The Housing Question No 11: Disasters happen and they walk away

Comparing the Post Office and building safety scandals, the 'catastrophic' health impacts of poor housing and why longer-term mortgages are not a quick fix

Turning a crisis into a drama

What does it take for an issue to break through into the public consciousness in the way that The Post Office scandal has?

The simple answer is a TV drama in prime time with a top-notch cast but it also needs great writing that tells a complex story via well-drawn characters that can resonate emotionally in a way that even the best reporting can’t. Perhaps too ITV can reach the viewers – and therefore the politicians – that other channels can’t.

The scandal had, after all, already been exposed in exhaustive detail over the last 15 years as first Computer Weekly, then Private Eye and then the national media reported the stories of Alan Bates, Jo Hamilton and all the others who were wrongly accused, forced to pay back fictional debts, wrongly imprisoned and/or had their lives ruined.

And that got me thinking about other scandals, particularly about housing, and specifically about the Grenfell tower fire and the wider building safety crisis that followed. Cladding campaigners and Grenfell families have certainly been quick to make the connection.

No two scandals are ever the same: 72 people died after the fire in June 2017, hundreds were displaced from their homes and tens of thousands more felt the wider impact of the building safety crisis; more than 900 sub-postmasters and mistresses were prosecuted because of a faulty IT system, many had their financial future taken away and 236 were wrongly imprisoned.

But there are also underlying similarities between Grenfell, the Post Office and other scandals like Rochdale, Hillsborough and Windrush. All involved bureaucracies that evaded their responsibilities and did not believe what the those affected were telling them, whether they were postmasters, tenants, girls in care, football supporters or people wrongly deported and victimised.

Most have involved painfully slow progress and years of campaigning to establish the facts and get compensation for victims and none yet seen those responsible held to account. There have been TV dramas about the last four. Going back even further, nobody was prosecuted over Aberfan or Ronan Point and a case involving individual and corporate manslaughter charges over the Herald of Free Enterprise collapsed. Attempts to prosecute individuals and companies after disasters have often foundered on the difficulty of proving responsibility and a ‘controlling mind’.

Grenfell is different in that millions witnessed the fire when it happened in 2017. The public inquiry was called the day after and devastating evidence has already emerged but its final report is not expected until later this year. The Metropolitan Police investigation continues and potential criminal charges will be considered after the inquiry’s final report is published. A judge approved a £150 million civil settlement of 900 compensation claims in Spring 2023. As part of the settlement, Grenfell Testimony Week will see bereaved, relatives and survivors speak directly to senior representatives of the companies and organisations involved in hearings next week.

However, the wider building safety scandal has exhibited a similar pattern to the other scandals, with progress followed by inertia and apparent breakthroughs that turn out to come with caveats attached followed by fresh publicity and calls for action.

As Farhad Neda, whose father was killed in the fire, told a press conference organised by the Grenfell Next of Kin group this week (see Guardian report here):

‘What I have noticed in the past years since Grenfell is that once the issue dies down, the government goes back to their old ways … and that has been highlighted with the postmasters. Over the past few years they have been so silent about it and now that it’s come back into the media, they are starting to take action.’

And there are parallels between the different groups of subpostmasters – those wrongly convicted, those who sued, those pressured into confessing and paying back money – and the different groups of leaseholders who may or may not be compensated depending on their circumstances and the height of their building.

Perhaps things will change in the wake of Mr Bates vs the Post Office. The extraordinary decision to exonerate the convicted subpostmasters en masse certainly sets a precedent. There will also be immense pressure to bring charges against and recover money from individuals and organisations involved and the impact of that could be felt in other scandals.

However, we knew for years before the ITV drama was broadcast who was to blame for the Post Office scandal and little has yet happened to hold them to account apart from one returned CBE.

Responsibility is spread much wider over Grenfell let alone the wider building safety scandal and you’d have thought that pinning down individual people and companies will take longer and be that much harder. But it must happen.

As Shah Aghlani, whose mother and aunt were killed in the fire, told the Grenfell press conference this week:

‘This problem of unaccountability and incompetence among the elite is quite often dismissed or they turn a blind eye to it. They don’t address it. We can see time and time again that people who are in charge and on their watch, disasters happen and they walk away without any consequences.’

Thinking about TV and housing more generally, the obvious comparison with Mr Bates vs the Post Office is Cathy Come Home.

That was a 1966 drama that exposed what was happening to fictional characters rather than to real people but it also led to a public outcry.

In the immediate aftermath, the rules for hostels were at least changed so that husbands could stay with their wives and children but what tends to be forgotten is that it took another 11 years before legislation giving statutory rights to homeless families was passed. And, more than 50 years later, record numbers of them are currently stuck in temporary accommodation and bed and breakfasts.

Action when time allows

ITV, this time ITV News rather than a drama, also played a significant role in exposing the scandal of poor housing, initially in social housing but also in temporary accommodation in the private rented sector.

As above, this was not news to anyone paying attention but the reporting by Daniel Hewitt presented it in a way that demanded attention.

Calls for action became unanswerable in the wake of the death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak from a respiratory condition linked to exposure to mould in his family’s housing association flat in Rochdale. Now the government is consulting on the introduction of Awaab’s Law, which would set strict targets for social landlords to identify and fix major hazards in their properties and allow landlords to be taken to court and ordered to pay compensation.

That is a welcome example of the government acting in the wake of a scandal but it is far from the end of the story.

My column for Inside Housing this week looks at a report published by the all-party Health and Social Care Committee on Friday that calls for the same safeguards to be extended to the private renters.

The report highlights what we already know about the health impacts of poor housing. Damp and mould hazards are much more likely in the private rented sector than in social housing. Poor private rented housing costs the NHS £2 billion a year at a conservative estimate before you start to consider the health impacts of housing insecurity and overcrowding.

The government has promised a new Decent Homes Standard, pledged to extend it to the private rented sector and set a target to halve the number of non-decent social and private rented homes by 2030.

The MPs say the government must act now to protect tenants from the ‘catastrophic’ health impacts of poor housing. Yet in what looks like a classic example of the bureaucratic inertia I highlighted above, action on private rented homes is promised ‘when parliamentary time allows’.

Will longer-term mortgages really fix it?

Longer-term mortgages are the big new housing idea from Rachel Reeves. The shadow chancellor wants to see a ‘cultural shift’ towards the sort of mortgages fixed for 25 or 30 years that are common in the United States and other countries and sees them as a way of helping people to buy with smaller deposits lower monthly payments.

Or rather big old housing idea, one pushed by Gordon Brown that appeared in the 2007 housing green paper and (as I said in The Housing Question No 10) also said to be one of the options for a Tory ‘big offering on housing’ ahead of the election.

The barrier, then as now, is adapting it to the different institutional structure of a UK mortgage market characterised by competition to lend and shorter-term fixes.

The US mortgage market relies on federal guarantees delivered through institutions (Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae) established as part of the New Deal in the 1930s.

However, Reeves told The Times that she was unwilling to see the taxpayer underwrite lenders to offer long-term fixes and wants the industry to make the shift itself.

Without that, it’s hard to see long-term fixed rates being cheaper than the short-term fixes we already have and equally hard to see many borrowers choosing them.

Even if it did work, though, the idea would only increase the amount of mortgage credit chasing a finite supply of housing. Yet again house prices would be boosted in the name of making them more affordable.