Forget hospitals: housing is the priority

We used to get very exercised about the level of the state pension. I mean really exercised. Not a here today, gone tomorrow row about a paltry 75p rise as we had a couple of years ago. At one time how much extra pensioners would see in their purses and wallets was a central issue in a general election – promising a 10 shilling rise or whatever, that was serious politics. And yet we now have more pensioners than ever but, whatever the platitudes, it no longer has the same resonance – true, many elderly people have never had it so good, but most still rely on the state pension for most of their income.

And talking of people never having had it so good, whatever happened to all that energy expended on council housing – in the post-war years when building homes was a measure of social commitment, the more little boxes or towers, the more effective, the more caring a politician could appear.

The media did not bother about failing schools, hospitals and social services departments – instead there were the slums and the proud picture of the Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan laying the foundation for yet another home designed to fulfill his pledge to build 300,000 a year.

Times have changed. But is the shortage of affordable housing any less acute? Admittedly the nature of these challenges change as do the solutions, but it is striking how social issues go in and out of fashion – sometimes for no apparent reason. There are 2.7 million people who rely on disability and incapacity benefits, many for all their income, nearly 4 million depend on housing benefit, yet you are far more likely to hear about top up savings products like ISAs than you are about the travails of those on incapacity benefit.

Meanwhile, the current political debate, when it is not about who said what to whom, is dominated by the idea that government is about transforming the performance of public institutions - hospitals and schools and more recently the railways. We are obsessed by these public services partly because they are highly visible and widely used partly because we are worrying less about the economy (until the last week or so) and the threat from abroad (until 11 September).

Making these organisations work better is obviously a good thing but it is worth remembering that viewed through the prism of political debate, they can often appear worse than they really are.

It is striking how social issues go in and out of fashion. Times have changed since Macmillan’s government, but is the shortage of social housing any less acute?

More important, in spite of all the scepticism around, often we overstate the capacity of politicians to transform them and ignore the limitations.

At the same time unseen forces that may have just as great an effect on quality of life receive much less attention – the pressure on modern families, the long hours culture, the breakdown of relationships, increased alienation of some young people at the bottom of the heap, the rise in mental health disorders and yes the lack of affordable housing – all these are somehow second order issues.

Last week I went to one of the most deprived areas of the country – an estate blighted by drug abuse where one in ten young people now takes hard drugs. Outside the converted council house which acts as his office a local councillor pointed to a sign for a community family support team. Until a few weeks ago it provided on the ground help and advice for families devastated by drugs. A great scheme, he told me, but lottery funding ran out and they could not get help from anywhere else.

We do talk about drugs – the legalisation debate has been played out ad nauseam and there are the high-profile deaths which cause shock and consternation – but we devote much less time to the growing army of addicts who live in chaos and without purpose or hope – unless they rob or mug us they are somehow someone else's problem. We leave them to the politicians and the community workers, to an over complex bidding process which militates against long term investment and we hope that their turbulent existence will not upset our comfortable world.