IT IS the council housing that can leave the strongest impression in the villages, small towns and hamlets of our countryside.

Still today, it is the well-built council family houses, mostly semis or small terraces, with their generous garden and community spaces, often paying homage in their design to local building traditions, that seem most practical and homely.

With their old privet hedges, mini-greens and trees often older than the houses, they are as much part of our countryside as old churches, pubs and timber-framed cottages.

They weren’t perfect. Some were cramped, while others were generously sized. Some were old-fashioned, poorly built and insulated, while others used the very latest building techniques. The old council management regimes could be nit-picking and oppressive as well as caring, and in the early days, the rents were often beyond many of the poorest folk.

You don’t often find them in the old village centres. The landowners and councillors didn’t want them too near the quaint old streets and lanes of cottages and prosperous tradesmen’s homes, farmhouses and small manor houses. They made sure the council housing was stuck out on local feeder roads, or groups of ex-farm fields, often some distance from the old centres.

Rural council housing represented one of the greatest gains for rural working-class people made in modern times. It was mostly built in the 60 years between the 1919 Addison Housing Act and the Tories’ 1980 “right to buy” Housing Act. That is, in the first governmental phase of Labourism and its liberal allies.

Houses belonging to the owning class and much middle-class housing, by contrast, stand out for their bonkers low densities, their underoccupation, their extravagance and their painful waste of land for private gardens and mini-parks. Paradoxically, in recent times new private housing stands out, too, for its cramped space standards.

And the medieval and post-medieval houses of our ancient village centres might have charm, but they don’t look like places a 6ft 2-inch-tall man like myself would wish to live in, even ignoring the death watch beetle.

Those council housing space and building standards owed much to the ruralism of the Edwardian garden city movement and its circle of architects and planners, with their emphasis on large, cottage-style dwellings and generous green spaces.

It’s mostly gone now.

That legacy of council-built homes is no longer available to rural homeless and badly housed folk, for the right to buy has marched through it like Terry Pratchett’s Reaper Man, privatising our collective resource, and often turning it into a new source of exploitation and private profit.

Of course, many of the residents of rural ex-council homes are the same families that earlier exercised their right to buy. But the trends are inexorable, for as those homes are sold one-by-one by those families as their needs change, they are bought for hugely increased prices, often by incoming urban escapees with salaries that vastly exceed those of local folk in housing need.

Some 40 per cent of ex-council housing is now owned and rented by private landlords — in Brighton, the figure is 86 per cent. They charge three or four times the rents on equivalent social housing, and, together with the rip-off rents, these landlords bring back all the problems of insecurity and neglect of tenants’ needs that dog the world of private rental housing.

The collapse of rural council housing came quickly with the coming of the right to buy.

With its big discounts, the right to buy was very popular with tenants in traditionally built houses. Sales were highest in the early years of right to buy, peaking in 1982-3. Between 1976 and 2017 it’s estimated that the number of rural council homes fell from 717,000 to 114,000. That left just 16 per cent of the stock.

The losses were somewhat less in flats and old people’s accommodation. The nature of the post-war subsidy system meant that most of the rural stock was family housing, and the only other rural category that received generous support was old people’s housing, which saw a big expansion.

Non-traditional housing, too, such as that made with pre-cast reinforced concrete often proved unsaleable in its early years, till new legislation gave buyers the right to insist that councils carry out repairs or rebuild.

And new council house building withered to near-nothing under sustained government attack, reinforced by the divide-and-rule tactic of first privileging the housing association movement, with its separation from local democratic accountability and its stronger integration with commercial norms.

Yet the need for good working-class rural housing remains huge, though largely invisible. One historian describes the situation as going from past “despair,” which he included the failure even of rural council housing to satisfy housing needs, to current “wipe-out,” as a new strata of professional, business and managerial earners have come to dominate all available rural housing.

One Wealden smallholder I know, whose family has worked their land for way over a century, summed it up: “There are no working-class people round here now.”

Inside Housing (June 3 2023) reported that the demand for social homes in rural areas has grown at ten times the urban rate. That is, the numbers on rural council waiting lists grew from 2019-22 by 31 per cent, against the increase in numbers on urban lists of 3 per cent.

Recently the spotlight has been on the increase in second home and holiday lets in rural and coastal communities, with one MP describing them as “hollowed out irretrievably.” The number of these holiday lets increased by some 40 per cent in the three years to 2022.

In 2023 it was reported that some 772,000 households own second homes, that is holiday homes or weekend cottages. That is an increase from 572,000 in 2008-9.
 
Yet in June 2023 the National Housing Federation reported that average rents were unaffordable for most key workers in nine out of 10 rural areas. And key workers are not necessarily the poorest of rural residents.

Since 1974 housing associations have been able to receive significant public funding to build new social homes, and this sector, linked to the growth of community land trusts has grown in reach and strength. It was given a huge boost by both Labour and Tory governments, which pushed to move council housing out of local council control and into the hands of existing, or new, customised housing associations.

Though this notorious attack on democratic accountability was pushed back and finally halted by tenants’ action across many areas (including our own in Brighton, with a 77 per cent tenants’ No vote for “stock transfer”) many rural areas have now lost all their local council housing to such transfers.

A quarter of councils are no longer landlords. And even in those councils which retain their housing stock, the management has often changed to “arm’s-length management organisations” with all their inefficiencies.

In many villages and country towns, small trusts and charities work valiantly to provide new social housing in ways that include legal locks against shifts towards commercial rents and stock sales. By 2008 the Rural Housing Trust had built some 3,000 homes in 350 villages. It was set up by the National Agricultural Centre in Stoneleigh in 1975, as an initiative to house retired farm workers.

From 2015 to 2019 the housing association sector built 20,000 “social rent” homes, 77,000 “affordable rent” homes, and 43,000 shared ownership homes. “Social rents” are up to 50 per cent of market rents and “affordable rents” are up to 80 per cent of market rents.

None of those rents bear any comparison to the much more affordable rents paid by council tenants historically.

All public and social housing rents — even historic council housing rents  — are grossly swollen by lending costs, but council tenants avoided the punishing rents paid by housing association tenants (let alone the horrors of private renting).

Even now many (most?) council tenants pay much less than housing association tenants, though the government’s intention remains to push council rents up to housing association levels.

Efforts have been made to reform the grossest absurdities of the right to buy and the clamp down on social home building. Thatcherite minister Nicholas Ridley initiated in 1989 the planning device of “rural exception sites” for small developments outside local authority development plans, let at “affordable” or even “social” rents.

The device is very underused. In some small villages, the right to buy may not apply — just as in some small villages of heritage value no housing development may take place.

Those are just micro-changes when we need system change. We can start by appreciating the past achievements of public housing both here and abroad, including the erstwhile Eastern Bloc.

Dave Bangs’ Notes From a Free Walker is a monthly column that appears on the second weekend of the month. Keep an eye out for the next one on July 13.