On the evening of 16th November 1966, some 12 million people
(a quarter of the UK population) were watching the Wednesday Play on
BBC1 and saw Cathy Come Home. Jeremy Sandford wrote it, Tony Garnett
produced it, and 30-year-old Ken Loach directed it. It's the story of a young working-class
woman going from a brief period of security to homelessness. It ends with her
children being taken from her by the social workers in a railway station as she
screams and writhes and the passers-by look on.
60 years on, that ending is not a historical footnote. The
government's own stats show that on 31st March 2026, 135,580 households in
England were living in temporary accommodation (the highest ever recorded). Of
those, 177,530 were children (another record, up 5% in the year). One in five
families with children in temporary accommodation have been there for five
years or more (one in three in London). In April, a parliamentary group
reported that between April 2019 and March 2025, 104 children had died in
England with temporary accommodation being a factor in their vulnerability, ill
health or death. Of those 104, 76 were babies under one.
These are not the conditions of a society that had learned
the lessons of Cathy Come Home. They are the conditions of a society that
celebrated Cathy Come Home, set up all sorts of charities in its name, and
then, over the next fifty years, systematically dismantled the modest gains achieved
in the period that followed. The liberal framing of this anniversary is very
telling. The "sixty years on and all we've really achieved is
nothing" lament treats the continuing housing crisis as a mystery or a
policy failure that some more enlightened government could have fixed. It
isn't. The housing crisis is not a failure of capitalism. It is a product of
it.
A drama in the form of a documentary
It's a very simple story, and that's its strength. Cathy
(Carol White) moves from the provinces to London where she meets and marries
Reg (Ray Brooks), a lorry driver. For a brief period, they live in a fairly
modern flat with all the paraphernalia of the postwar consumer boom. Reg gets
injured at work, his wages cease, and the family are off down the dunny. They
get evicted. They move into his mother's overcrowded tenement flat, where
tempers run high. They get rooms with a very kind old landlady and are then
pushed out through the courts when she dies. They live in a caravan until the
locals come over and attack the site. Then they're in a derelict building.
Eventually Cathy and the kids are put into a council hostel for the homeless.
Husbands aren't allowed there. The rules split up the family before force does.
Loach and Garnett had worked together on Up the Junction
(1965), and in Cathy they went even further in defying the conventions of
television drama. Much of it was actually shot on 16mm film on location with
handheld cameras, real streets and real hostels. Union rules at the time meant
that about ten minutes still had to be shot in the studio and spliced in. Over
the images, Loach laid the voices of people experiencing homelessness that
Sandford had recorded over many years of research, together with the rather dry
pronouncements of officials. The film ends with a series of captions giving the
bare statistics of the housing crisis.
The impact was absolutely staggering, and it caused real
concern within the establishment. Critics were in no doubt that blending
documentary with fiction was a form of deception, and that the viewer could not
tell what was real. Underlying the complaint about the form was a complaint
about the content. What the critics found so troubling wasn't that Cathy
was a fiction; it was that it was true. Every episode in the film drew on
actual cases Sandford had documented. The welfare state the postwar Labour
government had promised would look after its people 'from cradle to grave' was
shown, in its day-to-day operation, to be a system that, in fact, penalised the
poor for being poor.
The film's real artistic achievement is that it doesn't present
Cathy and Reg as victims of their own shortcomings. They're just ordinary,
likeable, occasionally foolish young people. Nothing they do is in any way to
blame for what happens to them. Each step down results from an external force:
an injury, a landlord, a rule, a waiting list, a rent they can't pay. The middle-class
viewer who wanted to believe that homelessness was the inevitable fate of
drunks and wasters had that belief completely eradicated.
This is what gives the film its enduring power. It doesn't
present homelessness as some individual's misfortune or moral failing. It shows
it as something the system does to people, the result of the system's machinery
in action (the landlord, the court, the council official, the hostel regime). Cathy
is absolutely part of the great current of British art of that period: the
realist tradition of the late 1950s and 1960s, when a whole generation of
writers and filmmakers turned their attention to the pressing social issues of
the day. As the WSWS pointed out in 2010, Loach "first came to prominence
in the late 1960s with television work such as Cathy Come Home". It
is the most complete example of what that tradition could achieve in a mass
medium.
What followed, and what was taken back
Shelter was founded on 1st December 1966, just a couple of
weeks after the broadcast. It was a planned organisation, but it rode the wave
of public outrage the film generated. The crisis returned in 1967, with the
play performed again, taken up in Parliament, and discussed for years. It's
frequently credited with helping bring about the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act
1977, which for the first time placed a legal obligation on local authorities
to house certain categories of homeless families.
It would be a mistake to think the TV play shifted housing
policy through moral suasion. Cathy came out at the height of the
postwar boom, when a militant working class could still be expected to win concessions
from the ruling class. Council house building was at its peak. Housing
completions in Britain actually peaked in 1968 at over 400,000. The changes of
that period resulted from the balance of class forces rather than any
particularly enlightened policy by politicians.
When that balance was upset, they took back the concessions.
Thatcher's Right to Buy (1980) saw some 2 million council homes sold off in
England, and councils were effectively prevented from using the proceeds to
build new homes. New Labour under Blair and Brown continued the process via
stock transfers and a reliance on private developers. The Conservative-Lib Dem
coalition after 2010 froze housing benefit, introduced the bedroom tax and cut
council budgets right across the board. The most horrific example of what
decades of neglect of the working-class tenant had led to was the Grenfell
Tower fire in June 2017, which killed 72 people.
The Labour government elected in 2024 promised to build 1.5m
homes by 2029. They're not on track. Their National Plan to End Homelessness
(which only emerged in December 2025 after a very long delay) contains no
assurance that the social housing required to end homelessness will actually be
built. Their flagship £39bn programme targets around 300,000 social and
affordable homes over the next decade, of which some 180,000 would be for
social rent. That's a very small proportion of what is required, and it's
spread over ten years. The freeze on Local Housing Allowance (the cap on
housing benefit for private renters) was maintained in the Autumn Budget 2026,
despite clear warnings from homelessness charities that this would push more
and more families out of their homes.
Meanwhile, councils across England are now spending nearly
£3bn a year on temporary accommodation. A significant portion of that goes to
private landlords and hotel operators to house families in single rooms, often
some way from their schools, their jobs and their families. The social workers
who looked after Cathy's children have all been replaced by 'out of area
placements' and for many families the result is the same.
What's changed in the last 60 years isn't the crisis per se
but the framework in which the crisis exists. The post-war social democratic
settlement, which was the very context of Cathy Come Home and which the film
implicitly sought to appeal to, is gone. Council housing has been sold off,
rent controls have been removed, and housing has become a financial asset
class. The crisis that Cathy Come Home first exposed in embryo has been
generalised.
The limits of a perspective
The film's makers were not neutral observers. Garnett and
Loach were drawn towards revolutionary socialist politics in the years after Cathy,
and their later collaborations, such as Days of Hope (1975), written
with Jim Allen, dealt directly with the betrayals of the Labour leadership.
Loach has remained the most consistently socially critical filmmaker Britain
has produced, from Kes (1969) to I, Daniel Blake (2016) and The
Old Oak (2023).
The WSWS have repeatedly acknowledged the seriousness and
integrity of this body of work from Kes through to Riff Raff, My
Name is Joe, I, Daniel Blake, The Navigators and I and Route
Irish. David Walsh's 2010 review of Route Irish said Loach had stood out in the
rather dismal cinematic landscape of the previous 30 years. His political
journey has also shown the limits of an approach that pressures Labour and the
state into doing the right thing. He founded Left Unity in 2013, backed
Corbyn's leadership from the outset and was kicked out of the Labour Party in
2021 under Keir Starmer. The party he had so passionately encouraged working
people to put their faith in has, in fact, turned on him and, in office, has
seen record levels of child homelessness.
Loach's political perspective has remained anchored to the
Labour Party and the trade union bureaucracy, the very institutions that, in
office, presided over the destruction of the housing stock his films document.
His 2013 documentary The Spirit of '45 expressed this most clearly. It
looked back on the Attlee government's nationalisations and council
housebuilding with nostalgia, as a lost golden age to be restored rather than a
period whose limits the following decades exposed. Stefan Steinberg's review on
the WSWS argued that the film revealed Loach's "very serious and even
fatal limitations." A return to 1945 cannot solve the housing crisis,
because the reforms of 1945 were themselves concessions made within capitalism,
and capitalism has spent the decades since clawing them back.
This attitude also appears in Cathy Come Home itself.
The film's anger is directed at the bureaucracy, the rules and the sheer
indifference of the officials. The closing captions are, in effect, a plea to
the government to build more houses. That was a legitimate and very valid
demand in 1966. The film doesn't ask why, in one of the richest countries in
the world, housing should be treated as a commodity and a source of profit
rather than a social right.
To the Guardian, on the film's 50th anniversary in
2016, Loach said more people than ever wanted a home. Back in 1966, there was
still council housing; now there is only the market, and the market has failed.
That description of the state of affairs is spot on. The diagnosis is a bit
off. From the point of view of the developers, landlords, and financial
investors who own housing in Britain, the market has not failed in the least.
Rents and house prices are at record levels, and housing is one of the most
profitable assets in the economy. The market is working perfectly, as designed.
It has failed the working class.
This was Engels' point in The Housing Question (1872)
in direct opposition to the petty-bourgeois reformers of his day who thought
they could solve the housing question within the existing order. He showed that
the housing shortage was a product of the capitalist mode of production: the
subordination of land and shelter to the pursuit of profit, rising rents, and
the periodic clearance of working-class districts to make way for commercial
development. As long as the capitalist mode of production exists, then "it
is sheer folly to hope for an isolated solution of the housing question".
Only its abolition could make a real solution possible. That analysis is just
as valid in 2026 as it was in 1872 or 1966. Every gain won within the system is
only temporary and is easily reversed, as the last 60 years have so clearly
demonstrated.
A film for today
Cathy Come Home has not lost an iota of its power.
The images of a young family being shuffled from room to hostel to the street,
of a mother having her children taken from her because she has no place to
live, are just as potent in 2026 as they were in 1966. The technique remains
remarkable in its urgency, its complete lack of sentimentality, and its use of
real voices to cut through the fiction.
The real lesson of Cathy Come Home at 60 is not so
much that nothing has changed as why that is the case. Housing is still a
commodity. The parties that profess to be the voice of the working people have,
in fact, served the property-owning class in office. The working class have not
yet forged the independent political force which could take housing out of the
market. Over 177,000 children in England today have no home at all. The
solution isn't a better charity or a more compassionate government. The
solution is socialist expropriation of banks, landlords, and property
developers, and the conversion of housing from a source of profit to a social
right.
Bibliography
The film
Cathy Come Home. Dir. Ken Loach. Writ. Jeremy
Sandford. Prod. Tony Garnett. The Wednesday Play, BBC1, first broadcast
November 16, 1966.
The Spirit of '45. Dir. Ken Loach. 2013.
Books and articles
Cooke, Lez. British Television Drama: A History.
London: BFI Publishing, 2003.
Engels, Friedrich. The Housing Question. 1872.
Various editions, including Marx/Engels Selected Works, Vol. 2.
Fitzpatrick, Suzanne, and Hal Pawson. "Fifty Years
since Cathy Come Home: Critical Reflections on the UK Homelessness
Safety Net." International Journal of Housing Policy 16, no. 4
(2016): 543–555.
Fuller, Graham, ed. Loach on Loach. London: Faber and
Faber, 1998.
Garnett, Tony. The Day the Music Died: A Life Behind the
Lens. London: Constable, 2016.
Hill, John. Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and
Television. London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Sandford, Jeremy. Cathy Come Home. London: Pan Books,
1967.
Steinberg, Stefan. "What filmmaker Ken Loach makes of The
Spirit of '45." World Socialist Web Site, 2013; republished
March 26, 2023.
Walsh, David. "Ken Loach's Route Irish: the Iraq
war comes home." World Socialist Web Site, October 21, 2010.
Whitehouse, Lisa. "Are there any 'deserving poor'
anymore?" Southampton Law School Blog, April 1, 2026.
Official statistics and reports
All-Party Parliamentary Group for Households in Temporary
Accommodation / Shared Health Foundation. Child Mortality in Temporary
Accommodation. April 2026.
Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee. England's
Homeless Children: The Crisis in Temporary Accommodation. House of Commons,
2025.
Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. National
Plan to End Homelessness. December 11, 2025.
Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. Statutory
Homelessness in England: January to March 2026. Published August 13, 2026.
Press and campaign sources
Big Issue. "Everything you need to know about Labour's
homelessness strategy." 2025.
Big Issue. "104 children's deaths linked to living in
temporary accommodation: 'We should be outraged'." April 2026.
Big Issue North. "Preview: Cathy" (on Cardboard
Citizens' adaptation and Loach's 2016 Guardian interview). December
2016.
Jeraj, Samir. "How homeless children die." New
Statesman, April 26, 2026.
Puddicombe, Stephen. "50 years on, Ken Loach's Cathy
Come Home is as powerful as ever." Little White Lies, November
16, 2016.
Shelter. "Number of children homeless in England
highest since records began." Press release, August 13, 2026.
