Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [372]
The most difficult aspect of the package seemed likely to be the higher council rents, which would also mean much higher state spending on housing benefit. More people on housing benefit means more welfare dependency; on the other hand, it seemed better to provide help with housing costs through benefit than through subsidizing the rents of local authority tenants indiscriminately. Moreover, the higher rents paid by those not on benefit would provide an added incentive for them to buy their homes and escape from the net altogether.
These reforms will need time to produce results. But the new arrangements for housing revenue accounts are applying a beneficial new discipline to local authorities. And deregulation of the private rented sector will increase the supply of rented housing gradually, as ideological hostility to private landlordism recedes.* But I have to say that I had expected more from ‘tenants’ choice’ and from HATs. The obstacle to both was the same: the deep-rooted hostility of the Left to the improvement and enfranchisement of those who lived in the ghettoes of dependency which they controlled. The propaganda against ‘tenants’ choice’, however, was as nothing compared with that directed against HATs and, sadly, the House of Lords gave the Left the opportunity they needed.
Their lordships amended our legislation to require that a HAT could only go ahead if a majority of eligible tenants voted for it. This would have been an impossibly high hurdle, given the apathy of many tenants and the intimidation of the Left. We finished up by accepting the principle of a ballot, limiting it to the requirement of a majority of those voting. In the summer of 1988 Nick Ridley announced proposals to set up six HATs, of which — after receiving consultants’ reports — he decided to go ahead with four in Lambeth, Southwark, Sunderland and Leeds. I later saw some of the propaganda by left-wing tenants’ groups — strongly backed by the trade unions — which showed how effective their campaigns had been to spread alarm among tenants who were now worried about what would happen when they moved out as their flats were refurbished and about levels of rents and security of tenure. One would never have guessed that we were offering huge sums of taxpayers’ money — it would probably have worked out at £100 million a HAT — to improve the conditions of people living in some of the worst housing in the country. Accordingly, the proposals for HATs in Sunderland, Sandwell, Lambeth, Leeds and finally Southwark had to be dropped, though we knew that a number of local authorities — even Labour-controlled ones — would have liked to obtain access to the HATs money if they could have overcome the opposition of the militants. As a result, no HATs were set up while I was Prime Minister, though three have been since I left office.
FURTHER STEPS IN HOUSING POLICY
By the time of the July 1989 reshuffle the problems with the implementation of our 1987 manifesto housing reforms were all too apparent and it was clear that we should take stock and seek new ways of achieving our objectives. Unfortunately, in Chris Patten as the new Environment Secretary I had someone whose energies were principally (and rightly) directed at trying to smooth out the introduction of the community charge and who in any case was less interested in housing policy than in his other departmental responsibilities. This is not, though, to say that innovative thinking had come to a halt.
Since the spring of 1988 Peter Walker in Wales had been pressing a scheme which he christened