Directed by Paul Sng and narrated by Maxine Peake, Dispossession: The Great Social Housing Swindle is a hard-hitting 90-minute documentary, which explores the chronic shortage of social housing in this country and focuses on several controversial regeneration projects around London.
The film nails its colours firmly to the mast in the opening minutes by focusing on the introduction of right-to-buy council homes by Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s as the start of the problem.
It goes on to describe how successive governments have prevented local authorities from building new social housing stock, while receipts from council home sales have gone straight into the treasury’s coffers.
With rising house prices and a lack of new council-owned stock, the film chronicles how Thatcher’s dream of a property-owning democracy has swiftly given way to a deeply-divided system, where one section of the population has benefited hugely and another has lost all hope of getting on the property ladder.
The film really finds its feet when it moves away from the semantics of social housing policy and focuses on a series of council estates, which are facing demolition and the impact regeneration is having on the residents who live there.
‘We don’t need a taskforce to say that
we should stop flogging off council housing’
The film talks to residents on the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark and Cressingham Gardens in Lambeth, who have been fighting plans to bulldoze their homes.
The documentary strikes at the heart of the gentrification debate by arguing that councils are intentionally neglecting estates as a way of justifying demolition projects, and doing deals with private developers to replace social housing stock with expensive flats which are out of the price range of people who have lived on these estates all their lives.
If there is one flaw in the documentary is that there is no response from the local authorities themselves. Lambeth council was approached to take part, but declined.
Where the film does succeed is by giving the residents on those estates a voice and highlighting their sense of frustration at the regeneration process.
Speaking at a screening of the film last week in Parliament, director Paul Sng said ‘the reality of social housing is very different to how its presented in the media’.
‘I think there’s a distortion of actuality,’ he added. ‘We made this film be an antidote to that and present the reality.’
The co-leader of the Green Party, Caroline Lucas described Dispossession as an ‘incredibly hard-hitting and powerful film’.
‘I wish some ministers could be confronted with the reality this film shows,’ she told the audience at the screening. ‘If they genuinely saw the way in which some people are forced to live, and having to make choices between feeding their kids or keeping a roof over their heads, we would have a very different housing policy in this country.
‘What is so shocking about is that is the homelessness and the appalling housing conditions for so many people we see is not some accident of an otherwise perfectly-good policy that has just had this unfortunate consequence,’ she added.
‘The government has been warned, time and time again, that the policies they are pursuing, particularly in terms of the way in which housing benefit has been frozen, will lead to more homelessness. This is not something they do not know. They know it and they are doing it anyway.’
Referring to the budget, Ms Lucas said it could have been an opportunity for the chancellor, Philip Hammond to ‘show real commitment to tackling the housing crisis’ and begin to ‘reverse the policies of successive government, which have resulted in the complete decimation of the bricks and mortar in our welfare state’.
‘What we saw yesterday was a chancellor who chose to tinker around the edges of an already distorted property system,’ said the Green Party co-leader.
‘His announcement to cut stamp duty for first-time buyers goes directly against the outlook from the Office for Budget Responsibility, which has stated that the main gainers from that policy are people who already own property.
‘Do we really need a homelessness taskforce to tell us we urgently need measures to prevent property speculation and that housing benefit is not high enough? We don’t need a homelessness taskforce to tell us that councils should be allowed to borrow to build or that homelessness is not a crime? And we don’t need that taskforce to say that we should stop flogging off council housing?’ added Ms Lucas.
‘Social housing is at an all-time low, with more than 170,000 council houses lost since 2010 alone and damaging policies like right to buy have seen more than 54,000 houses sold and just 12,000 built to replace them,’ she added.
‘In my own constituency (Brighton Pavilion), there are 26,000 people on the waiting list for social housing,’ said Ms Lucas.
‘We need to regenerate our housing stock in a way that does not push the poorest communities out of their homes, and instead listens to local communities.’