The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: Housing Policy in Great Britain, 1945–19971
p. 31-48
Texte intégral
1There are numerous accounts of housing policy in Britain since the Second World War (for example Merrett, 1979; Cole and Furbey, 1994; Harloe, 1995; Malpass and Murie, 1999; Malpass, 2004, 2005a and b; Mullins and Murie, 2006). But the question of how far the origins of contemporary problems can be said to lie in the policy choices of the past provides a novel angle from which to approach this well trodden ground. However, it is much easier to provide a descriptive account than to attribute cause and effect in this context: policy action has to be seen as only one among several possible drivers of change in the wider housing system. Among the other drivers are demographic trends, social change, macro-economic variables (income growth, inflation and economic restructuring) (Stephens et al., 2005: 16). Moreover, housing policy can be seen as a response to change, as much as a cause. This is also true of wider interventions under the heading of regeneration policy, which are effectively about remedial action designed to limit the adverse consequences of economic change. We also need to remember that policy choices are often heavily constrained by circumstances: ministers who have a realistic approach to the problems of implementation do not have complete freedom to frame policies that reflect their own ideological preferences. If politicians should have modest hopes for their interventions, they should also recognise that policies often have unforeseen consequences. Thus, to investigate the extent to which earlier policy choices have shaped the present is not necessarily to attribute blame or responsibility to previous generations of policy makers. It is probably best to assume that they were doing their utmost, as they saw it, working with limited knowledge and inadequate tools in difficult circumstances.
2The main theme of this chapter is that policies in the area of housing need to be seen in the longer term and that their impacts can live on long after the policies themselves have changed. This is the reason for borrowing from Charles Dickens the phrase ‘the best of times, the worst of times’. What I want to suggest is that in Britain after 1945 we had serious housing problems, but effective policies. Later, by the 1970s, the housing situation improved, but there was then a change of policy, and it is possible that the full implications and impacts of these more recent policies have yet to be felt. If this view of the longer term has validity then it raises some important questions about the flourishing policy evaluation industry, which is based on the assumption that the effects of policies can be measured in the short term, i.e. within the electoral time horizons of politicians.
3The chapter is structured around the idea that the 1970s represent a pivotal decade. This is not to imply that housing policy was unchanging before or since the 1970s; rather, it is to suggest that there was variation within one dominant paradigm, which then gave way to the construction of a new paradigm. Without necessarily trying to pinpoint one particular date, event or cause, it is nevertheless clear that much had changed between 1970 when one Conservative Party leader, Edward Heath, came to power, and 1979 when his successor, Margaret Thatcher, began her eleven years in office. It was during the 1970s that the long postwar economic boom (‘les Trente Glorieuses’) finally came to an end, finished off by the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement on international exchange rates in 1971, closely followed by the shock to the world economy when oil prices quadrupled in the wake of the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. Keynesian policies of economic management were abandoned as large scale unemployment returned to Britain and other advanced capitalist economies. Housing policy, too, changed in a number of significant ways.
The Housing Situation in Postwar Britain
4To take an extremely long term view, much of housing policy in the twentieth century was about responding to the problems inherited from the previous century of rapid and unregulated growth of urban industrialism. The two major wars of the first half of the twentieth century only made matters worse, casting long shadows, so that although there was a high level of house building between the wars, in the 1930s especially, not much progress was made in terms of replacing the older nineteenth century stock of poor quality houses. So we could say that housing in Britain was directly affected by war, or recovering from the effects of war, for the whole of the period from 1914 to about 1968. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War Britain faced the worst housing shortage of the whole century (Holmans, 1987: 93). Virtually six years of normal housing output had been lost (almost certainly more than one million dwellings), about 450,000 houses had been destroyed or rendered uninhabitable in the war, and there had been effectively no repair or maintenance work done since 1939. At the same time the population had actually increased by about 1 million, and the birth rate rose from 1946 onwards for the next twenty years. In England and Wales in 1951 there were about 750,000 more households than houses, and 75 per cent of households lived in accommodation that was either unfit for human habitation, substandard, overcrowded or shared with other families (DOE, 1977: 10). In Scotland the situation was even worse. A considerable proportion of the houses that were available were lacking in amenities such as bathrooms, inside toilets, hot water systems and central heating – features that most people take for granted today. It should be noted here that the situation in 1951 represented an improvement since 1945, due to the construction of 1 million new homes. Wartime plans for postwar reconstruction had been based on building over 1.3 million dwellings in ten years, just to meet existing and anticipated needs, plus a further 1.5–2.5 million to replace existing unfit and obsolete dwellings (Malpass, 2005a: 59). In terms of the overall ambition, therefore, the achievement of 1 million in six years was not enough.
Chart I — Housing tenure in England and Wales, 1951

5Postwar Britain was still a place where more than two thirds of households rented their homes, the majority from private landlords, but this was changing rapidly. These figures obscure wide regional variation, and the fact that Scotland had a significantly different tenure structure until recent years; by the 1970s more than 50 per cent of Scottish households were local authority tenants.
Policy Choices
6Some observers have seen British housing policy as beset by short-termism (Williams, 1997: 1–3). Others have made similar points by drawing on metaphors depicting housing policy as a ‘political football’ (Yates, 1982: 204), or ‘swinging drunkenly back and forth’ (Donnison and Ungerson, 1982: 285). Donnison (1989: ix) argued that there had been a lack of coherence as governments led by different parties sought to take policy in different directions. However, by standing back from the detail of policy others have identified coherence and continuity, in ways that provide a more useful perspective. Throughout the twentieth century housing policy in Britain was based on the underlying assumption that the market was the best way of delivering housing, and that private enterprise would provide for most people most of the time. This therefore placed public housing in a subordinate position, from which it only occasionally and temporarily emerged. Underlying this paper is the idea that housing policy in Britain was essentially supporting and facilitating a long term market-led transformation and modernisation as owner occupation replaced private renting as the dominant form of private housing provision (Malpass and Murie, 1999). This process, which was more or less complete by the end of the century, has had long term implications for the size, role and standing of social renting. In addition, Ginsburg (1999: 226) has identified continuities in what he calls ‘liberal collectivist’ housing policy, based on four themes that endured from the inter-war period right through to the 1970s:
- rent control/regulation for private rented housing without significant fiscal incentives or cash support for landlords or tenants
- nationally regulated and subsidised provision of local authority rented housing for the ‘respectable’ working class
- programmes of Victorian slum clearance with replacement council housing for poor people
- fiscal and general government support for owner occupiers
7Recognising the continuities either side of the Second World War is helpful in thinking about the policy choices made in the postwar period, for Ginsburg is suggesting that the 1940s was not a decade of change or innovation in the basic assumptions underlying housing policy. The policy choices adopted in the 1940s were a pragmatic response to circumstances, influenced by underlying long term support for market based solutions, and a path-dependent reliance on local authorities as major providers of new housing for the time being. Kleinman (1996: 175) takes a view similar to Ginsburg’s, arguing that housing policy in the thirty years after 1945 ‘was about estimating housing needs, setting quantitative output targets, boosting house building, especially in recessions, raising the average physical condition of the stock, removing substandard housing, and pursuing the goal of a decent home for every household’. Like Ginsburg, Kleinman also recognises the 1970s as turning point in housing policy.
8If we think about the choices open to policy makers in the mid to late 1940s, the key issues that they faced were how many houses to build and who was to build them. Doing nothing was not an option – at least in the British political context, and here there is an obvious and important contrast with the much lower priority attached to house building in the immediate postwar period in France (Harloe, 1995: 319). From a British point of view this raises questions about how it was politically possible to pay so little attention to serious housing needs in France in the late 1940s. In Britain, the sheer scale of the housing shortage contributed to a political situation that demanded action of some sort, and it is generally agreed that whichever party had won the general election of July 1945 there would have been a substantial house building programme, with the local authorities taking the lead role, at least in the short term. In the event the local authorities built more houses than private enterprise every year until 1958, and in the twenty years to 1965 they produced 60 per cent of all new houses. The lead role for the local authorities was a product of path-dependence and a case of practicality overriding politics, especially after the return of a Conservative government in 1951, when production of local authority houses actually increased towards an all-time record in 1953.
9The chart below shows house building in Great Britain from 1949, by which time the programme of new permanent houses had grown from just 3,000 completions in 1945 to 227,600 in 1948 (Malpass, 2005a: 68). The chart indicates the importance of the mid-1970s as a turning point: the end of the postwar reconstruction phase and the start of a new phase in which total production would generally be at levels significantly below those of earlier years. Output in Great Britain was consistently above 250,000 from 1953 to 1978, but since then it has never even reached 250,000. From 1990 to 1997 the total never exceeded 200,000.
Chart II — Housebuilding: Permanent dwelling completions by tenure, Great Britain

10This chart very effectively shows the importance of the contribution made by local authorities to the achievement of high levels of overall output in the period up to the mid-1970s, and the subsequent failure of the private and housing association sectors to expand their output to compensate for the loss of new supply from the local authorities. It also shows the generally upwards trend of the private sector in the period from 1953 to 1968, and its generally downwards trend from 1969 to 1981. Taking the whole period from 1969 to 1997, private house building has varied either side of the average figure of 156,900: in 17 of those 29 years the total was between 140,000 and 160,000. If we look at just the period 1974 to 1997 (i.e. starting from the first impact of the first world oil price hike following the Arab-Israeli war of 1973) the average is 151,700 and in 16 of 24 years the total has been in the range 140–160,000. The low point was 115,000 in 1981 and the peak was 193,400 in the boom year of 1988, but in most years the total was within 10 per cent of the average. The peaks and troughs in private housing production can be explained in terms of macro-economic effects, and indeed the stability of output since 1997 may also be due to macro-economic management. Whatever the reasons behind it, there seems to be a long running tendency for the British private house building industry to produce around 150,000 dwellings per annum. The historical evidence suggests that sustained levels of total output above this figure are dependent on increasing the contribution made by the social rented sector.
11The question of how many houses should be built was hotly debated especially during the reconstruction period, with much party political capital being generated by critics of the Labour government for not building enough houses in the late 1940s. But there were other critics who argued that the country could not afford to build houses on such a large scale when there was a pressing need to invest in industrial manufacturing in order to regenerate exports in aid of economic recovery. Building houses simply sucked in imports (such as timber), which cost foreign exchange that could be ill-afforded. This sort of debate carried on into the 1950s, and the continued commitment to a large housing programme is evidence that, at that time at least, politics trumped economics.
12During the first two decades after 1945, policy choices were heavily constrained by two main features of the housing situation: the overall shortage and the poor quality of much of the existing stock. Initial policy choices were also constrained by the capacity of the building industry, badly disrupted by the war. It was understood to be neither politically nor practically feasible to simply rely on private enterprise in an unregulated market. It has been argued (Malpass, 2003) that housing policy in the first postwar decade was, in effect, putting the building industry back on its feet and establishing conditions where it could once again be relied upon to produce the majority of new housing output. If postwar circumstances pointed to a policy concentrated on achieving high levels of new building, this imperative over-rode considerations of tenure. Whereas today the British, especially the English, are often seen as unreasonably pre-occupied with housing tenure, in the early postwar years, questions of tenure were not given much attention in debates about housing policy. The assumption was that most people would continue to need to rent their homes, and that in the absence of any sign of new investment coming into the private rented sector it would be necessary to rely on the local authorities for the majority of new supply. This represents a marked contrast with the stance of British governments in the present period: demands for increased housing production now meet a response that is almost the opposite of that of sixty years ago. A sort of market fundamentalism has overtaken housing policy and there is no prospect of local authorities being asked to build again.
13Turning to the question of the poor quality of much of the older stock, wartime plans for the first postwar decade had referred to a commitment to redevelopment on a scale that was, in practice, unachievable and officially set aside. For ten years after the war priority was given to expanding rather than renewing the stock. But in 1954, slum clearance was re-launched after a period of fifteen years, and local authorities were required to draw up plans to remove all remaining slum housing. Over the next twenty years over 1.1 million houses were closed or demolished in England and Wales alone (English et al., 1976: 39). In the interwar period there had been considerable debate about whether clearance or improvement was the better approach, with the emphasis coming down in favour of clearance. There was less debate in the 1950s, but it was nevertheless a bold policy choice to commit substantial resources to tearing down and replacing large parts of Britain’s urban fabric. This policy had a major long term impact on the appearance of inner city areas, removing low rise high density streets, contributing to suburban expansion and lower population densities in inner areas, but also generating new estates of modernist high rise forms that have subsequently become associated with, and icons of, the failures of municipal housing. Alongside slum clearance and redevelopment ran a low key policy of improvement grants to owners of older property. After 1968, however, there was a shift in emphasis away from clearance into improvement (for a full account see Gibson and Langstaff, 1982).
A Golden Age for Housing Policy
14Despite the seriousness of the problems of shortage and poor quality, the period of thirty years after 1945 has been described as a golden age for both social housing (Harloe, 1995: 10) and owner occupation (Murie, 1998: 96, Malpass, 2005b: 120). Indeed it can be seen as a golden age for housing policy as a whole, in the sense that there were clearly defined problems of shortage and poor quality, and coherent, effective policies were framed and implemented to tackle them. In relation to social housing, the idea of a golden age rests on the fact that half of all local authority dwellings ever built in Britain date from the twenty years after 1945, and for an extended period, local authorities were given the opportunity to demonstrate their capacity to build good quality homes on a large scale, for a relatively broad cross section of the working population. The growth of public housing in this period was sustained by a historically specific conjunction of factors and interests: the source of the housing problem was seen to lie in the private market: there were not enough dwellings, the quality was often poor, and there had been little inclination to maintain and improve the aging parts of the stock. In this context, local authorities could convincingly claim to be part of the solution, having shown between 1919 and 1939 that they were capable of delivering at scale, well beyond the capacity of the private not-for-profit organisations. Local authorities (and the development corporations in the new towns created after 1946) were well placed to take the lead role in construction during the period of worst market dislocation, channelling work to private building firms; in the memorable phrase used by Aneurin Bevan (Minister of Health, 1945–50), the local authorities were ‘plannable instruments’ in a way that private builders were not. The scale of the shortage and the political imperative of effective action meant that both Labour and Conservative governments throughout the period recognised that local authorities had a role to play. This is not to argue that there was a complete consensus on the matter, but the Conservatives, natural supporters of private enterprise, nevertheless recognised that the local authorities had to be involved in both meeting the overall shortage and tackling slum clearance in particular. Local authority housing also enjoyed the advantage of being more modern and better equipped than much of what was on offer in the private sector, especially the private rented sector, in which there was very little investment in new building or improvement. From the point of view of consumers, the local authorities offered the prospect of decent homes at affordable rents, and in an era before the widespread expectation that one’s home should also be a route to wealth accumulation there was strong demand from among the employed working class. In short, national and local politicians, building contractors and a significant section of the voting population all had reasons for continuing to support the growth of local authority housing.
15At the same time it is reasonable to talk of a golden age for owner occupation, which increased from 31 per cent of all housing in 1951 to 52 per cent by 1971. Again a number of factors combined to support growth in this sector: full employment and rising living standards meant that more people felt sufficiently confident of the long term sustainability of their incomes to commit to the relatively high costs of mortgaged house purchase. In contrast to the previous period of growth in this sector in the 1930s, inflation helped to reduce the burden of debt repayment, and in any case the building societies operated a cartel agreement that kept the mortgage interest rate below rates charged in the wider market. The lowering of the income tax threshold in the postwar period meant that increasing numbers of house purchasers were able to take advantage of mortgage interest tax relief. Additional support came in the form of the removal of tax on imputed rental income in 1963, and the introduction of the option mortgage subsidy in 1968 (this was a device to extend the benefits of tax relief to purchasers who were not income tax payers). As Murie (1998: 96) has pointed out, in the golden age there were also safety nets in place for purchasers who found themselves unable to sustain mortgage repayments: home owners claiming social security were entitled to assistance covering the whole of the interest part of their monthly mortgage payment, and there was the possibility of moving into council housing. In the period from 1945 to the early 1970s, therefore, home ownership was a relatively risk-free commitment, in contrast to subsequent years, when unemployment ran at much higher levels, tax relief and safety net supports were both removed, and the option of council housing ceased to be as available or as attractive an alternative.
Beyond the Golden Age
16The important realignment of housing policy in the 1970s reflected several factors, including objective changes in the housing situation, altered perceptions and expectations, and increasingly challenging macro-economic conditions demanding new policy responses. To take the last first, as mentioned above, the world economy was affected by the end of the long postwar boom, and shaken by oil prices increases that ‘sent shock waves of hitherto unimaginable dimensions through the system’ (Pollard, 1983: 373). In Britain, unemployment and inflation had been rising since the late 1960s and continued to be regarded as growing problems which governments wrestled with to greater or lesser effect, casting around for new policy prescriptions. These tended to cast high levels of public expenditure as a key part of the problem and therefore a target for attack, with obvious implications for capital intensive programmes of public house building. Similarly, tackling inflation was a major objective of economic policy, and this also had implications for housing.
17Inflation was one of the main reasons for a recasting of rents and subsidy policy in British public housing in the early 1970s (Malpass, 1990). This politically contentious change occurred at the same time as the first dramatic boom-slump cycle in the British housing market. These events helped to raise the reform of housing finance above production levels as the main theme in housing policy debates, and in 1974 the government launched a major review of housing finance (subsequently broadened into a housing policy review (DOE, 1977)). Since the late 1960s, ministers had been adjusting their rhetoric to take account of the new realities: they began talking about the approaching end of the national housing shortage and an overall surplus of dwellings over households; they also seized on the growing unpopularity of large scale urban redevelopment to justify a switch from high output policy into the rehabilitation of existing homes and neighbourhoods. The economic crisis of late 1967 effectively led to the end of high output policy in housing in the following year, and apart from a brief recovery in 1974 and 1975, the production of council houses has been on a downwards slope ever since. It is interesting to note again the extent to which output by private builders also followed a generally declining tendency from the late 1960s through to the early 1980s. The deepening economic difficulties of the mid-1970s only reinforced the tendency to emphasise past improvements: ‘We are better housed as a nation than ever before; and our standards of housing seem to compare well with those of similar and more prosperous countries’ (DOE, 1977: iv).
18By the time of the 1977 Green Paper a clear majority of British households were home owners, and the rate of growth was about to increase, despite the shift into much more turbulent economic conditions with high unemployment and increasing labour market insecurity. Home ownership had become normalised as the majority tenure. The contrast between ministerial statements of the 1940s and 1970s is stark; in the late 1940s, Aneurin Bevan had urged young couples to resist the blandishments of the mortgage lenders and to hang on for a council house. By 1977, his successors in a later Labour government argued that ‘For most people, owning one’s own home is a basic and natural desire, which for more and more people is becoming attainable’(DOE, 1977:50).
Chart III — Housing tenure in Great Britain, 1976 and 1997

19If the first thirty years after 1945 were characterised by the application of effective policies designed to address acute problems of housing shortage and poor quality, how is the later period to be depicted? Kleinman (1996: 2–3) has suggested that housing policy became bifurcated, split into two distinct strands, one of which is essentially a market based approach directed to what he calls the well housed majority, while the other, aimed at the less well off, is about the provision of social rented housing and other forms of protection for the homeless and vulnerable. The policy interventions applied to these groups are also quite distinct, the majority requiring essentially stable economic growth and low unemployment to allow the housing market to work effectively, while the minority require more direct intervention in the form of public housing or financial support. He also argues that during the 1980s and 1990s the two constituencies moved further apart.
20Kleinman’s analysis is useful, and consistent with the argument that British housing policy has always been based on the primacy of the market. What we have seen in the period since the 1970s is the development of an approach to housing that reflects a wider recasting of the relationship between the individual and the state as governments seek to do less for people under the rubric of empowerment, choice and responsibility. Housing policy has become more reliant on the market, and especially the owner occupier market for the achievement of policy goals, to the extent that at some periods critics have argued that housing policy had been reduced to tenure policy (Donnison and Maclennan, 1985). Policy has moved away from public provision and market regulation towards the idea that housing is a commodity like any other to be provided and consumed through the market mechanism, with the state accepting a role in providing for only the least well off, those for whom the market cannot provide. Expansion of home ownership (which was already established as a policy goal) has become the dominant policy objective since 1979.
New Policy Choices
21Some policy choices are more visible than others: the ending of the high output phase in British housing policy in 1968 was not announced as such at the time. It was a turning point that only became clear with the passage of time, although the main political parties soon stopped competing with each other in terms of how many houses they would build each year. Whether ministers would have made this change in the absence of deteriorating macro-economic conditions is open to speculation. There is no doubt that housing conditions were generally better than before, but there remained much still to be done and the situation could have been spun in different ways, had the economic pressures been less acute (after all, they were no more acute than in 1945). The introduction of a right for local authority tenants (and some housing association tenants) to buy their houses at substantially discounted prices was a policy choice of a very different order. This is a clear example of a purely elective policy, unconstrained by anything other than ideological preference. It is also an example of politics, and the politics of tenure, over-riding the established concerns of production, quality and affordability within housing policy.
22The right to buy was introduced as the flagship housing innovation of the new Conservative government in 1980. It was hailed as a vote winning measure by Margaret Thatcher and has proved to be enduringly popular (although the terms have been modified [Jones and Murie, 2006]). The right to buy had a rapid and significant impact on the municipal sector, for its introduction marked the point at which council housing stopped expanding and went into steep decline, both numerically and proportionately. The rate of decline was a product of both the right to buy and the continuing decline in new building (hitherto there had been voluntary sales by some local authorities, but new building had always maintained growth in the sector as a whole). New building by local authorities stood at 86,000 in 1979, when the Conservatives took office, and it declined steadily year by year to reach just 468 in 1997. The early significance of the right to buy was increased by the depth of the economic recession in the early 1980s, when private house building touched a 25 year low. As a result, in the four years 1981–84, the 537,000 right to buy sales accounted for half of the growth of the owner occupier sector.
23The chart below shows right to buy year by year, but the total for the period 1980–1997 was 1.8 million, to which must be added 245,665 dwellings sold to new social landlords under large scale transfer agreements between 1988 and 1997. The idea that a local authority might transfer its entire stock of council houses to a housing association (or other registered social landlord) was scarcely credible before the late 1980s, and in the context of a paper on policy choices it has to be acknowledged to be a phenomenon that came from the local authority level. It is a good example of a local innovation being taken over by central government. Individual authorities took the initiative as a way of circumventing a central government policy known as tenants’ choice, which councils believed would result in even more of their best and most popular houses being transferred out of the affordable rented sector. Stock transfer soon became attractive for other reasons, notably as a way of raising capital for local authorities, and government saw it as a way of both reducing the influence of elected local politicians and taking social housing capital spending off the public expenditure budget (this was a product of the peculiar public spending conventions in Britain (Wilcox, 1997)). By the time it left office in 1997, the Conservative government had made stock transfer its own mainstream policy and was pressing local authorities to come forward with transfer proposals (Malpass and Mullins, 2002). The total impact of various measures was that the local authority stock in 1997 was only two thirds of its size in 1976.
Chart IV — Right to buy sales in Great Britain 1980–1997

Chart V — Large scale voluntary transfers in England 1988/9 to 1996/7

24The heavy emphasis on expanding the housing market after 1979 had other important implications for the social rented sector. The local authority sector was already becoming the tenure of the least well off as a result of the continued decline of private renting and the high cost of house purchase. The right to buy accelerated the changing social character of the sector by selectively stripping out the more affluent tenants. Changes in rents and subsidy policy after 1981 added to the incentives given to the better off to buy or face substantial rent increases (Malpass, 1990). At the same time, there was a conscious shift of policy towards targeting assistance on the least well off through means testing, thereby making higher nominal rents more affordable by the poor than by the better off. This was taken a step further after legislation in 1989 gave central government renewed leverage on council rents through withdrawal of subsidy (Malpass et al., 1993).
25In the past, local authority housing had been open to the criticism that it provided good quality homes at subsidised rents for the better off while remaining unaffordable by the poorest. There was, therefore, a good case for improving access to the sector, but to do so at the same time as removing the better off has had long term consequences that have turned social housing in general into a tenure of last resort. By 1993, 66 per cent of households renting from English local authorities had no earned income (Holmans, 1995). It is important to establish that the residualisation of social rented housing in Britain has not been accidental; it is not the unforeseen or unintended consequence of expanding home ownership. It was entirely predictable, and was in fact predicted even before the right to buy came in (Murie, 1977, Harloe, 1978). It was, therefore, a deliberate policy choice.
26By 1997 (ie, before the advent of the New Labour government), a new market led housing policy orthodoxy had been established in Britain. First, subsidy had been much reduced across the board, and financial assistance was targeted at low income households through means tested social security benefits (mainly Housing Benefit). In marked contrast to the early postwar decades, when housing consumers in all sectors were protected from the full effects of market forces, by 1997 the market was much freer. Second, whereas public housing had played a significant part in meeting housing needs and tackling housing problems for thirty years after 1945, more recently it has become identified as part of the problem. The growth of public housing was partly about facilitating the restructuring of the private sectors of the housing market; that process is now substantially complete and attention has turned to the restructuring of social renting, through the transfer of stock to new not-for-profit landlord organisations. Third, a cross-party political consensus has emerged as the residual role of social renting within the overall housing system. This is quite different from the pre-1975 position. Fourth, as a result of the exaggerated respect shown by contemporary politicians for the market, when the issue of housing supply returned to the agenda in the 1990s there was a quite different response compared with earlier years, as revealed in the chart of housing production: whereas the local authorities had such a large part to play in the postwar decades in the new consensus they do not feature as providers (on the contrary their role continues to shrink).
27Underlying this chapter is the proposition that housing policies need to be understood in a perspective embracing the long term. This leads to the speculation that housing conditions in Britain today may reflect the impact of policies decades ago, rather than those of the recent past or the present, and that therefore insights about future circumstances and problems can be derived from an analysis of the policies of the past. The title borrows the notion of the best of times, the worst of times to make the point that in the postwar decades Britain had a serious housing problem, in the form of a gross shortage and extensive poor physical conditions, but against that alarming background we had coherent policies that were effectively aimed at the main elements of the problem. The sustained investment in housing during the postwar period of economic recovery eventually produced results in terms of significant improvements in both the quantity and quality of housing available. In difficult macro-economic conditions in the 1970s the very success of housing policy since 1945 provided a pretext for change. Since then, housing policy has been much more influenced by considerations of tenure – growing the market sectors and shrinking the social rented sectors – and letting market forces, and market-driven organisations, determine what gets done, when, where and for whom.
28The best of times, the worst of times was then reversed, so that during a period of improved housing conditions we had policies that were directed to different issues, specifically the ownership of dwellings and the means of financing their production and consumption. Housing policy in the traditional sense gave way to concerns about setting the market free. It is arguable that in the 1990s the fact that the majority were relatively well housed was at least partly due to the long term effects of postwar policies. However, the benefits were beginning to be overtaken by the effects of more recent policies. We are now able to see more clearly that relying on market forces and the self interest of market based actors and organisations does not necessarily lead to the provision of the numbers of houses needed by a given population. We need to re-learn the lessons of the 1940s – if we want to achieve an increase in the number of dwellings produced each year, we cannot rely on private enterprise. Having said that, neither can we simply revert to the policies of sixty years ago; those days are gone and cannot be recovered. The heavy emphasis on building by the public sector reflected a particular conjunction of circumstances and political and economic interests that no longer exists.
29The tragic irony of British housing policy is that the more governments have extolled the virtues of owner occupation the more they have undermined public housing, adding to problems which have then been used to reinforce criticism of the sector, thereby justifying yet more owner occupation and further residualisation of social renting. However, we should not be too surprised by this depressing outcome, and we should not have great expectations of politicians doing anything about it. The point was made earlier that British housing policy from the early part of the twentieth century could be read as providing support for a market led restructuring of private sector housing, from renting to owning. Governments have limited capacity to steer society in directions that the market does not want to go – after all, the system we live under is not called capitalism for nothing. In an era of consumerism, owner occupation makes sense from the point of view of capital, but the pursuit of ownership and wealth has intensified problems of supply and affordability, while placing unnecessary limits on the range of policy instruments available to governments.
Bibliographie
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Notes de bas de page
1 The author would like to thank Pete Daw for his assistance in the production of the charts used in this paper.
Auteur
University of the West of England, Bristol
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