and the bodies there to regulate the sector are now lagging behind the tenants and residents. There is understandable and justifiable impatience with the Housing Ombudsman Service because of the interminable delays we currently face with complaints. These go beyond the landlord two-tier complaints system, especially when landlords are still resistant to change.
I have yet to encounter a tenant who believes that the government’s Tenant Satisfaction Measures which are run by the Regulator are the panacea to all social housing ills. Scepticism is the best form of self-preservation.
Social housing is still heavily laden with policies and practices which didn’t have the benefit of tenant involvement. Social housing legislation has emerged from political short-term thinking and quick-fix solutions which only served to bolster and reaffirm the ‘we know best’ arrogance of policy-makers and housing association CEOs.
Permanent solutions will only develop through an organised tenant and resident movement, and alliances of the different campaign groups through which to create an impact, share tactics, celebrate our victories along the way, as well as learning about those approaches that failed. Most of all, we need to work together to break down those silos for ourselves. In the meantime, we can take a deep breath and remind ourselves that while it is frustratingly slow, the recent changes are progress.
A Call to Action
SHAC is working with campaign partners to establish a national tenants and residents union set up by the trade union movement and working to a collective self-empowerment model. Find out more here.
3 February 2025
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Thank you
What a really useful article! However, you use terminology that I have not come across ie silo. True, I am old and don’t get out much and maybe this is why the term has passed me by?
‘Silo’ really refers to the way in which different departments don’t share information or collaborate fully and is a term much loved by most social housing providers to talk about what they need to do to improve their internal practices. I vehemently dislike such jargon and used the term slightly tongue in cheek, although there is a serious point to be made. Jargon is so often used against us.