Yesterday morning I had the misfortune to listen to Andrew Pierce from talk radio show "LBC" pretending to be a journalist and “interviewing” Tory Housing Minister Grant Shapps at their conference. Andrew had previously expressed his expert view that since he was brought up on a Council estate in Swindon he knew “for a fact” that girls would get deliberately pregnant to get a count flat. How he actually knew this “fact” he kept to himself.
He then spoke to Shapp and his first question was the Sun pub bore favourite about all these scroungers getting large amounts of housing benefit to live in London. I thought for a moment he was going to ask about the 82,000 Londoners facing eviction from the recently announced cuts. That moment obviously passed quickly. Then a question on the usual prurient middle class hobby horse about young girls getting pregnant solely to get a Council flat and what-is-Shapp-going-to-do-about-it.
My father died a Council tenant and my mother is still a housing association tenant. Members of my family live and have lived in public housing up and down the country, I have worked as a housing worker in Council and Housing Association estate offices for 18 years and I have never, ever known of anyone getting pregnant to get a council flat.
Admittedly we do not ask as housing officer applicants this question (don’t give Sharpe ideas) but I have never seen or heard any evidence whatsoever. It is an urban myth. There will of course be an exception to the rule but the vast overwhelming majority of teenagers (repeat young vulnerable women) get pregnant for exactly the same reason that middle class kids get pregnant. Inadequate and/or non existent sex education, drink, drugs, trying to keep a partner and sometime wanting a have a baby to love. Add to this mix poverty, inadequate health services and poor schooling and you do get high rates of teenage pregnancy on housing estates.
But young women growing up on an estate are the first to know that getting a council flat does not mean (unfortunately) you have won first prize in life. To think that someone would deliberately get themselves pregnant solely to bring up said child up by themselves in a bedsit on the 20th floor of a tower block is just frankly deluded.
