[Ben Reeve
Lewis remembers Deptford of old and rages against the planners …]
So I spent my Jubilee party with Frazzles at a BBQ in Catford hosted by my great friend of 22 years ‘Mad Sandra’.
On her strict instructions as Mien Host, that everyone had to wear red white and blue in various combinations, a Union Jack cake was baked and at the appointed hour, said cake was produced and the national anthem was struck up.
Trouble was, apart from me, everyone else was West Indian and nobody, including me, knew more than the first line. Gales of laughter, good intentions dissolved on the spot and we all went back to the rum punch and Donald’s excellent jerk Chicken, sod the Queen. Multi-cultural Britain 2012 haha.
Secret Deptford
I watched the BBC documentary “Secret Streets” last night, about where I was brought up, Deptford, in South East London, home to Mighty Millwall.
It was very nostalgic to see film from the 1920s through the 60s and 70s. Streets and shops I remembered but mostly razed to the ground following planning edicts from Lewisham Council that pushed locals out to hideous, bland satellite towns like Bexleyheath and Dartford. Sorry if any readers live there, I hate the places.
On “Subdivisions” the Canadian rock band Rush sang “Any escape might help to smooth the unattractive truth, but the suburbs have no charms to soothe the restless dreams of youth” Nuff said.
Deptford was a community destroyed by a thirst for new build and public servants desperate to forge a career as forward thinkers whilst at the same time putting their ambition in front of the lives of the community that they didn’t live in.
Posh planners
The planner at the time, remarkably posh and interviewed living in a very green, un-Deptford like location waxing enthusiastic about the need to wipe away the old and replace with the new was making much of the idea that the properties he authorised to be knocked down were suffering from damp and disrepair. The programme makers however had sought out the diary sheets of the environmental health officers of the time reporting no such problems.
One street, earmarked for demolition survived, was renovated and the houses now sell for £750,000 to yuppified distinctly un-Deptford like house hunters in the mould of the planning officer. Maybe they went to the same school.
What was going on in the 60s and 70s? I was a kid and a teenager so I missed it. Thank god it was replaced in the 1990s and still continues on with the concept of community regeneration. Architects no longer foisting abstract design ideas on the lives of ordinary people and designing living spaces around what is going on at ground level, which is as it should be.
Very depressing viewing, to see lives and families destroyed by ambitious, self-important planners based in Surrey and Kent leafing through Bauhaus and Le Corbusier coffee table books whilst dictating the living styles of organically grown communities who had weathered Zeppelin raids in WW1 and Heinkels in WW2 but who couldn’t withstand the combined onslaught of twats with clip-boards.
Does housing make you happy?
Now perhaps on a similar theme I read in the Guardian this week about how David Cameron is looking towards general life satisfaction as an indicator of how well we are faring as a nation rather than just focussing on GDP. Becky Tunstall, Professor of Housing policy at the University of York, posed the question, “Is there a link between housing and happiness?”
She cited Maslow’s Hierarchy of human needs, who doesn’t. Frankly if you don’t know what that is, Google it. I don’t have the space or inclination to explain. Housing is such a basic need of humans, along with food, water, safety and the iPhone.
To me it’s a bit of a non-question. People are very unhappy without homes. They are also very unhappy when the safety of their homes is constantly under threat. By the way, did I mention Assured Shorthold Tenancies?
It doesn’t take a professor to work that one out. But what was interesting about the article was Becky’s reveal, that housing surveys in the UK don’t usually count housing when measuring happiness or life satisfaction but in other countries they do.
She gave an interesting example of the effect of concrete floors in Mexico when she said:
“In Mexico, families who were helped to replace mud floors with cleaner, healthier cement floors showed marked improvement in life satisfaction”.
As you all know our government, and large swathes of the nation, are somewhat obsessed with the notion of homeownership. Professor Tunstall poured cold water on this concept when she reports:
“In a recent UK study, Searle, Smith and Cook found that home buyers who choose, or are forced, to be pre-occupied with the financial returns on housing … cluster disproportionately towards the bottom of the well-being scale. Not only are they emotionally detached from the affective values of home, but they are nervous of leaning so heavily on the returns of a single investment”.
A fascinating counterpoint don’t you think? Mexican concrete 1: Homeownership 0:
The Tax Man cometh
Private landlords should be quaking in their boots at the announcement by HMRC, or the ‘Tax Man’ as we call them, reported by ARLA that a taskforce has been put together to knock on doors and trap landlords not paying tax on the rental income.
Pause button: Why does the government seem so obsessed with ‘Taskforces”? We have a beds in sheds taskforce, a high street taskforce under Mary Portas, Newham have a landlord taskforce. It’s as if Andy McNab has gained a consultancy contract with Westminster. Will I soon be forced as a TRO to wear black and abseil down the front of a building to catch a landlord in the throes of not protecting a deposit?
I digress.
HMRC reckons that they are losing £17 million a year in unpaid taxes. They’re not getting mad, just getting even. Actually door knocking is the least of a landlord’s problems. Stephen Barratt of business advisers James Cowper, said:
“Landlords can reasonably expect HMRC to gather information from across Government departments, and many other sources including press and internet advertisements, universities and colleges.
HMRC is also using increasingly sophisticated techniques to identify those who are not paying sufficient tax and the chances of going undetected are rapidly vanishing.”
What with Shelter’s campaigns in Scotland and Wales reported last week against agents the knives definitely seem to be out.
A new kid on the block
Finally I hope Tessa won’t mind me flagging up a new housing law blog that has thrown it’s hat into the ring this week. Lag Housing Law run by the Legal Action Group, who produce most of the legal bibles for people in our line of work, and the legendary Arden Chambers, housing law specialists behind so many landlmark housing cases.
Only one article at the time of writing but we can expect great things and welcome to the fray guys. There is plenty of room for all and I’m sure it will in time become a valuable resource. Of course you won’t get to read me on there. Leave the law to them and the sarcasm to me; it’s what I’m best suited for
Ben Reeve Lewis
Ben’s runs Home Saving Expert, where he shares his secrets on defending people’s homes from mortgage repossession Visit his blog and get some help and advice on mortgage difficulties, catch up with him on Twitter and check out his free report “An Encouraging note on Dealing with your Mortgage Lender” and have it sent right to your inbox.
Picture : Deptford HIgh Street
“public servants desperate to forge a career as forward thinkers whilst at the same time putting their ambition in front of the lives of the community that they didn’t live in”
So not much has changed then, other than the fact that those people have entered politics and subsequently treated “communities” and “the vulnerable in society” as a political football that has to be kept in the bounds and would degenerate into a screaming mass of incoherence, racism, brutality and depravity without their guiding light.
(My local MP is precisely such a person.)
I’m still thinking that people should be debarred from all elected office unless they can show a track record of experience in the real world, i.e. people who’ve had real jobs and not social sciences graduates looking for a sinecure.
I think the government can’t inlcude housing in any current happiness index, as (despite what The Rugg Report claimed) most tenants are unhappy.
@JS Did you see the planner? A case in point for you. He probably thought Deptford was a living example of one of those old british film newsreel things. “Plucky cockernees facing up to adversity, dontcha know?”.
Deptford was a dock area, with a multi-cultural community going way back who actually got on and worked around each other and the conditions they lived in. They didnt need to be patronised by someone with a vision of placid working classes living in his own wet dream, high rise splendour. Sorry if I rant on this one, its close to my heart.
Luckily enough old Deptford still remains, along with the rough but caring spirit.
@ Penny Happiness and life satisfaction is a difficult one to define clearly. I’m sure Deptford planner thought they would automatically be happier and more fulfilled by living in what he had planned for them
Ref your re-quote from
Searle, Smith and Cook that home buyers are emotionally detached from the affective [sic] values of home, but they are nervous of leaning so heavily on the returns of a single investment”.
There is surely a distinction to be made between those who buy a home for their own occupation and those who do so for investment? The silly money gains of the last decade are not likely to be repeated – and people who chose to re-mortgage and spend the difference on holidays are neither investors not wise.
Capital gains on homes are a generational windfall best regarded as inheritance – but let’s stay away from IHT.
Landlords can make capital gains by developing or improving property. Rents are there to sustain and maintain a tenancy and provide the tenant with a property free from the cost of repair and maintenance unlike the poor home-owner. Rent also facilitate borrowings – and the landlord takes on the commercial responsibility and risk involved – just wait til interest rates start to rise and then hear the squeals.
Home owners may see their property as a personal security – but with it comes responsibility and liability.
Maybe the rent-generation will realise that renting is not second best but their first choice for happiness.
I’m not sure from the article what the Searle, Smith and Cook report refereed to in that respect. Homeowners relying on equity or BTL landlords looking for an investment as an alternative to people’s dwindling faith in pensions.
I agree that silly money gains are unlikely to be repeated, certainly for a decade or so anyway, when people forget the lessons of the past but 2 things trouble me about your reply Alan:-
The presumption that people are spending the difference on holidays, and
That renting is the first choice for ‘Generation rent’.
My job puts me in a position where I have to delve deeply into the financial lives of people facing mortgage repossession. Yes there are those who have maxed themselves out, making hay while the sun shines but these cases are far outnumbered by people re-mortgaging and pushing themselves to the line simply to make ends meet in a crippled financial environment against the backdrop of rapacious, usually second charge sub-prime lenders going for outright possession on less than £2,000 arrears. The brutally simple logic of the lenders being “Get the money or get the house”
Such borrowers aren’t feckless ne’er do wells, but ordinary people like you and me, having followed government’s advice and putting homeownership before all, being screwed by the recession and a sheep-like belief that home-ownership is the holy grail.
Secondly. Generation rent don’t rent as a first choice, they rent as the ONLY thing available to them, which, by definition, is no choice at all. That’s the whole point of the ‘Generation rent’ label. It doesn’t make them happy. ASTs, with all the insecurity they bring puts paid to that. Landlords are happy with ASTs because it provides the safety valve they crave against nightmare tenants, and I totally understand that, but for tenants ASTs are debilitating and depressing.
Finally I agree with you about many landlords taking on responsibilities. These amateur landlords don’t understand what they are getting into. Amateurism is the curse of the PRS, apart from portfolio landlords and decent agents it is be-dogged by clueless participants, tenants/landlords and agents who don’t understand the legal processes that underpin what they are doing who then, as you say ‘Bleat’ about unfairness. Landlords, tenants and agents are all guilty of this.
In the interests of brevity my thoughts were not as clear as they might have been.
People WERE spending the difference on holidays, and renting COULD (SHOULD?) BE the first choice for ‘Generation rent’.
The free-loaders (holidays and cars) were mainly among home owners. The phenomenon among B2Letters was leveraging mortgages on perceived increases in value. Both were based on often dubious valuations.
As for the durability of ASTs – I’m afraid you only have to look back to the 1988 Act to see the benefit of a Section 21. Remove that and the PRS will disappear as fast as an auctioner’s hammer can knock them out.
No rent plus No possession, and we’ll be back to the re-po days of yesteryear.
I’m sorry you see the results of rapacious lenders and I’m sure there are many deserving cases. But most decent lenders are staying their hand while values are depressed and don’t want to flood the market.
We both try to work for improved standards and I for one would like tenants to take more care before they sign on the dotted. Secondhand car salesmen get a harder time than a dodgy landlord!
Loads of god points there Alan.
“People WERE spending the difference on holidays”. Some were but by no means all, and even those that were, did so because a pre-recession government encouraged them to do so, saying, in essence, ‘you never had it so good’. Therein lies the difference between austerity thinking, which has become the understandable norm of our age and the previous championing of Keynesian Economics, which people have forgotten, spending our way out of a recession. I’m not an economist; I have no idea what is the best solution. All I can do is quote Alf Garnett “I’ve lived under 13 different governments and I’ve been bloody broke under all of them” haha
And yeah I get your point about ASTs. I have the advantage of having started working in night shelters before the advent of ASTs. Yes, properties were lying empty because of too much tenant friendly legislation. ASTs certainly did encourage people to get into landlording. My question is, and I admit I don’t have a definitive answer. Can we not have a system that suits everyone in it? Why can landlords only be happy only when tenants are down? And vice versa.
I do take strong issue with you however that decent lenders are staying their hand in the current climate. They really aren’t. In 3 years I have never been so busy. Just spend a morning in my local county court on a repossession day and you would lose that fallacy. It’s a knives out, dog eat dog world there and people are losing their homes when they don’t have to.
I have 48 live cases. As a TRO they should mainly be landlord tenant/harassment/illegal eviction jobs but of those 48 cases 37 are mortgage cases, fighting to save their homes, put in the worst position when they don’t even need to be there for want of some informed advice.
Ben – How dare you talk about someone you have never met like that. Cllr Taylor worked as an unpaid councillor for 31 years to help the people of Lewisham. You seem to think he should have either faked a south london accent to fit in, or kept to his own class. And for the record, Cllr Taylor lives in Catford and attends church weekly in Deptford.
He was also a staunch defender of low rise housing at a time when high rise was all the rage. Don’t take my word for it, maybe try his book ‘The Village in The City’, which attacks the high rise planners that you think he is. http://vads.ac.uk/diad/article.php?title=296&year=1973&article=d.296.43
You should not be so vehement about people you are so ignorant of.
@ Chris – Ben did not name any planners in his post and was discussing a TV program.
I have not watched the program at the time of writing this, but it is always possible that the program makers may have misrepresented the people they profiled.
Have you watched the program?
Chris what I resented about Cllr Manners was that like planners across the UK at that time, from Plymouth to Newcastle, their enthusiasm for knocking down the old to make way for the new took precedence over the wishes of the community itself.
The Secret Streets edition on Deptford was on that very point and raised the issue that Reginald Street was full of decaying, run down properties. A view that was not borne out by the individual reports carried out by field officers. And the other street earmarked for demolition under the same plan and on the same thinking continues to thrive almost 50 years later.
The programme interviewed the people of Deptford about that period in time and nobody was happy with what happened and felt it had done damage to the community.
I appreciate that Cllr Manners was not acting to deliberately destroy the wider community, I’m sure he had the best intentions but in my book and many others, they were mis-placed intentions and the people of Deptford knew that at that time, as did the people of Plymouth, Sheffield etc but nobody listened.
What surprised me is that 40-50 years later he still held fast to the view that it was the best and right thing to do. He was working in planning when this kind of thinking was largely rejected in favour of the concept of Community Regeneration, a planning philosophy that incorporates the way that people interact with each other and their buildings. I’m surprised this didn’t seem to affect his view of what went on prior to that.
I’m sorry if you see this as a personal attack on the man but as I point out twice above, I feel very strongly about what happened to Deptford because it was my home and now, none of my family live there at all, I have no connection with the place and that is in no small part due to the decisions made by planners in the 60s and 70s.
I am aware that he wasn’t a fan of high rise planning. That is evident in Deptford which has very few, just the Milton Court estate and the 3 towers of the Pepys. It wasn’t the high rises that affected the community; it was simply the taking away of large swathes of homes.