Channel 4 look to council housing
Channel 4 has commissioned a three-part series called I Want a Council House which will step inside the council, onto the estate and into the bedsit to document the reality of life for some of the 1.8 million people living on Britain’s social housing list.
In the biggest shake up since Beveridge, Britain is tackling welfare head on and its primary target is housing. The country’s social housing is in crisis with extended families living in overcrowded conditions, people living in sheds and homeless teens and these are just a handful of the perceived issues facing Britain’s councils as they battle the biggest housing shortage since World War II. By 2015, local council authorities will have lost a third of their budgets and Channel 4 will explore some of the issues faced by an already over pressurised system through the eyes of those on the front line.
Filmed over six months in Tower Hamlets and Manchester, with access to the councils’ homeless persons’ unit and lettings teams, I Want a Council House will follow the day to day lives of the workers tasked with implementing the system and the stories of the people they deal with. Through these personal stories the series will address the housing headlines and challenge our preconceptions of the way housing is allocated and our view of the deserving and undeserving poor.
In the Homeless Persons Unit, we will meet people coming in off the street asking for emergency housing and the difficult task faced by the assessment team as they carry out their interviews, investigate each claim and work out who qualifies for help and who doesn’t.
I Want a Council House will also follow the journeys of the families and individuals already on the housing list bidding for homes, the system by which the council decide who should get a property and the decision making process of those who are eventually offered a home.
“According to one council they have 9000 single people waiting for flats. Their answer has been to demolish three tower blocks and an estate. That’s a Labour council!” notes Vivian Summers.
