The Observer view on the Stirling prize-winning Goldsmith Street

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/13/observer-view-on-stirling-prize-winning-goldsmith-street

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The award of the Stirling prize to Goldsmith Street in Norwich has rightly been hailed as an affirmation of the essential role of well-designed council housing in modern Britain. For the prize, given by the Royal Institute of British Architects to the best building project of the year, has gone to an enclave of homes for rent at affordable prices, with secure tenancies, built by Norwich city council.

Designed by the architects Mikhail Riches with Cathy Hawley, it is built to exceptionally high environmental standards, with energy bills about 70% lower than average. Its layout aims to maximise the outdoor space available to children and pedestrians, with cars kept to the edge of the site. It is thoughtful, humanly scaled and well detailed. It also, unlike some council housing of the past, does not set itself apart, or mark out its residents as different kinds of citizens from everyone else. It is a piece of a city like many others.

Goldsmith Street is part of a resurgence in council housing in recent years. If in the postwar years it was seen as the principal means of addressing housing need, Margaret Thatcher’s government effectively ended it. At the same time, her introduction of the right of council tenants to buy their homes progressively reduced the existing stock. Now, albeit within borrowing and spending rules set by central government, some local authorities are picking up where their predecessors stopped more than a generation ago. Many of these are in London, where the high values of land already owned by councils helps them to fund housing.

In relation to the country’s continuing and huge housing problems, which are matters of both price and availability, it is now widely recognised that council housing, alongside housing associations and private housebuilders, has a significant role to play. Conservative politicians can sometimes be heard to speak in favour of council housing, which is a remarkable transformation.

But there is very much more to be done. The 105 homes in Goldsmith Street took 12 years from inception to completion, partly because of the complex ways that local authorities have to operate, compounded by the 2008 crash. According to the National Housing Federation, which represents the country’s housing associations, England needs 145,000 new “social homes” per year. The precise level of such figures is always debatable, but the scale of the problem is not much in doubt to the millions who experience its effects.

What is needed is for the issue to be addressed with considerably more determination and belief than has so far been the case. Government policy has been one of mild encouragement towards local authorities, combined with occasional knockbacks. Last week, for example, it was announced that finance from the public works loan board (PWLB), through which the Treasury lends money to local authorities, would now cost an additional 1% in interest. Sharon Taylor, the leader of Stevenage council – and there are many others who feel the same – said that this “trashed” its plans for building housing.

In its public pronouncements, including at its recent conference, the Conservative party continues to emphasise the expansion of home ownership, the issue that proved electorally potent for them in the 1980s. They want housing association tenants to be able to buy their homes. They continue to promote their help-to-buy policy of government loans to home buyers, which, in at least some parts of the country, has had the self-defeating effect of pushing up prices.

It is of course desirable that home ownership should be as available as possible to those who want it, but it is not the most pressing housing issue facing the country, compared with the exclusion of many families and individuals from an acceptable home, of whatever tenure. Goldsmith Street shows what can be done. The danger is that it will be a rare exception. The challenge is to ensure that this model is followed many times over, wherever there is housing need.