Quality | 2010.02.08
The slums of tomorrow | Lynsey Hanley
In chasing its short-term targets for new housing, Labour is storing up a legacy of unfit homes
Channel 4, being on the cutting edge of all that\'s "real", has a predilection for making people live in surroundings not of their own choosing for the purpose of viewers\' entertainment. It has just sent four MPs to live on council estates around Britain, with the results being broadcast, starting this week, under the boom-tish title Tower Block of Commons .
All that\'s needed to bring a nation\'s schadenfreude to a rolling boil is the footage of hapless Lib Dem Mark Oaten groaning, as he approaches his billet: "I\'m hoping I\'m not in a tower block. It is a bloody tower block." He goes on to describe his feelings about where he\'s spending a week in terms more suited to banishment during the cultural revolution. Fair enough, perhaps, given the project is intended in part as media rehabilitation for legislators.
The level of public esteem accorded to both tower blocks and politicians is, for the moment, about equal. They fester alongside charity muggers and Ryanair in what David Bowie, in the 1986 film Labyrinth , termed "the bog of eternal stench". So what would you say if you knew that the next generation of soon-to-be-loathed and unfit-for-purpose housing was being thrown up under the government\'s watch?
The Kickstart "housing delivery" programme, through which £400m of public money will be administered to stalled and truncated new housebuilding schemes by the Homes & Communities Agency, has been given a kicking in recent weeks by parties including the influential Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment , the government\'s adviser on building quality.
Under the first round of the programme, many schemes have been revealed as failing most of Cabe\'s Building for Life criteria. New developments are given ratings out of 20 according to the quality of design, surroundings, environmental credentials and likelihood of creating a sense of community. Some have scored as little as 1.5, with many others achieving 10 or less.
In effect, the government is pushing through inadequate housing schemes in order to meet its target of having built 3m new homes before 2020. Disenchanted professionals have taken to calling the programme "Building Slums for the Future" in a nod to the government\'s other patchy mass construction scheme, Building Schools for the Future.
Yet they\'re not getting the support they hoped for among other design champions. Even David Birkbeck, the chief executive of Design for Homes , an independent body, has called Kickstart "a Marshall Plan for the devastated housebuilding sector. You don\'t just give emergency aid to the best dressed. The HCA is right to withhold support from only the very worst".
Really? There\'s already plenty of appallingly unattractive and family-unfriendly new housing that\'s been completed during the recession without the aid of Kickstart. My favourite of these must be a high-rise orange space crumpet named The Old Bus Depot , squashed into the junction of two busy A-roads near the M6 at Lancaster. Solely comprising one- and two-bedroom flats, its balconies enjoy uninterrupted views of a PC World superstore and the bit where the A683 splits off from the A6.
Where\'s the commitment to usefulness, to durability and to delight, which design thinkers from Vitruvius onwards have advocated? John Healey is the latest in a long line of short-lived housing ministers for whom design and planning is just part of a new brief that has to be mastered, rather than a cause that needs pushing and defending at every turn.
Does he, like Richard Crossman in the last mass housing boom of the mid-1960s, want to push through acres of new housing that will look good for the books in the short term but fail miserably in terms of sustainability, and the wellbeing of residents? Or does he want to have a legacy so lasting that people remember your name and associate it – like Nye Bevan\'s – with the use of political power for democratising, rather than expedient, ends? We have long been used to talking about the health service in these kinds of epic terms. Now it\'s time for housing and planning to be treated with the same fundamental seriousness.
Good homes for all. That\'s all anyone needs to have in mind. Never mind making it "affordable" – we\'re the fourth richest country in the world, we can afford to build it, and subsidise it if need be. We could afford good housing in 1945; to say we can\'t now is like saying we can\'t afford to think of a future that isn\'t going to happen. It is. It just depends on what you want it to look like.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/02/the-slums-of-tomorrow
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