Introduction

This chapter continues to describe housing quality in the 20 estates, focusing on the period from the 1970s to 2019. It covers maintenance, improvements, reorganisations and redevelopment. After the falls in relative housing quality from first letting up until the 1970s (Chapter 6), over this period relative housing quality in the estates rose again. However, quality rose belatedly, there were more downs as well as ups, and quality generally did not get back to the high relative level of many estates in their earlier years.

Maintaining absolute housing quality through repairs and planned maintenance

Throughout estate lifetimes, there were often day-to-day, legal and conceptual tensions between landlords and tenants over who or what caused wear and tear and breakages, and who should carry out repairs. At E14 (1926/900/h/NE) in 1982, the local repairs team leader said that the large number of repairs requests were at least partly due to the “particular lifestyle of a number of tenants”. However, he thought it was impractical to try to charge residents for this work, given low incomes and the fact that “extreme internal wear and tear, eventually leads to properties being impossible to let”. However, the big backlog of incomplete repairs was “possibly accentuated by the fact that residents considered that it was not worth reporting work” (in Andrews 1979:4). The number of requests jumped when estate-based management started (Director of Housing E14's local authority 1980). A visiting researcher noted, ‘tenants do very few repairs themselves’. In 2005, a resident at E14 said, “there is a real problem with repairs … they are more concerned with the looks – gardens, dogs [than with the fabric]”, and another said, “they make you do your own repairs”.

By the 1970s, it was widely acknowledged that ‘repairs backlogs’ had built up in many local authorities. In addition, while manuals recommended a programme of ‘planned’ or ‘cyclical’ maintenance to monitor, repair and replace the structure and services of a home over time, to counter the effects of wear and tear and for the natural safe functioning life of particular elements (Macey and Baker 1978), in practice, large parts of estate lifetimes passed while their local authorities did not have such systems in place.