Complexity to inform issues of methodology, taxation and politics in a context of crisis

Early in my time at Durham I was approached by Dr Leitch who combined the roles (as I remember) of Medical Officer of Health and Director of Social Services in the then County Borough of South Shields. He wanted a survey carried out on the Deans Estate in Tyne Dock (or  near Tyne Dock) which was regarded as an area housing “Problem Families” – a real trope of social policy then and under various labels since.  Dr Leitch – a very easy to deal with man – was looking at social services case data and noticing that a lot of families with social services engagement lived on this relatively small estate of dwellings built in the1930s to cope with slum clearance and overcrowding under the relevant Housing Acts for those purposes at that time. South Shields also built another estate at this time off Commercial Road in the Docks area to house “Arab” (in reality Arab seaman father and local mother) families. Interestingly that housing was of not bad quality and never became identified as a “problem” area.  The Deans was so identified.

A quick look at lettings data showed that only a minority of households had engagement with social services and quite a bit of that was in relation to support for a “special needs” household member rather than anything in relation to family inadequacy.  However, Dr Leitch and I agreed that a survey would be useful and we engaged students from my department to carry it out. I do not remember if we paid them. Practical engagement with research is invaluable and this was not the last time I was able to set this up. The students enjoyed the experience deploying a questionnaire designed by me to both establish household circumstances and to elicit views of residents about what support if any they needed and what future developments they would like to see in the area. Local people were very receptive to this study and the students found them cooperative and friendly.  We just went ahead and did it – no risk assessments carried out. Those were the days when as a Scout aged 14 I could lead a patrol in snowy weather deep into the Cheviots, hole up in a circular sheep pen, and not initiate a helicopter search because the farmer could see the smoke from our fire and knew we were OK. With two friends I made it over to Tangier aged 17!

I actually think we are now massively overprotective of students or rather that Universities are so anxious to avoid legal liabilities that they impose far too many constraints on what people can do although a quick think about and recording of risk is reasonable.

I read up on the literature on “problem” estates and “problem” families and discussed this with Dr Leitch and my students. One thing that jumped out was the radical difference in social housing – at that time overwhelmingly local authority council housing – between housing built for “general needs” and that built to replace cleared slums or to relieve overcrowding. The 1919 and 1924 housing acts had been about building for general needs with interestingly a recognition that the tenants would be higher income working class households and that moving into council housing by them would free up – filter – access to better basic private rented housing for lower income households. The provision that council housing was solely for the working class was removed after the Second World War and housing built under the direction of Nye Bevan (in his spare time from creating the NHS) and Harold Macmillan (less good but still good) was for general needs. Slum clearance started again in the 1960s as mentioned in relation to my undergraduate experience in an earlier post and more on this in a subsequent post.

What I and I hope my students learned from this was the path dependent history of housing stock and areas in relation to current condition and circumstances. We also learned that the people living on the Deans were in no way a lumpen proletariat of any kind although much of the policy literature described them in those terms whilst not using the phrase. The Durham Working Paper which reported on this study: Problem  Families – a housing lumpenproletariat  [1974] tried to make this clear.  There were some subsequent improvements to the Deans estate but ultimately the area was cleared which led to better housing for the residents in other social housing stock. Now the area contains not too expensive and rather basic owner occupied housing – more expensive now than when it was built. This was not really, unlike developments I will come to anon in West Newcastle, a “class cleansing” of working class people.

I had learned a lot about housing policy from Della Nevitt on her excellent course on my MSc although mostly about social housing and slum clearance. It was when I worked in North Shields after 1974 that I came to appreciate the enormous importance of paying the same attention to owner occupied housing.  Research on housing and the local implementation of housing policies in relation to socio-spatial inequalities in localities has been a crucial aspect of my research practice ever since.