This morning, The Spectator held a series of discussions about the future of Conservative welfare reform, chaired by Andrew Neil and made possible by the sponsorship of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. It was a sell-out invent with a stellar panel, and we’ll bring you the full reports later. But I thought it worth mentioning what our keynote speaker, Iain Duncan Smith, had to say about tower blocks and the work capability assessments made notorious in the film I, Daniel Blake.
There are 4,000 tower blocks in Britain which the former Work & Pensions Secretary says represent an “architect-led” planning mistake.
“Tower blocks, by and large, are not part of the housing culture of the United Kingdom. I don’t buy the idea that you can only get housing density by building tower blocks. I think it’s past time for a review, so we can get a more human sort of social housing… If you are going to build flats at all, build low-rise housing… The overall nature of trying to refurbish some of these very old tower blocks has led to the complications, huge costs and difficulties that we now see… I don’t think I have ever come across a constituent who has genuinely asked if they can move into a tower block.
Unless we build hundreds of tower blocks, like Hong Kong, high-rises will never make a major contribution to the UK’s housing stock – so the problem of housing density would not be resolved by tower blocks.
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