What future for the Four Courts? 

Grace L. Image: tenants’ protest July 2024

One Tuesday morning in February, tenants in the Four Courts flats in Hollington got a hand delivered letter inviting them to a meeting the very same day with their landlord, Southern Housing. The meeting would be about moving them out of their homes within a year.

The whole operation had the sort of slick, lightning-strike quality of a mass corporate lay-off: deliver the bad news quickly, utter some inane platitudes about a bright future elsewhere, and escort you from the building before you’ve fully processed what’s just happened.

Days later, some residents were still physically reeling from the shock. Everyone is realising they will now have this constant hum of fear and uncertainty in their lives so long as they stay in the blocks.

The glossy brochure prepared for residents highlighted compensation payments and assurances about people’s tenancy rights (which every social landlord is legally obliged to provide and represents no particular act of generosity on the part of Southern Housing) but was woefully short on other details.

Their homes will be demolished. Although that word didn’t appear in the brochure. Their homes will be ‘redeveloped’, but we know that doesn’t mean refurbished or upgraded because according to the letter they will be ‘replaced’, with a larger number of social homes. 

I’d like to see the detail on what that really means, because slippery language is very familiar to anyone who has seen the reality of any large-scale ‘regeneration’. A process through which, Dr-Who-like, tired old social housing estates are supposed to be magically and painlessly reborn in a younger sexier body, but in practice means years, sometimes decades, of ‘managed decline’ and community displacement.

Regen reality

Of course, fears about the future might be misplaced. Southern Housing may break the mould of regeneration schemes across the country over the past 20 years, where estate after estate of affordable social housing has been torn down and replaced with gentrified ‘mixed communities’ made up of private homeowners or corporate investors in overpriced, poorly-constructed new-builds, and ‘poor doors’ for the remaining social tenants who get hit with steep increases in their rents and service charges.

Southern Housing may actually build all new social homes on the site. But that would beg the question why fully half of their current housing development in Holmhurst are being sold off, and the other half are to be rented out at ‘affordable’ but not social rent levels.

We might also want to heed the siren warning of Clifton Court about what we can expect. Clifton Court is two blocks of 53 social rented flats in Hastings town centre owned by Orbit, another social housing landlord, also slated for demolition, which have been sitting empty for more than 18 months now. Four years after Orbit announced to their tenants that they were going to move them out within a year, they haven’t even submitted a planning application for the site.

In London, the devastating effects of demolition, both to communities and to the environment has been recognised as so severe that it is now a requirement for landlords to win support from a majority of residents in an estate ballot before they can qualify for any government grants. In the City of London developers have to fully consider all the alternatives to demolition before they even submit a planning application.

Neither of these things has happened here. There is no evidence that Southern Housing has given any serious consideration to new ways to upgrade the flats, and tenants are not even allowed to vote with their feet in the Four Courts – some people have already been waiting years to move out despite being entitled to transfer out for medical reasons or overcrowding. 

Many residents in the first block due to be emptied, which is for over 55s, are deeply unsettled by their first meeting with their ‘resettlement officer’ who told them there is no special plan to rehouse people – they just have to wait for something to come up. In 2023 a total of 173 properties were let to everyone waiting for social housing in Hastings, and at the end of that year there were still 1547 on the waiting list. Where are 98 Bevin Court tenants going to be rehoused in just one year? And what will happen to everyone else on the list?

It can’t continue as it is

Southern Housing’s main justification for demolition appears to be that people have been complaining about conditions in the flats for many years – a brave if surprising admission of their own mis-management and inability to engage positively with tenants, but surely not objectively reasonable grounds to demolish structurally sound buildings?

Years of neglect – lifts that were promised to be replaced year after year, breaking down for weeks on end; entry doors jammed open for months for lack of a spare part; bed bugs left to run through neighbouring flats while Southern Housing flip-flop on their policy of who pays to treat them; unsafe cladding left to fall off in storms. These are the constant indignities that make many people in the flats want to cut and run. Who could blame them?

Seeing extremely ill and infirm tenants being winched out of their windows by the fire brigade because the lift is not capable of fitting a stretcher –  it is beyond undignified, it is unconscionable that people who should not be living in these flats have been forced to stay there.

So what is the solution? The answer depends on recognising that the solution for individual tenants who need or want to move out of the Four Courts now, is not the same as the solution for problems with the blocks themselves – but Southern Housing can and should deal with both.

A block of flats may not be suitable for every elderly or disabled person. But there are many other types of property which are also unsuitable for many people, whether that’s because of the steep stairs in an old victorian terrace, or the isolation of a country cottage far from support services. The beauty of social housing should be that housing can be allocated and reallocated fairly and easily as people move through different stages of their lives. This is by far the most efficient way to maximise the best use of our housing stock where people can upsize, downsize, or join a supportive assisted living community at different points in their lives – but this only works if there is sufficient social housing stock to make this possible.

We need more social housing not less; more choice of size and type of housing for people at all stages of their lives. These flats could still be part of the solution to the dire shortage of social housing, and meet the needs of many people currently stuck in poor quality temporary flats, hostels, hotels or even sleeping on the street for lack of a decent home. There’s certainly nothing inherently wrong with high rise flats, as anyone who owns a luxury penthouse will know!

What nobody else anywhere says, is that a building which is not of modern construction or that doesn’t meet accessibility specifications for all needs, should be torn down. If this was the case we would level every Victorian building in the town.

Why Demolish?

So what is the attraction for social housing landlords in rushing to demolish instead of continually investing in trying to maintain their existing properties like private homeowners do? In short it’s a combination of perverse incentives created by government regulations and funding, and a corporate mindset at the top of these massive companies. 

Demolition allows landlords to unlock the land value under the existing social housing, by building new houses for private sale (by selling them as shared-ownership it is still counted as providing ‘affordable’ homes) at the same time as building replacement social homes. This is called the ‘cross-subsidy’ model and if you think like a corporate developer it makes sense – increase the value of your assets by building new flats that can be sold for a much higher price and use that money to build replacement flats for your existing stock, which can then also be rented at an increased price and still count as social housing. But what makes business sense does not make sense for society overall, because the whole point of social housing is to create affordable secure homes, not commercial assets. And every time a housing association cannibalises its own stock and land, to pay for an ever smaller number of genuinely affordable homes, we all lose out.

We shouldn’t just accept this as the way of the world. If housing associations can’t afford to keep social housing social, then maybe they should hand it back to the council or hand it over to a community land trust who will take care of it as an important asset, rather than sell it off piece by piece.

The other part of the puzzle of demolition is government policy promoting it. The government pays lip service to problems of climate change and severe shortages of affordable homes. But what they actually care about is ‘economic growth’ – economic activity that creates profits regardless of whether that economic activity is good for society or destroys the environment we all depend on. 

This government’s key target area for economic growth is construction. So we know that demolition and new construction has a hugely negative effect on the environment – from air pollution and construction waste, through to the carbon emissions and waste of natural resources in all the new steel, glass and concrete they require. We also know that new-build houses that are not built for social rent will do nothing to alleviate the shortage of affordable homes or bring down the overall cost of buying a new house.   

But because the government wants to promote economic growth through new construction, they charge VAT on materials for doing refurbishment work, but not for constructing new buildings; they give grants to build new properties but not to refurbish what’s already there; they give homebuyers subsidised loans to buy new builds that are not available for buying an older property. Public money that could be invested directly in social housing and in environmentally sustainable buildings instead goes to boosting the profits of developers, landlords and banks.

As the number of people struggling with housing costs rockets, and the very planet we live on is under threat, the priorities of our government and our society seem totally obscene. Of course it’s not down to the individual tenants in social housing – people who have usually done the least to contribute to these problems – to agree to live in substandard housing in order to save the environment or to save social housing for future generations. But if we want society as a whole to move in a very different direction, then that will mean people making sacrifices – that should start with all the people who are hoarding second homes, and all the people taking six figure salaries out of social housing companies, and then maybe we could seriously start addressing the issues, and start improving and sharing out existing homes fairly.

Are there alternatives?

Southern Housing needs to throw out the fag packet with their current plans on, and get out a drawing board – if they do have money to build all new social housing as they claim, then why not look at undeveloped land to build more accessible sheltered housing there? What about high quality, sustainable homes being built above the car parks for anyone who wants to stay in the area but can’t or doesn’t want to stay in the high rises? 

Upgrading the blocks is more than possible – they were well built and had many innovative features for their day such as underfloor heating. More architects than ever are specialising in retrofit. They  could come up with ideas for extending rather than demolishing the flats, to create larger new external lift shafts and additional flats, combined with low energy heat pumps and other energy saving measures to make them a model of sustainable social housing.

But it’s not just about improving the quality of the buildings themselves. The first people who moved into the Four Courts were excited and hopeful. Many residents have shared very fond memories of growing up there, or still enjoy and value the community they have there today. Every tenant needs an opportunity to have that sense of pride, safety and optimism about living in the Four Courts – and that’s not just about the building, it’s about how people feel about living there.

One solution might be for the blocks to be converted to co-operatives, offering tenants who live there or want to live there, a much greater level of control over how the buildings are maintained, how to deal with problems locally, and become a self-managed community. 

Who knows what other solutions are available if tenants themselves are included in the discussion – not just about where they want to go but whether they want to go at all, and what all of our vision is for the future of social housing in the town.

These flats and this land were all paid for with public money and were handed to Southern Housing, for free, to manage for the public good. But they didn’t even have the courtesy to discuss their plans with our local public elected representatives before simply announcing this as a done deal.

It’s the arrogance, and the ruthlessness of it all, which has kind of been most shocking.

But as long as tenants are living in the flats and are refusing to move out without being offered an appropriate alternative, then Southern Housing must recognise they will not simply be able to bulldoze through their plans. The sooner they start genuinely engaging in discussion, with tenants as well as the wider community, the better: because we all have a stake in the outcome.