So, in part one, some ideas were soft pedalled. To some readers it may not have seemed much like it. What they're likely to be feeling now is an almost uniquely contemporary shock. It comes with recognition that you're unprepared for what has already happened.
Ignoring, carrying on as usual, in service to surveillance capitalism’s feudal overlords, every energy you have either deployed in pursuit of the most basic needs, or, doom scrolling as you succumb to a near permanent state of futility and ‘oh-dearism’ is not a future facing option. Neither is ‘influencing’ or ‘creating’, dependent on compromised data or funding, advertising or global streaming platform revenues. That would make you ‘dancers at the end of time’, engaged in a futile onanism particular to our ever present ‘now’.
There have been societal and cultural moments in the past leading to similar shocks, collectively and individually. Some were indeed existential. None, in terms of human record and effect, concerned planetary collapse or a quickening inability of earth's ecosystems to support life as we know it.
It is possible to wake up to the fact that the world has changed irrevocably, to take stock and adjust accordingly. We are still, just, at the beginning of discontinuity signalled by that change.
Over the next decade or so, disasters and major climate events will multiply exponentially, in frequency and severity. Currently, apparently prosperous, thriving places will begin to fail. Access to any kind of finance or insurance will shift massively, becoming available only to those with most resources. Many of them will have become accumulated through practises, both actively and adjacent or dependent on that activity, by contributing to causing the planetary crises we all now must face.
Tens of millions of people will become climate migrants, moving away from immediate danger, in search of safety. Adding those numbers to those most able to choose, to exercise more agency because they have the resources, the means, will squeeze the availability of relatively safe places.
As the worsening crises accelerate - and all evidence indicates they will - the resulting chaos will sink deeply into every system upon which our lives depend.
It won't be the end of the world. It will be the end of an era when we could treat the crises as distant problems, happening at a remove, out there. Away from our daily lives, our families, friends, communities and what were our previous prioritised concerns. Planetary crises, of absolute necessity, will become the new central context of our lives.
It's true, like it or not. No matter what we do, how or where we live, all of it, right now, has been placed squarely in a context of planetary and societal discontinuity.
We face unprecedented changes, unfolding at disruptive speeds, undermining the usefulness of old assumptions, experience and expertise. We are all being forced, by the planet upon which all life depends, to ask ourselves, individually and collectively, tough questions about our futures.
Some have been asking themselves those same questions since the planet began responding to our industry and capital led abuses. We can place these early adopters as increasingly emerging alongside awareness of the Anthropocene era or epoch.
The Anthropocene is an interval of geologic time, making up the third worldwide division of the Quaternary Period (2.6 million years ago to the present). It is characterised as the time in which collective activities of human beings began to substantially alter Earth's surface, atmosphere, oceans and systems of nutrient cycling.
Its name is derived from Greek and means ‘recent age of man’ (of course a less gendered definition would be ‘recent age of humans’ but the literal translation depends upon the Greek for ‘man’, ‘anthropos’, used interchangeably for ‘human’, in the same way it was and remains common for some people to refer to ‘mankind‘, rather than the more accurate ‘humankind’). It is becoming an increasingly accepted fact, in relevant scientific fields, that the Anthropocene Epoch should follow the Holocene Epoch.
Although American biologist Eugene Stoermer coined the term in the late 1980s, Dutch chemist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen is largely credited with bringing public attention to it at a conference in 2000. In 2008, UK based geologist Jan Zalasiewicz and colleagues made the first proposal to adopt the Anthropocene Epoch as a formal geological interval.
In 2016 the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Union of Geologic Sciences (IUGS) voted to recommend the Anthropocene as a formal geologic epoch at the 35th International Geological Congress.
Changes in rock strata and the makeup of fossils they contained are used to mark the boundaries between such formal epochs. Throughout Earth's history, periods of upheaval characterised by mass extinctions, changes in sea level and ocean chemistry, and relatively rapid changes in prevailing climate patterns are captured in layers of rock.
Further formalisation of the Anthropocene depends upon whether effects of humans on Earth are substantial enough to eventually appear in rock strata.
By its very nature, geology depends on hindsight over long periods. The 2016 recommendation by IUGS acknowledges that by the time human effects on earth are likely to show up in strata, it may just be too late for humans, if not for the planet. Current geologic science, on the balance of all probabilities derived from evidence available, indicates an extremely high likelihood. The recommendation, as a break from general protocol, was not made lightly.
A vast majority of scientists agree the human collective influence on earth and its life supporting systems was relatively small prior to the Industrial Revolution, during the 18th century. Technological advancements since then have made it possible for humans to effect widespread changes to those systems.
In that, in the relatively recent past and present, human beings have had, are having, a profound influence over Earth's surface, atmosphere, oceans and biogeochemical nutrient cycling. By 2005, humans had converted nearly two-fifths of earth's land area for agriculture. An additional one-tenth of that land area was given over to urban areas by the same time.
All data and evidence available indicates that humans have harvested or controlled roughly 1/4 to 1/3 of biomass produced by the world's terrestrial plants on a yearly basis since the 1990s. This huge and sweeping control can largely be attributed to the development of a method of industrial nitrogen fixation called the Haber-Bosch process.
Created in the 1900s by German chemist Fritz Haber and later refined by another German chemist Carl Bosch, this process synthesises ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen under high temperatures and pressures. It is then used in fertilisers and munitions.
Industrialization of the process increased the amount of ‘usable’ nitrogen in the atmosphere by 150%. This has greatly increased crop yields and, alongside other technological advances, facilitated an exponential rise in the world's human population. This rose from around 1.6-1.7 billion in 1900 to 7.4 billion in 2016.
As human population surged, energy use increased. Energy derived from wood and increasingly easily obtained fossil fuels expanded concomitantly. Carbon dioxide released in preindustrial times was dwarfed by the amounts released through industrial furnaces, boilers, power plants, petrol and diesel-powered vehicles and concrete production during the 20th and early 21st centuries.
In the 1950s, climate scientists began to track the annual increase in average global carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. This rose from approximately 316 parts per million by volume (ppmv) in 1959 to 390 ppmv a half century later.
Alarm bells rang loud and clear. The build up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere contributed, is contributing, to global rises in average surface temperature. This led to, is leading to, loss of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, break up of ice shelves along the Antarctic peninsula, reduction in size and overall melt of glaciers, disruptive changes in prevailing weather patterns and increasingly more frequent extreme weather events across the globe.
Compounding this, the oceans absorbed much of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by human activities. This has driven the process of ocean acidification.
Marine scientists have observed a 30% continuing and growing increase in ocean acidity from the industrial revolution to 2010. Continued increases are slowing, will slow, and eventually cease coral reef construction around the world. It is dissolving, will dissolve, the shells and skeletons of molluscs and corals. It is interfering, will continue to interfere, with metabolic processes of larger marine animals.
Since coral reefs are hubs of biodiversity, the loss of coral will contribute, is contributing, to the demise of multitudes of other marine species, either directly, through habitat loss, or indirectly, through changes in food chains. Other human induced changes to the hydrosphere, as an integral part of the biosphere all life (and yes, human, that means you too) depends upon include damming and diversion of rivers and streams, rapid extraction of groundwater from freshwater aquifers and the creation of large oxygen depleted areas around the mouths of rivers.
These changes will create unique signatures in layers of rock. As well as ann increased rate of soil erosion from intensive agriculture and land use conversion. Rising sea waters, as glaciers and polar ice melt, will change the stratigraphy by submerging low lying areas, allowing the ocean to deliver sediment further inland than it did previously or does at present.
As sea water pH levels decline, the depth at which carbonate minerals form in the ocean will be more shallow than it was during preindustrial eras. Many pre-existing carbonate formations will dissolve, are dissolving, leaving a signature of striking dark layers of carbon depleted rock.
By far the most significant evidence of the Anthropocene in rock strata is being, will be, caused by a dramatic increase in both land and sea species extinctions.The rate of extinctions occurring since the middle of the 20th century has been more than 1000 times that of the pre industrial era, comparable to the pace of other mass extinctions occurring earlier in earth's history.
This rapid extinction rate stems from the continuing conversion of forests and other natural areas to industrial agricultural and urban usage, as well as accelerated climate change resulting from wider alterations to the carbon cycle. As a result, there will be stark differences in the fossils found in layers of rock deposited worldwide.
In 1945 the first human generated radioactive particles, following the first atomic bomb tests and subsequent bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, appeared in the geologic record. Although radioactive particles were produced at smaller scales before then, it was not until that year they occurred in amounts significant enough to appear in soil samples around the world.
The same year signalled the beginning of what is referred to by scientists, sociologists and anthropologists as ‘the Great Acceleration’. This is the post war ‘boom’ period, typified by exponential growth in human populations, fossil fuel use, water use, industrial food production, international communication and pace of land use conversion.
In 2016, the Anthropocene Working Group included in their recommendation that the year 1950 should serve as the starting point of how the geologic interval is measured. Ultimately, this was based on unanimous agreement that by this point in Earth's history, plutonium isotopes, caused by nuclear weapons fallout, would be concentrated enough to serve as an observable signal in rock strata.
Now, we do not have the luxury of hindsight from future observations of rock strata. As the quickening drum beat of heat waves, mega fires, wild storms and massive floods warn us, human created climate chaos is not a future threat, it is a present reality. Without question, things will get worse, quick.
Of course, we should do all we can to limit the magnitude of destruction we've set in motion and in which we are all complicit. No matter what we do together, we cannot avoid the consequences of decades long inaction. We each face a lifetime of unprecedented, rapid change.
None of us can afford to plan our futures as if all this upheaval wasn't happening. Inattention and cognitive dissonance, however prevalent, is about to become very costly.
Few of us are ready. We can, however, learn quickly how to make ourselves ready. The time to act, to prepare for the accelerating discontinuities of planetary crisis, of the Anthropocene, is now. The best way individuals, families, communities can do that is to ruggedise their lives. Quick, smart.
Climate ruggedisation refers to risk reduction and capacity increasing strategies to cope with accelerating climate change and system collapse. Personal ruggedisation refers to making important decisions with a realistic understanding of planetary risks, to increase chances of survival, even genuine success.
Personal ruggedisation means thinking realistically about where and how we choose to live. About systems we create or embed ourselves in. About the ways we work, practically, personally, with other humans, other species, flora and fauna, to improve our odds of a good future, or any future at all.
Intelligent, optimistic, purpose driven engagement with deep and overwhelming uncertainties. And it is the only way we can genuinely make ourselves at home on a rapidly changing planet none of us, no humans ever, have seen before.
There are no ‘right’ answers to questions raised when we think about the deep uncertainties of a human future. It is not possible to tick some boxes, pick a climate haven and move on.
There is no easy formula for living through a never-before-experienced climate and biosphere transformation. Anyone offering simple answers doesn't understand the questions.
No one can tell you exactly what to do. No one is coming to save you.
But we can help each other to start. So we can build capacities to not only survive but possibly thrive in the discontinuities and uncertainties.
There are tools to be shared, for seeing patterns amidst the chaos, for distinguishing rapid change from catastrophic doom, for planning intelligently as the world becomes literally unpredictable. They can be used to make sense of the crises and the choices they demand of you. They can reframe your future.
Some are old, reclaimed and repurposed. Some are brand new, borne of necessity.
Of course, we all have pressing, day-to-day demands, what we feel the need to prioritise based on choices we made previously. By and large, those past choices are wholly irrelevant now.
It may be, reading this two-part post, some readers are feeling a little defensive of those choices. Perhaps rightly, or at least inevitably so. Whilst reactions and being reactionary, in compound circumstance, are understandable, they are, regardless, not responses or responsiveness.
Amidst defensive reactions, of course, you may experience a compounding knee jerk tendency – ‘naw, you’re irrelevant, your reactionary!’ etc. This too is understandable, could even be attributed to moving through stages of grief. Please, dear reader, fellow human, don’t allow yourself to deny us all a future by remaining stuck in denial.
Attempting to avoid defeatist loops of rhetoric and debate, a self-fulfilling race to the bottom, an ad infinitum loop of ‘naw, you are’, ‘naw YOU are’ exchanges, it is worth thinking preemptively, in the interest of moving quickly beyond them. Not least, so genuine practical considerations and actions can follow.
Where some key concepts, referred to previously herein, may indeed appear irrelevant (or, at least opaque, in terms of what relevance they may have to you) - vernacular architecture, tiny house movement, climate migrants – they are, in fact, wholly relevant and central to forward planning and discontinuity mitigation. To understand why and how doesn't take too much of a credulity or general thinking stretch.
Planetary crisis, by its very nature, is a global phenomenon. But, as discussed previously herein, it is not a distant or abstract concept. It is very real and right here, in our daily, localised lives.
Here in Angus, the storm flood battered residents of Brechin, discussed in more depth here, largely built on a floodplain, know this all too well. Evacuated from their homes and businesses, some unable to return permanently, their focus, beyond initial incredulity, inevitably had to be on practical needs.
Shelter, temporary - possibly with other more permanent considerations to be made too - accommodation, food, clothing and access to work, so financing the other concerns could remain a viable possibility. They may not have realised, temporarily housed with family, friends or neighbours in surrounding localities, fretting over what to do in response, that their actions were those of displaced climate migrants.
As some were exposed to the harsh realities of what they could only hope was temporary homelessness, replete with the market predictions of rentierism-based financial extraction and real estate markets, more than adequately symbolised by private landlords and housing, the gap between social housing and private rents exposed, some took necessary, radical, practical action. They were supported by immediate and equally radical, in changed and extreme circumstances, short term intervention and support from surrounding communities. Soup kitchens, charitable donations of yes, money but also food and clothing, bedrooms freed up and offered, other offers made of work from local businesses too.
Even provided with these mitigations, for some there was no option but to get creative and practical in terms of finding or providing temporary shelter. For some of those, this may simply have meant tents in local woodlands, begged, borrowed or previously owned campers and caravans or otherwise hastily erected shelters, using whatever could be found.
In one instance, this blog knows of (and likely not to be the only one), a mother of two, single parent, attempting to save as much as she could of her and her children's belongings, some of the things which made their house a home, putting them into storage in a borrowed shipping container, made the decision to turn it into a temporary home.
Unwittingly she had also become, as had so many others in their necessary, practical sheltering arrangements, both homeless and inadequately housed, as well as part of the tiny house movement. They had also, however little they were aware, become proponents of vernacular architecture.
Despite the architecture reference, this term has been largely appropriated by contemporary architects, also subject to market predations, from archaeological and anthropological fields. In this way, it has, by and large, become dissociated from its original context. This is given pitch perfect contextualisation, for Scotland and more localised areas, by Rhoda Meek, here.
Viewing the vernacular through an anthropological lens becomes necessary, if there is (oh, and there is!) a need to contemplate appropriate architecture and design for different environments, to cope with rapid and quickening cultural, societal transformation, to introduce new (sometimes drawing upon old) approaches which can be applied to design processes. Practical responses to this view, in an academic sense, aim at encouraging attempts of return to vernacular architecture, of different societies and cultures, and its vocabularies.
Architectural historian Paul Oliver, well known for the three volume 1997 ‘Encyclopaedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World’ - the uninspiring title of which does some disservice to Oliver’s rich and varied academic hinterland - just one of many academic studies and books he wrote on the subject, previously a researcher at the Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development, argued that vernacular architecture will be necessary in the then future to ‘ensure sustainability in both cultural and economic terms beyond the short term’. Oliver also argued, in his 2003 book ‘Dwellings’:
‘As yet there is no clearly defined and specialised discipline for the study of dwellings or the larger compass of vernacular architecture. If such a discipline where to emerge it would probably be one that combines some of the elements of both architecture and anthropology with aspects of history and geography.’
Since then, architects have developed a renewed interest in vernacular architecture, some as a model for sustainable design. For others, particularly where planning permission from a local authority may be sought to build in a rural area, it has become merely an additional aesthetic market consideration. It is often described in these circumstances as ‘inspired by the vernacular’’; it is not vernacular architecture.
But therein lies the rub. Even among academics publishing in the field, the boundaries of what constitutes ‘vernacular’, the apparently so simple issue of definition, has proven to be a stubborn issue, not least for advocates of vernacular architecture and landscape design.
In terms of providing shelter or adequate housing, the vernacular, borrowed from linguistics, is connected to its roots, its environment and place of origin. Elements which define its multifarious characteristics are, have always been, based in specificities like culture, climate, topography and often most importantly, availability of materials and resources in any given locality.
Often what are referred to as traditional constructions or building techniques, specific to place, became that way because they were developed by populations, in a wider historical context, based on available resources. In its primary function of sheltering and protecting humans from external dangers and accommodating their daily activities, housing and construction techniques have always evolved. As with so many things viewed through an anthropological lens, traditions become ossified, no longer living and breathing culturally, unless they do.
Many building techniques used in traditional vernacular architecture have evolved, have become enhanced, over time, reconsidered and incorporated into new technologies or changes to available resources. These become fundamental to consideration of economy and sustainability, to how humans build shelters which become homes. Climate has always been relevant to them and becomes even more so in the face of compound environmental crises which signify the Anthropocene.
To some extent, making these responses, incorporating new technologies and changes to available resources, faced with accelerating and unpredictable climate change, is the primary reason for evolution of the term ‘digital vernacular’. This combines contemporary digital design and resource use with traditional vernacular craft.
In terms of appropriate shelter or adequate housing, it is wholly relevant to both personal and collective ruggedisation of our lives when faced with the compound crises of climate change. Often it involves 3D printing, which has evolved far enough so that whole houses and elements of them can be printed, incorporating vernacular styles ‘seamlessly’.
Changing construction parameters of the vernacular, particularly in a contemporary residential context, becomes associated with improving quality of life, especially in relationships with the natural environment. Faced also with housing crises, across cities, regions, states, rethinking construction techniques from a more sustainable perspective has become imperative to residential architecture.
But are they, can they be genuine considerations in terms of local government or state responses? Where are they, in terms of prioritisation, when affordable or social housing quotas are referenced by municipal authorities? Can they be considered separately from issues of ‘ownership’, of structures and land, environments, they must sit upon or within?
Just as vernacular architecture is place specific, so too must be what we consider and refer to as ‘social’ or ‘affordable’ housing. Likewise our perceptions of what they are and how we may have arrived at them.
Of course, they may sound incongruous considerations against a backdrop of bulk house building and ever increasing marketisation of housing as speculative investment. Over a long period of time, this has been enabled by UK government policy, initially inherited by the then newly devolved Scottish Parliament and governing parties there, from 1999 until 2016, when the Scottish Government recognised at least some of its folly and complicity in the increased pace of housing crises.
Technically, across the UK, local authorities had the ability to sell council houses to their tenants, following on from the Housing Act 1936. Until the early 1970s, sales in England were limited and in Scotland virtually nonexistent.
Council housing proliferated across the UK as its constituent nations rebuilt in the post World War Two period. Much of this, as with pretty much all of what we came to consider the ‘social contract’, drew upon the findings of Liberal politician William Beveridge, and what came to be known as ‘The Beveridge Report’.
Officially entitled ‘Social Insurance and Allied Services’, the report became a key part of plans to rebuild and improve after the war. Beveridge found five ‘giants on the road to reconstruction’. These were:
‘want’ - an adequate income for all
‘disease’ - access to healthcare
‘ignorance’ - access to a good education
‘idleness’ - access to gainful employment
‘squalor’ - access to adequate housing
This blog may return to the first four, as well as the inherent conceits in all five, in later posts. For now, the focus is on the last listed here; addressing ‘squalor’ by providing ‘adequate housing’.
Alongside other legislation aimed at tackling ‘the five giants’, as part of what became known as ‘the post war consensus’, following on from a Labour Party landslide victory in the 1945 General Election, Prime Minister Clement Attlee's government of 1945-50 enacted significant pieces of legislation to address ‘squalor’ by providing ‘adequate housing’.
The first of these was the 1946 ‘New Towns Act’. This, alongside later facilitative acts, was aimed at relocating people from poor or bombed out housing. Designated ’new towns’ were placed under the supervision of a Development Corporation and were developed in three waves. Six New Towns in Scotland were designated between 1947 and 1973.
These were East Kilbride (1947), Glenrothes (1948), Cumbernauld (1955), Livingston (1962), Irvine - encompassing the existing settlement of Kilwinning – (1966) and Stonehouse (1973). This last was de-designated in 1976, after fewer than 100 houses had been built.
These New Towns, alongside later developments which came to be known as ‘expanded towns’, mirroring developments elsewhere in the UK, were developed and expanded to accommodate what was referred to as the ‘overspill’ population from densely populated areas of deprivation. In Scotland, this mainly meant Glasgow.
This was also seen as a way to speed up regeneration of industry and employment. It also involved developing or expanding villages as vocational communities.
All of these developments, cumulatively rehoused tens of thousands of people from West Central Scotland. They attracted new industrial and commercial developments and were key sites for modern planning and architecture.
Functions of development were performed by New Town Corporations, rather than by elected local government or municipal authorities. These were supervised by government appointed boards, rather than elected councillors. The corporations were wound up in 1995-96, with their functions transferred to local authorities.
As part of their ‘attack’ on the ‘giant of squalor’, Attlee’s government developed a policy of ‘Homes for All’. Bombing during the war was estimated to have destroyed 500,000 homes, With many more left badly damaged. many other houses, built in prewar periods, desperately needed modernisation. Another estimated 500,000 did not have an indoor toilet in 1950.
The Government attempted to solve these issues by building 1.2 million new homes between 1946 and 1951. Four out of five houses were built by local councils. 156,623 prefabricated houses, known as prefabs, were built in some areas as a quick solution to housing shortage.
‘Homes for All’ came to be seen as a qualified success. Whilst the target of 1.2 million houses to be built by 1951 was not achieved, 800,000 were. Some slums were demolished. Many pre-existing houses were improved by the addition of indoor bathrooms and hot water.
By the early 1950s there was still a perceived shortage of new houses built for sale. There were still waiting lists in urban areas and there were widely held negative attitudes towards prefabs.
Despite any perceived shortcomings, expressed in disgruntled quarters, in achieving its aims, alongside varying contemporaneous, internal and international or geopolitical, ebbs, flows, consolidations and upheavals, the post war consensus held until the 1970s.
Moneyed, landed and political establishment insider classes were if not happy then, at least in public, grudgingly willing to go along with managed or balanced political economy if its emerging structures offered their interests, their pockets, appeasement. It was not a break from but a return to their ‘ancien régime’, when concessions made were issued as patrician like diktat from a centralised politics, focused on Westminster and London.
Economically, the structural design, in terms of the managed surplus and deficit of political union, of the UK, from the 1970s, was for Scotland (and all other regions except London and the southeast) to be in deficit. Or at least that was the plan.
In the late 1970s, de-industrialisation took place across the UK, as neoclassical economists persuaded policymakers that managed surplus and deficit, with transfers between nations and regions, should play a more minor role, as markets led by increasing focus on financial services driven economic sectors took over. Whilst there were concessions, acknowledging some initial pain, by those leading the charge, assurances were offered that market forces would ensure later gain.
It is with varying politicised and economic hindsight, this is now considered along a spectrum of opinion, from wilful naïveté, or wishful thinking, to mendacious lies for personal or political advancement. The truth is, the Trojan horse of personal freedoms, at the core of how neoliberal free market economics were ‘allowed’ to proliferate, set loose again ‘the five giants’, who had been somewhat tamed by post war consensus.
The interconnected nature of these ‘giants’ had profoundly influenced what people perceived as home. How, where and why housing was built or improved to meet changing standards of what was considered ‘adequate’ was fundamental to this.
Likewise, as the post war consensus was attacked and ultimately, in real terms, as any kind of social contract between government and citizen, by the mustering forces of neoliberalism, dissolved, new, managed perceptions emerged. These involved nudges toward acceptance of emerging ‘norms’, in which citizens’ previous perceptions of themselves were shifted toward a now primary function as consumers. Foundational to this was a foregrounding of the ‘Right to Buy’.
Much of how perceptions of what constituted a home or adequate housing were manipulated to fit neoliberal agendas. These manipulations, to a significant extent, were hidden in plain sight.
After Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, in 1979, legislation to implement the Right to Buy was passed in the Housing Act 1980. Michael Heseltine, in the role of Secretary of State for the Environment, was tasked with implementing the Act.
The Act conveyed the ‘right’ onto some six million people. Around one in three purchased their local authority or association housing.
Heseltine asserted that no other ‘single piece of legislation…(had)…enabled the transfer of so much capital wealth from the state to the people’. He also said the Right to Buy had two main objectives: to give people what they wanted (and for this read to give people what they had been led to believe they wanted) and to ‘reverse the trend of ever-increasing dominance of the state over the life of the individual’.
The sale price of a council house was based on its market valuation, discounted initially by between 33% and 50%, or up to 70% for flats. Discounts were said to reflect rents paid by tenants and to encourage take up.
Overall maximum discounts were raised to 60% in 1984 and 70% in 1986. By 1987, more than 1,000,000 council houses across the UK had been sold to their tenants. This was seen as the boom period, with rate of purchase declining thereafter. By 1988, the average discount, which had by then actually been given, was 44%.
Local authorities were obliged by the Act to offer a mortgage with no deposit. Discounts on sale prices applied depended on length of tenancy, with provisos that if a house was subsequently sold within a minimum period, a proportion of the discount would have to be paid back.
Sales were restricted to general needs housing. Adapted properties or those built specifically for older people were exempted from the scheme.
Right to Buy rules changed in 2005. A minimum of five years tenancy was then required for new tenants to qualify. Properties purchased after January 2005 could no longer immediately be placed on the open market, with previous landlords (councils or housing associations) being legislatively required to have right of first refusal. The Financial Conduct Authority had management and regulation of most types of mortgage selling, including those under Right to Buy, conferred upon it.
As the scheme continued, beyond the boom years, criticisms emerged as its social impact was assessed. Speculation was seen as having been integral to it.
Not only were larger and more well funded speculating investors able to buy up council properties, through different transaction agreements, but individual new owners were able to ‘trade up’ when selling, since market values were always higher than initial discounted purchase values. Both contributed to increasing spirals of rising property values, leading to a loop of compounding speculation.
Increasing amounts of former council housing found its way into the hands of private landlords, as speculative investors. By 2013, an average of 36% of homes sold under right to buy were effectively being rented back by councils, who were responsible for an exponentially increasing housing benefits bill.
In now familiar self-replicating loops, this placed more pressure on local authority and housing association waiting lists, leading to more people being forced into the under regulated private rented sector - with over a third of former right to buy houses then in the hands of private landlords.
Commercially and socially valuable public assets, held in common, had been sold at below market value or replacement cost. Not only can this be seen as a particularly immediate imprudent waste of public money, it also placed an ongoing burden on the public purse. Council budgets, strained by increasing payments of housing benefits finding their way into the pockets of speculative investors and private landlords, had increasingly diminished ability to replenish vastly reduced housing stock.
What did remain of council housing stock had become concentrated in areas ‘undesirable’ to speculative markets, further isolating and stigmatising tenants. Among them remained older and disabled people, in adapted housing, excluded from the scheme.
This then had only been a transfer of capital wealth, as continuing market speculation, from the state to some people. Ever increasing dominance of the state (and now also speculative investors and moneyed interests) over the lives of some individuals continued unabated. Stigma and othering of them also continued to increase exponentially.
In 2013, the Scottish Government confirmed Right to Buy would be abolished in Scotland from 2017. It was in fact ended, as part of the Housing (Scotland) Act 2014, from 1st August 2016.
Unfortunately, since then, councils and housing associations have continued to struggle with replenishing housing stock. The Scottish Government, in the face of now seemingly inevitable and ubiquitous market forces, also now perceived by so many as inherent to what housing is and does, have been reduced to mitigating against looming housing crises by loosening regulations around building on brown and green field sites for bulk house-builders, promising ‘acceptable’ percentages of ‘affordable’ housing, to be built alongside others offered at market value. That and providing subsidies for them to do so.
As new houses, built in this manner, with bulk house-builders using cheaper materials and construction methods to maximise profits, begin to near the end of standard affordable mortgage terms, of 25 to 30 years, and degradation of both house and land it sits upon or within takes its toll, owners are and will be faced with the increasingly harsh realities of what makes adequate housing. And what makes it not ‘just’ a home but a safe one, protected against increasingly unpredictable and escalating environmental impacts. What are, or will be, their options?
They may seem increasingly limited in wider contexts.
Last year a housing emergency was declared by Edinburgh City Council, following on from one declared in Argyll and Bute, reflecting deep rooted pressures in the system, extending across Scotland. Glasgow became the second Scottish city to declare the same in November 2023.
With other local authorities ready to or following suit, in May this year, nearly a year after the first of ten so declaring local authorities held up their hands in despair first, the Scottish Government declared a nationwide housing emergency.
Whatever else it means to declare an ‘emergency’, including the urgency with which it is addressed and assessing how it came to this, it is a signal that expectations, however arrived at, are not being met. Perceptions are adjusting (or at least some recognise a need for them to adjust) and things cannot go on how they have.
Council and social housing has been sold off. New building is a long way from replacing it or meeting demand.
So, what can you do, citizen/(reluctant) consumer, as you try to ruggedise your life, faced with this and multifarious other crises? Answers cannot and will not come from the places you may have expected them to, previously. Alternatives, for the willing, however, are available.
The next post from this blog will begin to address some of the practicalities of them. Hopefully, they will give you pause for both thought and action.
Of course, as ever it was with housing and homes, they depend upon equitable access to land (and now, of course, with all necessary things considered, the ‘right’ land), a previously unconsidered or wilfully omitted ‘giant’, worthy of tackling on behalf of any country’s citizens. This will inevitably also be a necessary focus of that next post.
In lieu of it, and of Scotland, with the most inequitable distribution of land ownership of all European (or now former European) states, and its governments seeing sense and adopting in full Andy Wightman’s proposals and bill, as an alternative, with genuine teeth, to current and previous milquetoast, compromised attempts to address the issue, there are some actions which can still be pursued now. Much like everything else, if you’re trying to ruggedise your life in the face of the intertwined perma-crises of our quickening now, they may require something of an adjustment in or retuning of mind-set.
Are you willing, do you have the will?