Speech given to the Shelter fringe meeting, Brighton Party Conference, 2007

About half of the people who come to see me at surgery come because of their housing situation.

On one occasion, because a disabled child was involved, I went to visit in their own home a constituent with a housing problem. “Housing problem” doesn’t begin to describe the situation. Nice three bedroom flat – but the flat didn’t start until the first floor. And to get to the first floor you had to mount a narrow and long staircase.

Now, the daughter – quadriplegic – had to be carried up and down that staircase. That was barely manageable when they moved in and she was five – but now she was eleven. The father worked and his work meant he wasn’t there to help. And the little brother was too small and young.

When I went in, I met the daughter – who was strapped vertically to a contraption that enabled her to be placed in front of a television to entertain her in the hours and hours that she had to spend immobile. She had no movement in any limb, couldn’t speak, but she could see and hear and her brain function and understanding were normal. I can’t even begin imagine what that is like.

For over five years since they applied to move to a ground floor – they were told – no three bedroom ground floor accommodation had become available – in the whole borough!

Five years – no progress. I mean, goodness me, the council could have gone down to the local estate agents and purchased a new house – if they’d really wanted to fix the problem. Because you see – this wasn’t a case of the council saying, “sorry, we’ve got no money” – although that often is an issue – but instead it was a case of the dead hand of bureaucracy mindlessly churning through the administrative wheels without any real desire to fix the problem.

All through was lacking the basic humanity and decisiveness that should have driven imaginative or nimble thinking about how to get round obstacles and really improve people’s lives.

I am convinced that if there had been the will – there would have been a way, whether it involved estate agents or not. And indeed, I wrote a polite letter to the Council. No joy. I wrote a more stroppy letter to the Council. No joy. Come and meet the Chief Executive. Stroppy meeting with the Chief Executive. No joy. I wrote my column in the local paper about it. And yes then – accommodation was found – a great result, but one that leaves me convinced more could have been done sooner if they’d been the will.

The saddest fact is that this is in no way a unique circumstance. Not all the cases are so clear – but there are so many many people in awful circumstances – overcrowded, dreadful and temporary accommodation that isn’t temporary.

So – one problem is that way in way bureaucratic rules stifles imaginative thought and sucks the humanity out of the administrators far too often.

But another problem is the way the rules keep on changing – and that stops people being able to plan their future, and make the best of it.

Now, if you were told at the outset that it would take (say) 15 years to get accommodation – or that the likelihood was that you would never get suitable accommodation – that would not be welcome news. But it would at least allow you to make a whole series of decisions about your life and what you will do with it for yourself and your family.

And then the third problem is that when the council offers you something finally – and it is disgusting – you pretty much have to say yes anyway, because if you don’t take the first property offered to you, you normally drop right down the list again. So people are forced into accepting totally unsuitable properties out of fear of otherwise never getting anything.

All these problems are getting worse – because the overall housing situation is getting worse.

There are half a million more more households on council waiting lists than when Labour came into power in 1997. 130,000 children live in unsuitable temporary accommodation; and there are one million in overcrowded accommodation.

This Labour government is obsessed with centralisation and tick box targets, but this a problem we need to tackle on a local level; Councils need to be allowed to build houses. The need to provide an adequate supply of affordable housing has got to be one of Brown’s top priorities.

Yet the solution so far has often been to massage the figures rather than house people properly. In Haringey, we have – or I should say had – about 26,000 people on the housing list.

In a quiet re-registration exercise, Haringey Council has removed 14,687 households from its council housing waiting list – that’s just under six in ten of the total.

How did this happen? Well, Haringey Council carried out a ‘re-registration project’ in September and October last year. People on the list were written to and given thirty days to complete and return a re-registration form. Those who did not return the forms were struck off the list.

This sort of statistical sleight of hand doesn’t actually house anyone or improve their condition. There is also the problem that 55% of council housing does not meet basic standards. But that’s a whole other discussion.

Affordable housing is a basic right – everyone should have access to a decent home, yet in my constituency this is not the case.

There are solutions to be sought in the supply of housing – particularly getting more derelict land and even empty housing into use – but there is also an oft neglected issue of quality.

It is about quality of design, quality of concept and quality of materials. The built environment is vital in terms of spirit and aspiration – and protecting our environment – yet those most in need of being able to lift their eyes above the daily miseries are often those who are worst treated and find poor quality developments rammed into their areas without the sustainable infrastructure needed to support increased densities – building in crime, building in misery, building in hopelessness.

Poorly designed, badly built developments are far too often rushed through – but cruddy housing on the cheap doesn’t just let down the current occupiers, it stores up more costs and problems for the future when that housing doesn’t last. Think of all the money we’ve had to spend on redoing the housing mistakes of the 1960s and 1970s – but there’s no reason why properties can’t survive in a decent state for much, much longer. It’s because they were badly designed and badly built we are now having to undo those mistakes. But far too often we’re just repeating them again – less bare concrete in site, but the same poor design and poor construction problems behind it all.

These issues of course affect housing beyond the bounds of council and social housing – as indeed does the issue of housing overall, though limitation of time means those will have to be left to another time.

But in conclusion – we need not just more, but better housing – and housing allocation systems which are administered not just better – but smarter, with a more imaginative approach to overcoming obstacles and a greater sense of certainty given to people as to what their futures might hold. So then they can make decisions and be in control of their life and destinies.

Speech given at the launch of Reinventing the State: Social Liberalism for the 21st Century, Brighton Party Conference, 2007

I started out on my chapter just thinking about how often friends or colleagues bound up to me and say, “Hey Lynne, I feel fabulously happy and I there’s nothing I would want different.”

Duh! Never! We appear to wander round in mild to severe discontent with our lot. It’s not actually the ‘fabulously happy’ answer that I really hope for – but I do wonder what it is that makes us feel such dissatisfaction.

It comes down to status – and how we value and are valued in today’s society. And my chapter looks at the way I think we are floundering around somewhat, because the historic pillars of behaviour have crumbled and yet we have not put anything solid and acceptable and universally accorded in their place.

And the problem for us oh so very humans, is that while we all crave status – status is much about the external. So we end up trying to define ourselves in terms of our purchasing power, position in society, our job, where we live, or indeed the possession of the perfect pout – but this all leaves a certain hollowness behind, a failure to really address our human need..

It has simply created internal deserts which are hungering for something more substantial, more rewarding than material goods, an 18-hour day, or being a size double zero!

And, whilst it is undoubtedly more comfortable to be rich and miserable, too many of us – across all parts of society, of all different bank account balances are, in reality, miserable.

To comfort us in our misery, or to insulate ourselves against the reality of the deficiencies in ourselves, our work, our lives, or our families, we seem to like numbing ourselves to reality by passing time anaesthetising ourselves with the quick-fix, feel-good-for-a-moment relief of retail therapy, junk TV, junk food (hello obesity), or excess alcohol (hello binge drinking).

The real unobtainables of the 21st century are not material goods – but values, emotions and feelings. I know – it’s a bit touchy, feely … but it one of the reasons why some politicians – Bill Clinton most famously – do so touch something deep in voters’ minds – with an understanding of pain and hurt.

Now, as this isn’t a philosophical treatise on the decline of man, the question is what is it that can be done, both by the state and by individuals, to improve our lot?

Of course there is an underlying rationale for some particular instances of malaise and misery – for example when divorce, unemployment, bereavement or ill-health come our way – but current levels of unhappiness seem excessive when set against the low levels of unemployment, a relatively decent health service and income which is not generally the grinding poverty of yesteryear.

So whilst public policy on health, crime, employment, housing, education, the environment we live in and so on all colour the backdrop against which we live our lives there is more to the problem than this.

We have seen very clearly, under a Labour, authoritarian and centralising government, how very, very little ever-more stringent laws, surveillance, rules, regulations, targets and punishments are achieving in terms of changing behaviour.

So how do we rebalance the relationship between status and friendship and the common good – indeed, is possible at all?

And what role, if any, does government have in all of this? This is tricky territory to tread in; one false slip of the sentence and you open yourself up to pastiche for wanting a Ministry of Fun, or state-regulated force-fed humour courses with every meal.

The only real solution is to create an environment where behaviour matters because of the social order, not because of a purely legalistic one.

So – I have a look in my chapter at what used to provide our social order – how we used to behave well because the Church, parents, teachers, the police and the government said we should. This is no longer very much the case.

The remedies we appear to have put in place to keep us on the straight and narrow of behaviour now are legal boundaries rather than the old social ones – and they will not and cannot work in the longer term.

Some of the underlying changes do, of course, have positive outcomes as well as negative ones. People are less deferential and more free to do what they want – which is a liberal outcome. The trick is to try and work out a way of developing a new framework, a new social.

So – what’s to do?

Perhaps first and foremost, we need to re-establish trust in the state, the behaviour of the state and the nature of the state.

We need to re-establish society and resurrect helpfulness and kindness as virtues to admire. A World Health Organisation survey showed that in the 11-15 age group the majority interviewed in England did not feel that ‘most the students in the class were kind and helpful’. In Sweden over 75 per cent said that they were, but in England it was under 46 per cent.

Kindness, trust and niceness – what happened to these virtues? Was it Margaret Thatcher who began the slide away from the common good, with her ‘no such thing as society’ and the nation’s love affair with home purchase, leaving social housing never to recover?

If one of the primary needs is to create communities where we know each other, then we, from the bottom up, and the state, from the top down, need to take action.

In the grand sweep of policy, there are obvious big-picture items, including tackling poverty, reducing social exclusion and cutting crime. All help remove real causes of misery. But they are not the whole story. Just think of the number of times people say things along the lines of, ‘we may have been poor, but at least we were happy …’; so I am interested too in the smaller-scale measures.

Take one example: the question of how engaged someone is with their neighbours has huge knock-on effects on their participation in society, level of crime, happiness and even health. Government can hardly order people to talk to, or like, their neighbours, but at the micro-scale, what about councils doing more to help and encourage the organisation of street parties, so that people get to know each other?

Perhaps councils should be doing more to help online communities emerge in their areas? Measures such as providing easy-to-use and free website and online discussion forums can help people set up an online community for their street or neighbourhood – and of course click a link to print off some flyers to distribute to their neighbours.

If you look at the fastest-growing communities, they’re on the internet. And for young people, the fastest growing part of their internet activity are the social networks. Why? Because human beings crave social engagement. Websites such as Facebook are the new means to gossip, check who’s talking to who and who’s doing what and going where.

There’s no time tonight – but my chapter proffers ideas on, amongst others, parental behaviour, paternal responsibility giving power back to teachers to teach, and the ability to use that authority judiciously but without fear of being accused of harassment.

So – to bring my remarks to a conclusion – clearly a more equal society is vital in addressing much of the current malaise. But we also need to reward and revere our human good qualities and give them value and worth too.

We need to work on creating a feel-good society rather than a feel-bad one – and that ‘feel-good’ needs to come more from our behaviour and less from what we own or what we do for a living. We need to rebalance ‘me’ with ‘us’ by promoting and valuing the common good.

It isn’t necessarily the structures that can or will change. Change has to come from within and it is about the behaviour of the people who are part of those structures. This is not about morality, but about engagement, where consideration for others and the common good comes as high at least on our list as simply our own well-being.

If you think about what makes you happy – really happy – it isn’t just about what you have. It isn’t just about what you do. Status isn’t nothing, but it isn’t everything, and we have managed to create a value system that says it is. It’s not really status versus friendship – but it is about human relationships. After all, that’s what makes most peoples’ world go round!