In 1866 the Corporation of Liverpool commissioned the building of 146 flats and maisonettes on Ashfield street in the Vauxhall area of the city. Intended to house those that the market would not or could not provide for, St Martin’s Cottages became not only Britain’s, but also Europe’s first council homes. Despite the modest living conditions experienced by tenants, this early experiment in municipal housing set the tone for a century of council housing delivery in Liverpool and the UK more generally. Following incremental additions to the corporations housing stock towards the turn of the century and a flurry of inter-war slum clearances, it was post 1945 that council house building took off in Liverpool as well as the rest of the UK. 

Reaching a climax in the early 1980s Liverpool City Council had 60,000 homes in its possession, contributing to 31% of total tenure split nationwide. Fast forward 30 years or so to 2008 and Liverpool City Council had no council homes in its possession, following years of Right to Buy sales and stock transfers to Housing Associations. Currently the council has 6 properties in its possession, representing a cumbersome legacy of New Labour’s Housing Market Renewal Initiative, that aimed to revitalise the housing market in neighbourhoods considered ‘left behind’. Soon enough the Pathfinder Programme, as it was also known, was also left behind as funding was cut leaving the council with the 6 properties it currently possesses today. 

The fact that the only properties in possession of the council are the result of local budget cuts raises a hint of irony, especially considering the budget cuts local authorities have had to contend with since the 2008 global financial crisis, to aid ‘recovery’ through austerity. In the five years between 2010 and 2015 the Department for Local Government and Communities lost over half of its funding, rendering many municipal services defunct. At the same time there has been a growing acceptance amongst a broad assemblage of people in the UK that we are now in the midst of a housing crisis. This has led some to talk of a double crisis currently involving local authorities in the UK: the crisis of austerity and the housing crisis [1]. 

Whilst the cause of todays housing crisis is complex and multifaceted, the practicalities are that demand is rapidly outpacing supply, especially regarding the provision of affordable housing. With much of the responsibility for social housing now beyond the scope of local government, it has now fallen on third (and increasingly the private) sector Housing Associations to provide for those who require rates outside of the market. Though the majority of Housing Associations are run as not-for profit enterprises, organised around a set of socially oriented core values; there is increasing evidence to suggest that not only are they incorporating the management techniques of corporate finance into their operations [2], the associations themselves have been absorbed into the web of global finance [3]. This seriously calls into question how the core values of housing associations can be reconciled with the politics of global finance

The blame for the current housing situation can not be placed solely at the feet of housing associations who in the face of minimal funding from central government have turned to alternative sources. Yet the story is a familiar one, just as in 1866 the market is failing to provide for the most vulnerable in society.

References

Ben Clifford & Janice Morphet (2022) Local authorities doing it for themselves: austerity, the direct provision of housing and changing central-local relations in England, Local Government Studies, DOI: 10.1080/03003930.2022.2033227

Graham Manville & Richard Greatbanks (2020) Performance Management in Hybrid Organisations: A Study in Social Housing. European Management Journal 38, no. 3: 533–45. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2020.04.006.

Thomas Wainwright & Graham Manville (2017) Financialization and the Third Sector: Innovation in Social Housing Bond Markets. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 49, no. 4: 819–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X16684140.