Church Housing

For a second week in a row the news transported me back to the late 1960’s when I served as parish priest in a deprived working class area of South London. This era was hailed as one of social progress (some considered it social engineering) as old three-storied slum housing was demolished to make way for vast new estates of buildings ranging from maisonettes to huge tower blocks. The architecture was modernist, the construction modular based on huge slabs of concrete fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle. Most parishioners were glad to move into a new home with all modern conveniences, despite some social drawbacks. The most controversial of these was that whereas three generations of a family could live together in the old housing, thus establishing a strong family identity and providing childcare facilities enabling young couples both to be employed, in the new provision, the grandparents were housed in designated housing for the elderly which could be some distance away from the rest of the family. In time some of the new housing would prove socially disastrous, and today most of the tower blocks celebrated in the sixties have been demolished to make way for user-friendly low-rise accommodation.

There was no private ownership of housing in my parish, or those that it adjoined. The major landlord was the local Council to whom the tenants paid their rent. The only other housing was in smaller estates provided by charities of which the Peabody Trust, the Guinness Trust and the Church Commissioners are the best known. The Church Commissioners are the body which includes parliamentary appointees, who manage the Church of England’s financial, business and investment interests.

In addition to being parish priest of St Christopher’s Church, I was also Warden of Pembroke House, a large building attached to the Church. The House and Church together constituted a mission founded by Pembroke College Cambridge in the nineteenth century, at a time when many Oxford and Cambridge colleges developed a concern for those living in abject poverty in the great cities. The principle of these foundations was to provide accommodation so that undergraduates could spend part of their time living amongst the poor and addressing their spiritual and social needs. A vestige of this practice still remained in the sixties, but more importantly, Pembroke House provided one of the rare places in which professional people like teachers and social workers who had a real commitment to the locality and wanted to share in the local community’s life could be accommodated. The only other possibility living out this kind of commitment was by renting accommodation in the nearby Church Commissioners Octavia Hill Estate.

This Estate, named after a woman who was a tireless worker for better conditions for the poor of this locality, has been in the headlines recently. The Church Commissioners have put the Octavia Hill Estate, along with several other estates in South London, up for sale. The Commissioners are arguing that they are not realising a sufficient profit on their investment in social housing, so want to sell out and invest elsewhere. The proposal has met with fierce local opposition, from existing tenants, from the local council and from Members of Parliament, including Simon Hughes who featured so prominently in last week’s blog. Local churches are also opposing the sale and I would like to think that the members of St Christopher’s church, in the spirit of some of our 1960’s campaigns, are just as involved today. When questions were raised in Parliament about both the Christian and social implications of the proposed sale, the response from one of the Commissioners was to suggest that the Commissioners needed to get the best return possible on their investments, so that they could continue to support provisions like the Clergy Pension Fund.

The Church Commissioners have had quite a chequered career in my time. It was while I was at Pembroke House that an enormous scandal developed around housing in Paddington which was one of the Commissioners’ investments. It transpired that this housing was in a ‘red light’ district and that many of the houses were being used as brothels. Such was the outrage that the Commissioners had to sell its Paddington houses and invest elsewhere, but controversy broke out again when several years later it was revealed that the Commissioners had invested in enterprises linked to armaments production. This raised further moral issues and prompted talk of the need for ethical investments. It would be several decades before the resistance of the Church Commissioners, who still maintained the argument for realising maximum profits, could be overcome and ethical investment became an acknowledged principle. There was an instance of this policy this week when the Commissioners announced they were withdrawing their £2million investment in the earthmoving equipment firm Caterpillar, because of the firm’s complicity in providing equipment to Israel to the detriment of Palestinian homes and lives. Despite some advances, a few years back the Commissioners became involved in an even greater fiasco, by investing in land near Ashford which they believed would be a prime development site when the channel tunnel project was realised. These development hopes were dashed, and the Commissioners lost hundreds of millions of pounds on the deal. It was this particular piece of mismanagement which so affected the stand-alone Church Pension Fund that today individual diocese are having to make an increasing contribution towards the support of their retired clergy.

The present controversy over the Octavia Hill Estate turns the spotlight once more on to the degree to which the Church should be involved in social housing as an aspect of its ministry of social justice. In one sense the Church in the UK is deeply involved in this kind of provision, both through the enterprises of individual parishes making land available for such developments and through the work of Christian housing associations, and this is to be applauded. The Commissioners’ proposals raise questions of a different order concerning the degree to which housing originally provided to address the needs of the poor should more than a century later be regarded primarily as a source of revenue for the Church.

The provision of low-cost housing in an age in which a spiralling market render it difficult for young couples in poor communities to secure decent accommodation is an almost universal phenomenon and it is a tragedy when the Church is seen to be contributing to this problem. Some years ago, when I was working in New Zealand, the appropriate use of some vacant land belonging to the Cathedral was debated in diocesan synod. The then Dean who happened to be Chair of World Vision which tries to address the issue of world poverty, argued against the site being developed with low-cost housing on the grounds that professional housing ‘would attract more cathedral-type people into the area’. How’s that for a symbol of the Church’s commitment to social justice?