Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

Several thousands of tenants on the Leeds Corporation housing estates are preparing to resist a new scheme of rent payments, the details of which were published today. It is proposed to apply these new rates to all corporation houses; and the extent of the scheme may be gathered from the fact that the socialist party now in power intend to demolish 30,000 houses within the next six years and to build a similar number at an estimated cost of £12,000,000. It is in their programme for the next year to spend at least £1,150,000 on slum clearances and rebuilding. The new method of rent payment, which has become widely known as the “means test rent,” implies that the poorer tenant will get off at a much reduced rental, or with no rent at all, while those tenants in better circumstances will have their rents much increased. In the detailed proposals, issued today, instances are given that where a person is able to pay a higher rent it will be practically doubled. For instance, a three-bedroomed non-parlour house, the present rent of which is 6s. 6d., will be raised to 11s. a week, exclusive of rates. The suggested economic rents will come into force on April 2, and within the next few days all the tenants on the various housing estates will receive notification to this effect. If a tenant feels he is entitled to what is described as “public assistance” by way of rent relief, he furnishes information concerning the full family income, and a small sub-committee will decide on the amount of rent relief, if any. The affected tenants are amalgamating to hold a special meeting of protest and to formulate some plans to resist the new scale.

Comment

Comment

See Quintin Bradley for the fate of the basically two-week rent strike against the Differential Rent Scheme of Leeds Council’s housing policy sub-committee, whose chairman and ubiquitous public face was the socialist vicar of Holbeck, Charles Jenkinson:

Driven from their former allegiance by this attack on their privileges, the tenants of the first council estates rebelled against their socialist leaders. In the process they created a new recognisable political movement: a movement which plays a major role in housing policy today… Far from being a creation of the privileged artisan class, as it is traditionally portrayed, the tenants movement was born out of a class identity crisis. The first tenants associations aimed to impose cohesion on a section of the working class which was disintegrating under immense social pressures.

[…]

“The whole system seems to be turning round,” said T.H. Gilberthorpe, president of the Leeds Federation of Municipal Tenants Associations… “One has sympathy with people who have fallen on hard times but why should the burden of their rent fall only on other municipal tenants? Why not ratepayers?”

(Bradley )

Bradley’s use of the word aspirational in the following isn’t necessarily wrong, but the aspiration, perhaps above all others, to live in a council house does form an amusing contrast with the Thatcherite vision of the aspirational working class embodied in her right-to-buy policy:

The general needs housing built between 1919 and 1930 created mixed communities of council estates, catering principally for the skilled and semi-skilled working class, who were aspirational – in both political, social and economic terms. (Bradley )

The test case put up by the LFMTA used their secretary, J.R. Jenkinson (no relation of the Red Rev.), who lived on the Greenthorpe state in Bramley and saw his rent go from 9s. 8d to 13s. 11d., and who, in another article in The Times which now eludes me, is said, presumably on the basis of information provided by C. Jenkinson or an associate, to be quite wealthy. He lost on appeal in October 1934. Bradley again:

The first council tenants to move onto the Hawksworth Wood estate in 1920 all brought their pianos with them (YEP 1 June 1920)… The piano crops up again as a symbol in the middle of the 1934 rent strike. Federation secretary, James Jenkinson is seeking to expose the effect of rent differentials on workers with a war disability; the trades he uses as an case study are those of a piano tuner and a piano teacher (YP April 5 1934). There were no piano teachers or tuners on Jenkinson’s Greenthorpe estate so why did he chose this example? Perhaps he was writing in the front room by the piano – we’ll never know.

Major elements of the housing programme included the Quarry Hill flats and the garden suburbs of Belle Isle and Gipton. It is alleged in various places that better-off tenants subsidised poorer ones directly through the rent pool, but the Rev. Jenkinson was quick to deny this at the time in The Times (Jenkinson 1934/02/24).

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Original

“MEANS TEST” RENTS AT LEEDS
OPPOSITION BY MANY TENANTS
FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT.
LEEDS, FEB. 18

Several thousands of tenants on the Leeds Corporation housing estates are preparing to resist a new scheme of rent payments, the details of which were published to-day. It is proposed to apply these new rates to all Corporation houses; and the extent of the scheme may be gathered from the fact that the Socialist Party now in power intend to demolish 30,000 houses within the next six years and to build a similar number at an estimated cost of £12,000,000. It is in their programme for the next year to spend at least £1,150,000 on slum clearances and rebuilding. The new method of rent payment, which has become widely known as the “means test rent,” implies that the poorer tenant will get off at a much reduced rental, or with no rent at all, while those tenants in better circumstances will have their rents much increased.

In the detailed proposals, issued to-day, instances are given that where a person is able to pay a higher rent it will be practically doubled. For instance, a three-bedroomed non-parlour house, the present rent of which is 6s. 6d., will be raised to 11s. a week, exclusive of rates. Three-bedroomed flats, which are now 4s. 9d. a week exclusive of rates, will be raised to 8s. 8d., and so on. The suggested economic rents will come into force on April 2, and within. the next few days all the tenants on the various housing estates will receive notification to this effect.

If a tenant feels he is entitled to what is described as “public assistance” by way of rent relief, he furnishes information concerning the full family income, and a small sub-committee will decide on the amount of rent relief, if any. The affected tenants are amalgamating to hold a special meeting of protest and to formulate some plans to resist the new scale.

It is also announced to-day that the Corporation Housing Committee is to tackle at once the demolition of 1,214 houses in the Marsh Lane district and to convert 500 acres of land in the Moortown residential district into a new housing estate. The slum area concerned is where the present Archbishop of Canterbury (Dr. Lang) lived when he was a curate at the Leeds Parish Church.

397 words.

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• Affordable housing (3) ·
• Back-to-back house (4) ·
• Class conflict (11) ·
• Conservative Party (1834-) (22) ·
• Council house (1) ·
• Eviction (1) ·
• Garden city movement (1) ·
• Hawksworth, Leeds (1) ·
• 📌Holbeck (9) ·
• Housing Act 1930 (1) ·
• Jenkinson, Charles (1887-1949) (1), Church of England clergyman, housing reformer, Leeds councillor ·
• Labour Party (UK) (17) ·
• Leeds City Council (32) ·
• 📌Leeds (235) ·
• Margaret Thatcher (3) ·
• Means test (1) ·
• Public housing in the United Kingdom (1) ·
• Quarry Hill, Leeds (2) ·
• Rent strike (1) ·
• Slum clearance in the United Kingdom (1) ·
• Slum clearance (5) ·
• Slum (4) ·
• Tenants union (1) ·
• Terraced house (1) ·
• Terraced houses in the United Kingdom (1) ·

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