After the Second World War, Britain built around 1.5 million homes using non-traditional methods — and tens of thousands of them were made of factory-cast reinforced concrete, bolted together on site in days. Airey. Cornish Unit. Orlit. Woolaway. Wates. They were permanent council houses with gardens and indoor bathrooms, and for millions of families they were the best home they had ever known. Then, in 1981, investigators opened the walls. The steel inside the concrete was rusting — invisibly, behind the cavity, where no surveyor could ever see it. And in 1984, the British government passed an Act of Parliament declaring entire types of houses it had designed, built and sold to its own citizens officially, legally defective.

In this video: the Barnsley house fire that led engineers to the defect hiding inside every wall — the research finding that condemned not one estate but every pre-1960 concrete design in the country — the Right to Buy families who bought their council houses in 1980 and watched the same government condemn them four years later — the 31,000 owners the state estimated were trapped — the £14,000 repair grant with a deadline, offered before a single approved repair method existed — the year owners spent sitting in condemned houses waiting for the paperwork to catch up — the streets today where one house is rebuilt in brick and worth normal money while its identical twin next door sells for cash at auction — and why, forty years on, a designated defective home still cannot be mortgaged.

So what do you think should happen here? Should the state that built these homes, sold them, and then condemned them pay to repair every last one — no matter the cost, and no matter when you bought? Or was a 90% grant and a deadline all the taxpayer ever owed, and everything after that is simply the risk of owning property? Let me know in the comments below.

#PRCHouses #RightToBuy #UKHousing #CouncilHouses #HousingCrisis