UNIVERSITY

OF

OXFORD

Discussion Papers in
Economic and Social History
Number 98, May 2012

FROM SLUMS TO SLUMS IN THREE GENERATIONS;

HOUSING POLICY AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF
THE WELFARE STATE, 1945-2005
Harold Carter

FROM SLUMS TO SLUMS IN THREE GENERATIONS;

HOUSING POLICY AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF
THE WELFARE STATE, 1945-2005.
Harold Carter
University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 2RL
Email: [email protected]

Abstract
Housing was the major domestic priority of all postwar UK governments. By 1970 the physical
conditions of British housing had been transformed; by the 1990s seventy per cent of households in
England owned their own homes. Yet in 2012 there were still parts of many cities that deserved
labeling as slums. Why had massive public expenditure not managed to achieve the goal of successive
governments?
Vested interests, created by each wave of intervention, limited subsequent policy choices. From about
1950 to about 1995, governments expanded owner occupation via a wide range of subsidies, but
increasingly restricted the supply of land by restrictive planning laws. There was a massive (and
unremarked) tenurial revolution, as privately rented houses were sold off to owner occupiers. At the
same time, slum clearance created large single-tenure areas. This changed the nature of the demand for
council housing (once occupied by the upper skilled working-class). In some parts of the country,
gentrification removed a once-affordable source of owner-occupied housing. But rent control meant
there were few homes for would-be renters. Access to good quality social housing thus became a very
high-stakes game, for those on modest incomes and a major source of ethnic tension in some inner
cities.
From the mid 1980s on, means-tested help with rent payments and market liberalization provided new
help to would-be private renters. By 2010 this had resulted in the provision of over 2.2 million new
privately rented dwellings in under twenty years (almost as many as had vanished between 1960 and
1975). Small debt-funded capitalist landlords, and tenants with limited security of tenure, would have
been familiar one hundred years earlier. But this time the government was paying the rent;
guaranteeing the market for a new generation of slum landlords, while producing severe disincentives
to labour-market participation by the poor. This new form of subsidy (coupled with continuing high
land prices) helped to increase nominal rents much faster than average earnings. Housing benefit
expenditure rose 11 billion in 2000 to 22 billion in 2010.
As, on the surface, the British housing market moved away from social democracy and towards market
liberalism, its underpinnings moved in the opposite direction. Measure was piled on measure, and
subsidy on subsidy, until at the end of the century the influence of government had become allpervasive.
Social amelioration of this kind faces two major problems. The first problem is that it tends to reward
the majority at the expense of the weak. The second great problem is that it depends on a continuing
flow of new resources, to fix each new problem while still maintaining preserving the interests of
existing clients. If liberal democracies survive by buying-off trouble from new problems, while
continuing to support accrued vested interests, how will they manage if economic growth can no longer
be relied upon? Based on the experience of the UK housing market, it seems likely that they will focus
their resources on those in the middle. This does not bode well for the poor.

'It is possible to imagine, like Rousseau, a world in

which the disposal of land is free from strife. An
assurance that land is humanity's common heritage
continues to inspire social philosophers and social
movements in the face of contrary realities. But the
arrangements which govern the allocation of land
to particular people are still amongst the most
potent determinants of the character of social
relations, economic activity and political power.
Land remains a principal source of authority and
inequality.'
A. Offer, Property and Politics, 1870-1914 :
Landownership, Law, Ideology and Urban Development
in England (Cambridge, 1981).

All markets operate within normative frameworks. These range from the rules that
establish the validity of contracts, to restrictions on who can contract for what (for
example, sumptuary laws about clothing). Even black-markets have rules, and the
penalties for breaching them can be harsh.1 These could all be considered as ethical
codes albeit minimal ones.
Sometimes we go beyond this; we try to create a different set of outcomes, by
modifying the way the market operates. Economists have developed theories that
describe when it might be sensible to do this; mainly, when markets participants have
unequal power (for example, monopolies); when some outcomes might have high
externalities; when conventional discounted cash flow decisions lead to obviously
silly decisions (such as setting no value on the environment a hundred years from
now); or when people face problems of co-operation, which makes them unable to act
in their own self-interest.
Slash-and-burn horticulture destroys rain-forests:
abandoning the used-up inner-city creates urban wastelands. Consider the dilemma
facing a slum-landlord; if she improves her property, but her neighbours do not, then
her effort will have been wasted. The decision to intervene under such circumstances
purports to be explicable within a rational choice framework (for example, to make
polluters pay for externalities; to promote area-wide schemes of urban renewal to
overcome collective action problems; to use a different discount rate to deal with
long-term costs and benefits). But this apparent objectivity is the hard shell around a
soft centre; why not chop down the rain forest, or let the cities rot? Who cares about
slum landlords? Should we really care about the interests of people who have not yet
been born, and thus make ad hoc adjustments to take account of them? Ethics keep
creeping in through the back door.

D. Gambetta, Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2009).

Quite often, however, our actions go well beyond this, and we try to impose a
completely different outcome from that which market forces would have created.
During the past thirty years such anti-market interventions have been deeply suspect
in academic circles - what right have we got to impose our choices on other people?
(a potent mixture of rational-choice mathematical models, hippy moral-relativism,
and the interests of huddled-bankers-yearning-to-be-free, has dominated the social
sciences). But despite academic disapproval, the political pressures to intervene have
remained. Even Mrs. Thatcher expanded the welfare state. Serious attacks on
welfare make politicians unelectable. As a consequence, a very large proportion of all
decision-making about spending and investment has continued to be shaped by
political concerns (albeit in the context of a market economy spinning out of control).
There are few signs that in the present economic crisis, pressures on government to
intervene will abate. If anything, the reverse is true. Since this is so, it is of vital
importance to understand more clearly what happens when governments intervene in
markets, or over-ride them entirely, in order to pursue ethical goals.
The notion of Government as a disinterested arbiter of the public interest has more
merit than is often ascribed to it. But however well-meaning people may be, their
actions face an intrinsic problem. Notions such as fairness, and social justice, are what
Gallie called essentially contested concepts:
the proper use of which inevitably involves endless disputes about their
proper uses on the part of their users.
He says:
to use an essentially contested concept means to use it against other
uses [,] and to recognize that one's own use of it has to be maintained
against these other uses.2
These disagreements are more than intellectual. There are winners and losers.
Changing the way we use words, changes power relationships.
Avner Offer has shown the way in which politicians in late Victorian Britain pursued
a notion of small-ownership to bind the masses to support the political and economic
power of ruling lites, creating outer ramparts of property to protect the stately
homes within; a policy that the Conservative Party has followed with success ever
since. Equally, the claim of the post-war Left that it was acting in the public interest
by creating prudential goods (such as council housing, hospitals and new universities)
created winners and losers, not just amongst those who benefited from the new assets,
but amongst those who were directing and managing the new enterprises.. Depending
2

W.B. Gallie, "Essentially Contested Concepts," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society LVI, no. New

Series (1955/6). p.169, 172. For a political exposition of Gallies ideas se William E Connolly, The Terms of
Political Discourse (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1974).

on whose notion of the public good was pursued, even within the left some
flourished while others faded.3 Offer comments:
The administrators, councillors, contractors and professionals who
manage society's collective capital at the local and national level have
appropriated many of the trappings of tenure. Rousseau, in his vision
of strifeless society, did not foresee these prosperous and powerful
offspring of the General Will. 4
In thinking about how these struggles played out in the provision of housing, it is
important not to take a narrow view of what constitutes an interest in property. Offer
described tenure thus:
[It is] any claim on land, buildings or minerals [which] may be
exercised directly . or indirectly as a charge or an expectation
[emphasis added].. [It] is a precondition of physical and moral
subsistence. It implies a degree of autonomy, however limited the
objects of tenure are marked off from other forms of property by their
rigid and substantial character. The stock of land and buildings cannot
be rapidly expanded or reproduced and the extent of the surface is
fixed..
He commented that:
some of the peripheral interests [were] sufficiently tenacious to merit
description as property rights.5
This broadening the concept of property is extremely helpful, because it makes clear
the range of people who had distinct (and possibly conflicting) stakes in the system:
for example, leaseholders with different lengths of lease, owners of ground rents,
lawyers working on conveyancing, providers of loan capital, clergymen in their
rectories, and dons in their college rooms.6 All were property professionals; all
stood to gain or lose in different ways from any reform. Over the last half of the
twentieth century, the number of people with complex relationships to property
expanded still further, as tenurial interests (in Offers use of the term) became
increasingly circumscribed by conceptions of the public good.
3

For the exercise of bureaucratic power, see: Jon Gower Davies, The Evangelistic Bureaucrat : A Study of a
Planning Exercise in Newcastle Upon Tyne (London: Tavistock Publications, 1972). Norman Dennis, People
and Planning : The Sociology of Housing in Sunderland, Society Today and Tomorrow (London: Faber,
1970). Clare Ungerson, Moving Home : A Study of the Redevelopment Process in Two London Boroughs,
Occasional Papers on Social Administration, No. 44 (London: Bell, 1971).
4

Avner Offer, Property and Politics, 1870-1914 : Landownership, Law, Ideology and Urban Development

in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). p.406.

5

Ibid., p5,6.
Ibid. p.91.

There were many more freehold owner-occupiers, but their apparently marketbased choices were substantially shaped by rules about planning, by tax
breaks, and by a saving-and-lending regime deliberately designed to assist
building societies in funding housing loans.7 In addition, promotion of owner
occupation via the Right to Buy in the last quarter of the century meant that
many people bought their homes, at heavily discounted prices, directly from
the state.
The second most important group was local authority tenants - who were
allocated houses and could make few choices about how to live in them, but in
return were offered lifetime security of tenure at controlled rents. The
economic value of the below-market rent in this tenure is hard to estimate; but
Prof. John Hills of the L.S.E. estimated that the net present value of the
subsidy in 2007 was about 32,000 per dwelling across England as a whole,
and as much as 65,000 in London.8
The third most important group were private tenants - but for them, the state
also intervened by imposing rent-control and security of tenure (and
eventually, by expropriating their landlords, for derisory compensation, and
knocking down their homes).
The last quarter of the century was marked by the rise of new social
landlords such as Housing Associations but they depended initially on
government loans, and later on government subsidies, to build their
affordable rented housing, and in consequence had to follow government
rules about what they could build, who their tenants should be, and what rents
they should charge.

Independence from the state, for all these groups, was a chimera. Government action
could be defended in ethical terms as creating public benefit; but many of these
benefits conflicted with one another. There were thus extensive opportunities for
those who could shape the agenda to define the public good in ways that suited them
best.
Britain was not unusual in the dependence of its housing markets on government
decision-making. All the other major western countries were subject to extensive
intervention even the United States, where there was little direct provision of social
housing, but where there was much federal support for owner-occupation (and, in
some cities, tough rent control). In Europe, the pattern varied but broadly speaking,
governments intervened to support the creation of good quality rented housing for
7

Stephen Merrett and Fred Gray, Owner Occupation in Britain (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982). .

See, for example, pp 303-4, which detail the extent of intervention in mortgage markets in the 1970s.
8

John Hills, "Ends and Means: The Future Roles of Social Housing in England," in CASEreport (London:

ESRC Research Centre of Analysis of Social Exclusion, 2007). p.62

ordinary working people (though not the poorest) in the 1940s and 1950s (often
through semi-independent voluntary housing organisations, sometimes tied to
confessional groupings and sometimes to political parties); but by the end of the
century most governments provided directly subsidised housing principally to the
very poorest groups, so that it became a residual tenure. Almost all OECD countries
also experienced substantial growth in owner-occupation, aided by generous tax
subsidies.9
So housing is a good test-bed to study the impact of ethical intervention in markets. It
is also an extremely important one. Apart from the intrinsic importance of good
quality housing, construction activity and housing-wealth had an important influence
on much of the remainder of the economy. The distribution of overall life-chances
thus came to depend substantially on the consequences of political intervention in
housing markets.
Housing has become simultaneously the principal speculative good for most families
in the developed Western economies, and one of the most important consumption
goods. There is constant tension between these two roles.10 A house is not just a
machine for living. Each form of intervention in housing markets affects both
consumption value' (how nice a home we get to live in this year), and investment
value (our future expected housing consumption, our ability to barter our rights for
housing in exchange for other desirable goods, and our ability to pass things on to our
children). While these are related issues, they are not inseparable; Presidents of
Oxford colleges live in glorious homes when they are in office, but they retire to
cottages. Their Lodgings have high use value, but no exchange value.
There are six core ways in which housing markets are affected by political
intervention:

by planning;

by demolition and slum clearance;

by rent controls and security-of-tenure in private rented housing;

Michael Harloe, The People's Home: Social Rented Housing in Europe and America (Oxford: Blackwell,
1995). p.263-7 and . Kathleen Scanlon and Christine Whitehead, "International Trends in Housing Tenure
and Mortgage Finance," (London: London School of Econonomics, 2004). p.25
10

In uncontrolled markets, the first is expressed by capital values, the second by rents. Capital values are

much more volatile than rents, since rents depend on factors which were not as elastic as the expectations of
investors. On the supply side, the stock of housing cannot be rapidly increased. On the demand side, usage
and contract ruled out violent fluctuations The stock of humanity changes rather slowly. Offer,
Property and Politics, 1870-1914 : Landownership, Law, Ideology and Urban Development in England.
p.271.

by ownership subsidies;

by the direct provision of subsidised rented housing;

by the provision of direct subsidies to individuals.

There processes feed back on one another. Attempts to shape the provision of housing
needed to cope with the multiplicity of entrenched rights and expectations in each of
these spheres. Though the rights were entrenched, the trench itself was made of
shifting sand. Getting the steering wheel of the digger, and shaping a new trench, was
a game with high-stakes consequences.
A focus on the housing of the poorest members of society offers one standpoint from
which to understand how attempts at intervention have played out. Ethically, a major
test of social policy is how it has affected the lives of the least well-off.
Slum dwellers have often been the rhetorical focus of housing policy. However, there
is a broad consensus in the housing literature that in the pre-war era, not just in Britain
but also in most other developed economies, the poorest people often suffered from
the policies that were ostensibly designed to help them.11 Slum-clearance knocked
down their homes, but the new socially-subsidised houses that replaced them were
often too expensive for poor families to rent, and came instead to be occupied by the
upper, respectable working-class.12
After the 1950s, social housing allocation no longer discriminated against the poor.
The physical conditions of the housing stock were transformed for the better. The
number of households without a bath or shower fell from 38% in 1951 to 22% in
1961, 9% in 1971 and 2% by 1981; those without access to a WC from 14% in 1951
to 1% by 1971 and nil by 1981.13 As conditions improved, definitions of poor
housing were changed to reflect new aspirations: by the end of the century decency
standards included repair conditions, modernity of bathrooms and kitchens, and
insulation standards. In 1996, 53% of all social sector homes and 43% of private
sector homes failed to reach these new standards; by 2004 even those proportions had
fallen to 31 per cent and 29 per cent.14
11

Ben Jones, "Slum Clearance, Privatization and Residualization: The Practices and Politics of Council
Housing in Mid-Twentieth-Century England," Twentieth Century British History 21, no. 4 (2010). pp.517522 (and see also the comprehensive literature review at the start of that article)
12

Harloe, The People's Home: Social Rented Housing in Europe and America. pp.143-4. Peter Malpass and

Alan Murie, Housing Policy and Practice, Public Policy and Politics (London: Macmillan, 1982).,42, 61.
John Burnett, A Social History of Housing 1815-1985 (London: Methuen, 1986). p.238.
13

Social Trends 30: 2000 (London:HMSO, 2000), Table 10.16 p.173

14

Social Trends 37: 2007 (London:HMSO, 2007) pp.136-7

The poorest social groups still did least well, but the major differences related to the
environment outside the home, not conditions of the building itself. The proportion of
people in the poorest income-quintile living in energy-inefficient homes was only
12% (against an average of 8% of all homes), and the proportion living in homes in
serious disrepair was 13% (against an average of 9%)15 (Table 1). This was not a
picture of Dickensian squalor, and was a world away from the life depicted by George
Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier and by Robert Roberts in The Classic Slum.
(The poorest performers were in the private-rented sector, which was principally a
tenure of transition, rather than of long-term settlement. By 2009, half of all privaterenters were aged under 35, and 70% of all newly-formed households moved into
private renting).16
Table 117

The overall shortage of housing, which had been a major problem in 1945, was also
eliminated. By 1970, the United Kingdom already had a crude housing surplus

Experience in other countries which adopted different routes to housing provision in the post-War era show
that similar results could be achieved in many different ways; but the pervasive nature of subsidies suggests
that without government help in all those states, progress would not have been so fast. See Harloe, The
People's Home: Social Rented Housing in Europe and America. pp.263-7
15

Social Trends 37: 2007 (London:HMSO, 2007), Table 10.13 p.137

16

Department of Communities and Local Government, English Housing Survey: Headline report 200910,

(London, 2010) pp.11,20.

17

Social Trends 37: 2007 (London:HMSO, 2007) p.137

(though there were local shortages).18 The bulk of the growth happened before 1971,
but the number of dwellings in Great Britain increased by a further 38 per cent
between then and 2007 (from 18.8 million to 25.9 million).19 Over the same period,
the number of households increased from 18.6 million to 24.4 million (a 31 per cent
increase), and the population grew by only 9 per cent.20 The number of dwellings
almost doubled from 1951 to 2005. Serious shortages still remained in some areas
especially London and the South East, and in pretty country towns and villages but
these were essentially problems of economic success, in a fast growing regional
economy.21
Up to 1981, much of this new building took place outside the market sector, by the
provision of council houses. (The impact of this building varied widely by region: by
1971, over half of all households in Scotland lived in a council home, as against just
under 30% in England.22) After 1981, social housing construction was much less
important.

18

Malpass and Murie, Housing Policy and Practice. p.52

19

Social Trends 40: 2010 (London:HMSO, 2007) p.139

20

Social Trends 40: 2010 (London:HMSO, 2007) p.140

21

N. H. Buck, Working Capital : Life and Labour in Contemporary London (London: Routledge, 2002).

22

Table 104 from:

http://www.communities.gov.uk/housing/housingresearch/housingstatistics/housingstatisticsby/stockincludin
gvacants/livetables/

10

Figure 1: New Dwellings Completed, 1946-200523

The overall impact of council housing construction on the stock of housing was
however significantly less than these figures suggest. The very first interventions in
housing markets, in the nineteenth century, had been prompted by the desire to do
something about the slums.24 In the middle of the twentieth century, starting in the
1930s and continuing until the mid 1970s, England saw huge slum-clearance
programmes. If this negative house building is included, the overall contribution of
government agencies to growth in the housing stock between 1960 and 1975 is
halved: they built 1.6 million dwellings, but demolished almost a million (Figure 2a).
Especially towards the tail-end of the demolition programme, councils were
demolishing houses that could, in private hands, have been successfully refurbished.25
None the less, it is clear that the demolition programme removed much of the worst of
the housing stock, and thus had a considerable impact on changing the quality of
homes available to the poor.

23

24

Reproduced from Hills, "Ends and Means." p.29

Malpass and Murie, Housing Policy and Practice. p.24ff. Burnett, A Social History of Housing. p.146-

159. Harloe, The People's Home: Social Rented Housing in Europe and America. p.40.
25

See for eample: Dennis, People and Planning : The Sociology of Housing in Sunderland. Neil McIntosh,

Council Housing in Southwark (London: Southwark CDP, 1975). Ungerson, Moving Home. Larry Bennett,
Neighborhood Politics : Chicago and Sheffield, (New York ; London, 1997) pp 4-5. Harold Carter,
"Building the Divided City: Race, Class and Social Housing in Southwark, 1945-1995," The London Journal
33, no. 2 (2008).

11

Figure 2a: Changes in Housing Stock by Tenure, 1960-7526

The other notable feature of the years before 1975 was the sale of private rented
housing, mainly into owner-occupation.27 Until 1960, the decline of the private rental
sector also accounted for a much greater proportion of the growth of owneroccupation than did new housing construction.
Together with the growth of
working-class owner-occupation in the building boom of the pre-war period, it was
largely responsible for the spread of owner-occupation to 42% of the UK population
by 1960.28 This represented a largely un-noticed tenurial revolution. To help put this
into perspective, it is worth noticing that these sales of private rented dwellings, from
1938 to 1960, accounted for about one-and-a-half times more transfers into owner
occupation than did all the sales of public rented dwellings under Mrs Thatchers later
Right to Buy programme between 1980 and 2010, which have attracted so much
more attention.29 The sales (which amounted to around 3 million dwellings between

26

Merrett and Gray, Owner Occupation in Britain. p.311: authors calculations.

27

Ibid. p.134

28

George Speight, Who Bought the Inter-War Semi? : The Socio-Economic Characteristics of New-House

Buyers in the 1930s (Oxford: University of Oxford, 2000).

29

Right to Buy in England transferred about 1.8 million dwellings out of the social housing sector between

1980 and 2010 a 30 year period rather than the 37-year period between 1938 and 1975, but comparable in
effective time because of the impact of the war, which put most property-market transactions on hold.
Source: Chart 671 Social housing sales:
http://www.communities.gov.uk/housing/housingresearch/housingstatistics/housingstatisticsby/socialhousin
gsales/livetables/
The impact of the policy in the UK as a whole was greater than that (because there had been so many council
dwellings in Scotland). But Aled Davies, "Right to Buy : The Origins and Development of a Conservative
Housing Policy" (M.Sc., Oxford University, 2010). gives the total sales under Right to buy as 2.2 million

12

1938 and 1975) have also attracted much less attention than the demolition
programme (which amounted to 1.6 million dwellings over the same period), but had
a much greater numerical impact. (Figures 2a, 2b, 3, 4).

Figure 2b: Changes in Housing Stock by Tenure, 1960-7530

Figure 3: Annual Increases in Owner-Occupation, by Source, 1951-1975

homes from 1979 to 1996 (30 per cent of the council housing stock), and this was still substantially fewer
thanthe total number of houses sold out of private renting into owner occupation.
30

Merrett and Gray, Owner Occupation in Britain. p.33: authors calculations.

13

Figure 4: Changes in Tenure, 1950-1970, 1975.31

Source: Social Trends No 6 (London, 1975) Table 3.3 p.54

Some of these sales, especially in parts of London,32 were early examples of

gentrification; but most were not. Many Labour councils actively sought to promote
such owner occupation, because it offered a housing solution for more prosperous
working people in skilled manual jobs (their core traditional constituency), and to the
new generation of what the party called ordinary working people and their families
(the product of a changing UK occupational structure social workers, teachers,
routine white collar workers). Councils helped these new buyers by offering loans to
facilitate purchases of older houses, at a time when building societies (the main
lending institutions) were often unwilling to lend on such properties, or to lowerincome purchasers.33
In Labour-led, impeccably working-class Sheffield, for
example, the council became a major provider of mortgage finance between 1960 and
1965, making some 10,000 loans in total. By August 1965, it was reported that:
in recent months of the Town Hall has been almost the only place
where would-be house owners have been able to borrow money.34
These sales improved the quality of the housing stock available to people of modest
means, as well as opening a route to owner occupation, because they unleashed a
31

Source: Social Trends No 6 (London, 1975) Table 3.3 p.54

32

See C. Hamnett, "Gentrification and the Middle-Class Remaking of Inner London, 1961-2001," Urban

Studies 40, no. 12 (2003).

33

The issue of council loans for house purchase is discussed extensively in Merrett and Gray, Owner

Occupation in Britain. Chapter 10 pp.99-105 .

34

Sheffield Star, 3/8/1965

14

torrent of private-sector funding for housing repair, which had been bottled-up by
fifty years of rent control. From the 1960s onwards, increasingly generous
government grants also started to be available to supplement those private resources.35
Yet despite huge improvements in the physical conditions of old housing in the postwar era, and the good physical quality of many of the new dwellings, by the end of
the century there were parts of many British cities that deserved labelling as slums
(albeit, slums of a new kind). The worst were dirty, dangerous and frightening places,
whose inhabitants lived lives that were sharply distinct from those of most of their
fellow citizens. To make matters worse, most of these new slums were in areas
predominantly owned by government, or managed by voluntary bodies under
government direction.36
Even for those born in a 1970 birth-cohort, the chances of someone living in council
housing growing up without any qualification by the age of 30 were twice those of
someone who grew up in owner-occupation.37 When households at the start of the
new century were matched on social and other criteria, social housing tenants had
startlingly worse outcomes; for example, of people with no qualifications, 70 per cent
of those living in social housing, but only 43 per who did not live in social housing,
were without jobs; 64 per cent of lone parents who lived in social housing were
workless, but only 35 per cent of single parents who lived in other tenures had no
job.38 Compared to 1979,
the chance of someone in social housing having both of their nearest
[working-age] neighbours in full-time work had fallen from just
under half to one in nine.39
Some of these estates especially in areas originally built with a large number of flats
rather than houses were also unpleasant and frightening places to live.
It is important not to over-state this problem- In England in 2004/05, 51 per cent of
homeowners reported that they were very satisfied with their area [but] so did 38
per cent of those who were renting in the social sector.40 A majority of occupants in
35

36

Malpass and Murie, Housing Policy and Practice. p.51

To those with a sense of irony, it seemed curiously appropriate that at the start of the twentieth century

the largest slum-landlord was said to be the Church of England, and that by the centurys end the largest
slum landlords were ethically-motivated governmental institutions.
37

Hills, "Ends and Means." pp.100-110. T

38

Ibid. pp.100-110.

39

Ibid. p.46

40

Social Trends 37: 2007 (London:HMSO, 2007), p.138

15

all sectors described themselves as satisfied, or very satisfied, in a survey in 2007-8

(Table 2).
Table 2: Satisfaction with current accommodation: by tenure, 2007/841

However, satisfaction measures are difficult to interpret; they may relate to what
people think they could reasonably expect to achieve, rather than to an absolute
standard. More detailed questions show that more than a fifth of social tenants
report the presence of drug users or dealers as a serious problem and in the areas
originally built as flatted council estates nearly a fifth of social tenants report as a
serious problem the general level of crime, fear of being burgled, vandalism and
litter, and 18 per cent of social tenants say that they feel unsafe alone even at home
or outside in daylight.42 (Figure 4) These were what Labour MP Frank Field called
Neighbours from Hell.43 Similar problems existed in much of the residualised

41

Social Trends 40: 2010 (London:HMSO, 2007), p.147

42

Hills, "Ends and Means." pp.4, 94ff.

There was a real (and novel) problem of social order in some inner city areas, from the 1960s onwards. For
example, Norman Dennis et al., The Failure of Britain's Police : London and New York Compared (London:
Civitas : Institute for the Study of Civil Society, 2003). has pointed out the very sharp rise in robberies and
assualts in Lambeth over the course of fifty years a rise way beyond anything that could be explained by
changes in reporting, or other methodological issues.
43

Frank Field, Neighbours from Hell (London: Politicos, 2003).

16

social-housing stock of other European counties, and in the (much smaller) socialhousing projects in parts of the USA.44
Figure 4: Particular Problems, by Tenure and Area Type45

In the 1990s and 2000s, things were made worse by an unintended consequence of the
sale of council homes; while houses in good neighbourhoods were popular (and
retained their original families, or were often sold-on to working families of modest
means), flats that were sold in inner-city council estates were often bought-up by
speculators who rented them back at high rents to needy families (supported by
means-tested housing benefit), but had had no interest in maintaining them in good
condition, or improving the condition of the neighbourhood (and no way of doing so,
even if they wanted to). Thus, a new generation of private slum-landlords emerged,
alongside their public-sector counterparts.
Much could be done to improve the quality of life in these areas, by changing the way
that they were managed to make them more flexible and responsive to tenant needs.46
44

Anne Power, Estates on the Edge : The Social Consequences of Mass Housing in Northern Europe

(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). For residualisation of social housing in Britain, Denmark, Germany, the
Netherlands and the USA see Harloe, The People's Home: Social Rented Housing in Europe and America. .
45

Reproduced from Hills, "Ends and Means." p.95

17

But these were often improvements from a very low base, compared to the experience
of their better-off fellow citizens (even in the most modest suburban
neighbourhoods).47
So why did the problem of providing poor people with a decent home in a safe
neighbourhood, with adequate schools and well managed community facilities, prove
so difficult to solve? An answer given by some on the Left was that there was no real
desire to solve the problem in any case; the new slums resulted from a failure of will,
or perhaps even from a deliberate attempt to split the interests of the mainstream
working class from those of the poor.48 On the Right, rational-choice explanations
about the demoralising effect of welfare competed, and sometimes combined, with
explanations in terms of personal inadequacy or a lack of cognitive capability; poor
areas are hell-holes because they are occupied by dysfunctional people.49
This paper will argue that it is not fruitful see the problems of the slums in isolation.
Each intervention creates rights and expectations that complicate and limit subsequent
choices. In England, after 1945:
46

Anne Power, Rebecca Tunstall, and Joseph Rowntree Foundation., Swimming against the Tide :
Polarisation or Progress on 20 Unpopular Council Estates, 1980-1995 (York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation,
1995)., Anne Power and Liz Richardson, Housing Plus : An Agenda for Social Landlords? (London: LSE
Housing in association with The National Tenants Resource Centre, 1996)., Anne Power and Centre for
Analysis of Social Exclusion., Neighbourhood Management and the Future of Urban Areas, Casepaper, 77
(London: Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion London School of Economics and Political Science,
2004). Nick Juravich, We The Tenants: Community Politics in New York City Public Housing, 1968-78,
Columbia University USA, 2011.
47

Paul Barker, The Freedoms of Suburbia (London: Francis Lincoln, 2009)..

48

Merrett and Gray, Owner Occupation in Britain. p.121-2. Lynsey Hanley, Estates: An Intimate History
(London: Granta, 2007). pp.142,168
If there was a conscious conspiracy to split the working class in the 1930s, 1950s and 1960s, when
working-class home ownership really started to take off, it was well concealed. Aled Davies has
demonstrated the determined resistance of those at the top of the Conservative Party (such as Harold
Macmillan, Keith Joseph, and Enoch Powell) to the establishment of a mandatory Right to Buy council
homes. Conservative support for the idea grew only when it was demonstrated to be highly popular amongst
tenants, by local initiatives in Birmingham in the mid-1960s. Tories supported home ownership as a means
of uniting the nation; and council housing was seen as a natural (and generous) response to the needs of the
weak. Tories did not generally see the world in terms of class-conflict, even when talking amongst
themselves. The sale of council houses in the 1980s was another matter, and a specific attempt to attract
former Labour voters. But this late arrival was only a very small part of the story. See Davies, "Right to
Buy : The Origins and Development of a Conservative Housing Policy". pp.22-33
49

An important influence here was Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles A. Murray, The Bell Curve :

Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York ; London: Free Press, 1994). But some
members of the Labour Party, especially those such as David Blunkett who represented the most deprived
inner-city areas, came to advocate the need for strong action on issues of law and order.

18

50

Town and country planning restricted the ability of cities to expand.

This helped to prevent hollowing-out of city centres (as has happened
with 'white flight' to the suburbs in the USA). But it also stopped
many middle-and-lower middle income families moving to spacious
houses with gardens in the suburbs; so it lowered overall space
standards, and thwarted aspirations to home ownership. Those who had
bought when suburban building was allowed, saw the values of their
homes rise sharply once planning controls stopped further expansion:
NIMBYism grew. The impact of this was made more severe by
different regional growth rates. As the periphery of England declined
economically, and the south-east flourished, planning restrictions
prevented people from moving to places where jobs were available. In
the declining economic regions, the reverse sometimes happened;
populations were trapped without jobs or a sense of meaning, and
whole towns came to depend on government expenditure for their
livelihood - unable to shrink to a viable economic size, because there
was nowhere else for their people to go.50

Slum clearance created large single-tenure areas, slums were normally

physically replaced by council housing. So the right to live in an area
came to depend on the allocation rules applied by local councils.
Much of the newly built housing had to be allocated to those whose
homes had been destroyed. These people were often relatively poor.
The demolition programme thus changed the nature of the demand for
council housing, which became increasingly occupied by the desperate.

Demolition also resulted in blight over wide swathes of the inner city.
A mixture of groupthink, ambition and corruption (aided by a shift in
government subsidies) led councils to move significant resources into
high-rise buildings. This era culminated in an explosion and the partial
collapse of a tower block (Figure 5), though high-rise construction
was already becoming less popular before then. In the mid-1970s,
demolitions came to an end - mainly because government ran out of
money to carry it through; but partly because of a revolt by some of the
three million people who had bought and renovated previously

Leunig, T. and J. Swaffield, Cities Unlimited: making urban regeneration work. (London, Policy

Exchange: 2008)

19

privately-rented property, and now found themselves in the bulldozers

path.

In some parts of the country, gentrification of what were once

working-class houses then drove out a younger generation of lowerincome households. At the same time, it generated very large windfall
capital gains for some of their parents. In this game of musical chairs,
the lucky ones were those who were sitting down when the music
stopped.

These pressures would have been attenuated if there had been a

flexible private-rented market to take up the slack. But rent control had
been in place in the UK since 1915, and attempt to remove it produced
political uproar. There were therefore no homes for would-be renters
to go to.

Governments expanded owner occupation via a wide range of cash

subsidies and tax advantages. This had the effect of reducing entry
barriers to a level at which it was normally affordable by the families
of skilled and routine-non-manual workers, but did not make it
available to those on the lowest incomes. Later, restrictions on the
supply of houses because of planning increased prices, especially in
high growth areas. Simultaneously, disparity of incomes increased.

Later, the sale of council houses to sitting tenants, under the Right to
Buy, extended the opportunity of home ownership slightly further
down the scale; but it also lowered very considerably the quality of the
remaining housing stock available for rent.

Access to good quality social housing thus became a very high-stakes

game, for those with nowhere else to go. Faced with intense shortages
and fevered demand, social housing providers had to prioritise those in
the greatest need. Needs-based housing allocation meant that the old
practice of grading tenants on their suitability and respectability,
became seen as illegitimate (and racist, given the tacit definitions that
housing visitors used to classify applicants).
This created deep
conflicts about what fairness meant; rewarding those who were
established members of the community and waited their turn? - or
responding to the pain of those who were in the greatest need? There
was no easy way to resolve these issues. There were extensive blackmarkets in social housing tenancies. In some areas of major housing
stress this competition led to sharp communal or ethnic tensions

20

between established residents and newcomers.51 This created even

more pressure on those who stood any chance of getting out, to do so.

Attempts by governments to help poor families by providing meanstested help with rent payments, increasingly important in the UK and
other European countries after 1980, initially fed-through in Britain
into higher rents, rather than into an increase in supply. Even when
private renting started to revive sharply after 2000, prices remained
extremely high. Thus, many families found themselves facing major
disincentives to work.52 (These disincentives were much less marked
in areas outside the South East, where private rents were much lower).
Social rents were still very considerably lower than private rents, so
rent-subsidies did little to reduce the pressure for access to social
housing, in areas of high demand.

This was a dynamic process, marked by frequent struggles to redefine the nature of
the public interest. Politicians had to juggle the priority of helping outsiders to
overcome their exclusion, against that of serving insiders who felt they had legitimate
moral claims under existing arrangements. But it was not a struggle of the masses
against the classes: there were formidable vested interests amongst the relatively poor.
Choices were constrained by interactions between the powerful forces that successive
governments had unleashed, and by contradictions within the ethical goals they
sought to pursue. At each stage, governments were constrained by the multiplicity of
tenurial interests (in Offers sense of the term) created by their own and their
predecessors attempts to alter market outcomes in pursuit of the public good.
Outcomes were path dependent, and that is why in order to understand the choices
governments were able to make, we have to understand the history of a centurys
attempts to reform the provision of housing.

51

John Rex, Robert Samuel Moore, and Institute of Race Relations., Race, Community and Conflict: A Study
of Sparkbrook (London, New York,: published for the Institute of Race Relations by Oxford U.P., 1967).
Great Britain. Commission for Racial Equality., Hackney Housing Investigated a Summary of the
Commission for Racial Equality's Formal Investigation into the Allocation of Public Housing in the London
Borough of Hackney (London: The Commission, 1984). J. W. Henderson and Valerie A. Karn, Race, Class
and State Housing : Inequality and the Allocation of Public Housing in Britain, Studies in Urban and
Regional Policy ; 4 (Aldershot: Gower, 1987). Great Britain. Commission for Racial Equality., Housing
Allocations in Oldham : Report of a Formal Investigation (London: Commission for Racial Equality, 1993).
Carter, "Building the Divided City: Race, Class and Social Housing in Southwark, 1945-1995.".
52

Hills, "Ends and Means." p.5

21

Figure 5: Ronan Point

Before 1936, council housing had mostly been occupied by better-off working class
families, who could afford the higher rents that were charged for it. This process
started to change in some places even before the war;53 and because of national
subsidy structures slum clearance was increasingly important after 1936. But it was
still on a small scale compared to the total housing stock.54 The Atlee government
revived what was effectively a pre-1936 policy, by building high quality houses for
working people, at relatively high rents; but the availability of private rented housing
was much more limited than before the war, so the pressure on allocation was much
more important. The building programme (almost entirely in the public sector; private
construction was limited) was restrained by other calls on public expenditure. The
Conservatives, in power in the 1950s, had to deal with these shortages; they set
ambitious house-building targets, shifted subsidies strongly towards slum clearance,
and tried to focus council housing on those in the greatest need. They released the
controls on private building while also building large numbers of council homes.
But as slum clearance got under way, council homes had to be allocated first to those
whose houses had been demolished. This fundamentally altered the relationship
between council housing and the children of the old, respectable working class,
since they no longer stood a realistic chance of getting a council house within a
53

Jones, "Slum Clearance, Privatization and Residualization: The Practices and Politics of Council Housing

in Mid-Twentieth-Century England."
54

Malpass and Murie, Housing Policy and Practice. p.67

22

reasonable time. This started to have significant consequences in undermining their

attachment to the Labour Party.55
By the early 1970s, the newer estates were occupied mainly by people displaced from
the slums, or by people allocated homes on the basis of housing need; they also
faced great problems of maintenance and repair. By contrast, the occupants of the
first great wave of social housing had been selected from amongst the most
prosperous working-class families. This set the scene for sharp clashes between the
interests of these two groups. Because the new dwellings were more expensive to
build and maintain than the old ones, but their inhabitants were typically much poorer,
there was pressure to cross-subsidize the rents of the new homes.56 Policies varied
widely between cities.57 But the trend was clear. By 1965, 40 per cent of all local
authorities offered some form of rent rebate for poorer tenants. 58 These proposals
provoked great anger, and sometimes rent-strikes, amongst better-off tenants and
those in the older and better homes.
In effect, families who had been given
substantial tenurial rights by one form of ethically-driven form of housing supply,
now saw those rights suppressed as new values came to the fore; it was little wonder
that they often felt bitterly betrayed.
Council tenancies had other disadvantages. They were often were hedged around with
rules. For example, one local authority (Bermondsey) had so extensive a list of
conditions that the author of the councils official pamphlet commented:
After reading the conditions of tenancy, a tenant may wonder what
there is left to do with the premises occupied by him, other than to
sleep and eat in them.
and went on to explain that:
The Housing Committee.. will continue to exercise strict control
and the presence of any person or persons, other than the tenant's own
family who are entitled to live on the premises, will not be permitted. 59
55

Barry Hindess, The Decline of Working-Class Politics (London,: MacGibbon & Kee, 1971). Harold Carter
et al., "The Life and Death of Old Labour : Collective Action and Social Cohesion in Sheffield and
Southwark, 1945-1997" (Thesis (D Phil ), University of Oxford, 2005., 2005).
56

This could take place either by rent equalisation (which was possible in the UK because funds in the

housing revenue account were pooled, which was not the case in most continental European countries), or by
offering poorer tenants rent-rebates, or both.
57

58

Sheffield Telegraph , 4th August 1960:

Western Morning News, 26th August 1952.

Malpass and Murie, Housing Policy and Practice. p.62

59

Bermondsey Borough Council A report on the work of the Council in connection with the Improvement
of Housing in Bermondsey (London,1949)

23

Camberwell stressed the need to rent its council homes to tenants who could be
expected to look after their property in a proper manner and meet their weekly
commitments regularly, while Southwark seems to have promoted good tenants to
better estates, and transferred problem tenants to bad ones.60 Southwark housing
visitors forms had boxes to tick in which they were invited to grade the quality of
the family to be re-housed, the tidiness of its house, and the condition of its
furniture.61
By the late 1960s, council house building had greatly improved the housing
conditions of about 30 per cent of the population. But it had not made up for the
collapse in the overall supply of rented housing, down from 63 per cent of the housing
stock to 53 per cent in 1960, and 50 per cent in 1970. Ordinary working people had
to have somewhere to live. 62 Rules granting rent control and security of tenure to
new occupants made it very unattractive for new private landlords to make new
houses available.
By contrast, owning a house gave freedom to decorate, to change the building, to do
what one liked in the garden; it allowed one to choose where to live (within the
constraints of price) rather than to be allocated a home where officials thought
appropriate. It allowed families to move home when they needed to in pursuit of a
job (which was almost impossible in the council sector), and to get a bigger or smaller
home as family circumstances changed. It was also felt (sometimes wrongly,
according to economists) to be financially sensible because it could avoid the waste
of paying rent.63 Owner occupation offered more freedom; it was increasingly
affordable as wages rose; and above all (unlike council housing) it was available
without a ten-year wait. By the late-1960s it had become the only game in town for

60

Metropolitan Borough of Camberwell, Housing Committee minutes, cited by Sue Goss, Local Labour and

Local Government: A Study of Changing Interests, Politics and Policy in Southwark from 1919 to 1982
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988), 57.
61

62

Ungerson, Moving Home, 15.

Until the late 1970s, Britains European neighbours did increase their supply of socially-aided and

collectively-provided housing so as to accommodate young couples of the kind increasingly excluded from
social housing in the UK. But countries such as France, Germany and the Netherlands did this having what
were in effect two different sectors of subsidised rented housing one provided mainly by voluntary
associations which offered good-quality housing at higher but subsidised rents, and the other provided
mainly by municipalities, offering worse housing under more demanding conditions, and principally used by
the poor. These were feasible alternatives, but would have done little to improve the conditions of the
poorest, whose segregation from mainstream families increased in those countries also, over the following
thirty years. Harloe, The People's Home: Social Rented Housing in Europe and America. pp.260-267
63

See the model developed by Merrett, S. and F. Gray (1982). Owner Occupation in Britain. (London,

1982), Chapter 5 pp.65-71.

24

young skilled and non-manual workers who wanted to get a home and start a family.64
By 1972, almost half of all skilled workers in Great Britain already owned their own
homes.
Figure 6: Tenure by Social Class of Head of Household, 1971-265

The market responded to these pressures. As has been shown already, there had been
a boom in owner occupation prior to 1960, mainly accounted for by tenureconversion. But after 1960, building for owner-occupation took off, and between
1960 and 1975 2.6 million private-sector dwellings were constructed (Figure 7).

64

Peter Malpass, Reshaping Housing Policy : Subsidies, Rents and Residualisation (London: Routledge,

1990). pp.22-3.
65

Adapted from Social Trends 6 (London, 1975) Figure 3.1 p.17

25

Figure 7: Dwellings completed in the United Kingdom, 1945-8166

But the market was not acting in isolation from normatively-driven government
intervention, even at this exuberant peak of speculative building activity. Quantitative
housing construction targets became a matter of government policy. The
Conservatives and the Labour Party competed to promise ever-greater numbers of
housing completions; 300,000 a year forced on Churchill by the Conservative Party
Conference, 500,000 a year promised (though never quite achieved) by Harold
Wilson. Government intervention (which was to take owner occupation to a peak of
over 70% in 2001) posed the question of whose interests it should serve. For Labour
councils (which controlled most of the big cities) the promotion of working-class
owner occupation enabled the party to continue to satisfy the needs of the aspirant,
respectable working people who constituted its backbone of activists and voters,
while still building council homes. The Conservatives continued to pursue their
vision of a property-owning democracy, rather than one divided by class. But for
both parties, this focus came at the cost of some other core aspirations for Labour,
the belief in housing as a social service rather than a market commodity; for the
Conservatives, the desire to restrain government expenditure and therefore to focus
66

Malpass and Murie, Housing Policy and Practice. p.50 (colour added)

26

state subsidy on the least well off. The sharp rise in nominal interest rates throughout
the second half of the century turned mortgage interest tax relief into a considerable
drain on the public finances; not just a subsidy to owner occupation, but one worth
much more to the rich.67 From 1967-8 to 1976-7, its value rose by nearly 146 per cent
in real terms (while subsidies to public-sector housing rose by only 107 per cent).68
Once again, a formidable new tenurial interest had been created.
While marginal tax rates and interest rates both remained high, and the proportion of
the population claiming it increased, tax relief was politically impossible to reform.
So governments added to it, piling Pelion on Ossa with additional help aimed at
owner occupiers with lower incomes. In 1968 the Labour government introduced (as
an alternative to tax relief) a subsidy to the interest rate charged to buyers by building
societies (which could be coupled with guarantees allowing lenders to increase the
amount they could lend to low-income families).69 Building societies had always
been given favourable tax treatment on their deposits, enabling them to make loans at
below-market rates. As interest rates soared in the 1970s, grants and a special 500
million loan were added to this help; and after 1974, Government developed joint
lending policies with the Building Societies, including quantitative targets.70 Local
councils also stepped into the breach by providing loan finance to marginal
borrowers, on older properties.71

67

To the value of these reliefs has to be added the exemption of owner-occupied housing from capital gains
tax, and the fact that (after 1962) now income-tax was charged on the imputed rent from occupation of
housing, which income from other forms of investment was charged at a rate 15% above the rate of tax on
earned income. Together, these forces created a considerable tax-bias in favour of owner occupation. It
was politically impossible to cut back on these reliefs in the 1970s, but successive governments chipped
away at their value to individual householders, and at their regressive nature. Initially, relief was given on
the full value of any loan; this was capped at 25,000 in 1974. As house prices started to rise sharply, this
cap restricted the proportion of the value of more expensive houses on which it was possible to claim relief.
In 1988, it was restricted to one loan per property, rather than one loan per borrower (previously, unmarried
couples could each borrow and claim relief on the full allowance). In 1990, it was restricted to the basic
rate of tax only; in 1994-5 it was cut back to 20 per cent; from 1995 to 1998, 15 per cent; in 1999-2000, 10
per cent; and in 2000 it was finally abolished.
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/stats/mir/intro.pdf

Source:

HM

Revenue and

Customs-

68

Malpass and Murie, Housing Policy and Practice. p.53.

69

This option mortgage scheme was taken up by 180,000 existing borrowers in the first year, and about

25,000 new borrowers per year after that Merrett and Gray, Owner Occupation in Britain. p.37.
70

Ibid. pp.81-84, 298, 303-4.

71

See earlier in this paper for a discussion of this issue

27

Figure 8 Value of Mortgage Interest Relief72

The impact of all of these measures was dwarfed by that of inflation, so government
constantly had to scramble to try to keep up with its effects. Inflation had complex
effects on owner occupation. Because debts were fixed in nominal value at the time of
purchasing a house, if house prices inflated then home-owners made windfall gains as
the real value of their obligations fell. On the other hand, in the early years of a loan
high interest rates caused by inflation made repayments hard to afford. There was
thus a tendency for substantial swings in the affordability of housing, and owners
experiences could vary widely depending on when they entered the market. First
time buyers declined from 60 per cent of all purchases in 1970-72, to 48 per cent in
1973-80.73 Total building starts for the private market fell steadily, from a peak of
around 200,000 dwellings in 1972 to only some 100,000 in 1980.74 Meanwhile,
nominal house prices rocketed (Figure 9).75

72

{Hills, 2007 #1384}, Table 6.1, p56 : authors calculations. The value of mortgage interest relief was then

reduced sharply, and by 1997 its value was negligible.

73

Merrett and Gray, Owner Occupation in Britain. p.301

74

Ibid. p.305

75

Ibid. p.300

28

Figure 9: The average price for dwellings for owner occupation purchased with
completed building society mortgages in the UK 1966-80, and Index of Average
Nominal Wages76

By the late 1970s, governments were being pushed in multiple directions. Spiralling
house prices and interest charges led to rapidly mounting bills for mortgage interest
tax relief (now being claimed by a large proportion of the population). House building
started to decline very sharply in the public sector (Figure 10), as the Labour
government faced a public expenditure crisis. Council house allocation was
increasingly oriented towards those in the greatest need. Existing council tenants
faced the prospect of rising rents because of pressure on councils to increase prices.
At the same time, traditional skilled workers (the historic core of local Labour parties)
had little chance of seeing their children able to get access to a council home. There
were no private rented houses for people to go to, and there seemed to be no way to
expand private renting. The interests of owner-occupiers were also divided; a family
which had borrowed money to buy a house in 1966 had seen the value of its
obligations fall to almost nothing; but new entrants to owner occupation faced sharply

76

Calculated from Table 11.7 Ibid. p.182 and Lawrence H. Officer, "What Were the UK Earnings and

Prices Then?" MeasuringWorth, 2011. URL: http://www.measuringworth.com/ukearncpi/

29

increased costs. Those who had bought homes early increasingly pressured local
government to deny planning permission to a new wave of would-be homeowners.
Government subsidies and rules were omnipresent, but each attempt to alter market
outcomes for one group created distortions elsewhere.
The picture by the end of the 1970s was one of confusion and multiple conflicts of
interest, but not of failure, Over 50 per cent of the British housing stock had been
built in the previous thirty-five years.77 The physical conditions of housing had
improved beyond recognition. Growing owner-occupation (59% of dwellings in
England and 36% in Scotland by 1981) reflected a widespread desire for house
purchase, shown in many opinion surveys at the time, not simply the absence of
opportunities to rent. But continued success in meeting voters aspirations after then
faced three inter-related threats;

77

The drying-up of the cheapest and easiest route into owner-occupation

for people on modest incomes, since most of the private-rented stock
had now been sold or demolished;

A major change in the structure of the British economy as it became

overwhelmingly based on service employment rather than on
manufacturing. (This hit hard the skilled workers who had steadily
been buying their own homes, since the 1930s).

An increasing divergence between incomes in the top and bottom

quartiles of the economy, partly as a product of the shift of the
economy away from manufacturing.
This also had regional
implications for the affordability of housing, which were reflected in a
growing financial (though not proportionate) difference between house
prices in different regions of England (Figure 10).

Peter Hall and Stephen Kennett, "The Inner City in Spatial Context," in The Inner City in Context, ed.

Peter Hall (London: Heinemann, 1981). pp.25-66. Hall points out that there were marked regional variations
within England; new housebuilding in the years up to 1981 had reinforced existing patterns of tenure with
much building for owner occupation in the South of England outside London, and building by councils in
London and the North.

30

Figure 10: Regional Divergence in House Prices, 1990-201178

Part of the reason that house prices had risen so sharply on London was that the city
which had experienced population declines in the 1960s and 1970s had not been
allowed to grow physically when in the 1980s and 1990s it metamorphosed from a
decaying imperial hub and industrial city, into one of the fastest growing and most
prosperous regions of Europe.79 Not only London, but also the towns that surrounded
it and formed a clear part of its economic area, were surrounded by Green Belt land.
For much of the 1970s and 1980s, development of brownfield land within its
boundaries was also prevented by the planning policies of local councils, often
Labour-controlled, which wished to preserve the land for industrial use, to provide
employment for their working-class populations.80 In both places, once development
was allowed, the pressure of demand was so intense that it tended to create homes for
the rich (though construction of some affordable housing was often a condition of
78

Table 506 Housing market: simple average house prices, by new/other dwellings, type of buyer and

standard statistical region, from 1990 (quarterly) : authors calculations. From

http://www.communities.gov.uk/housing/housingresearch/housingstatistics/livetables.
79

Buck, Working Capital : Life and Labour in Contemporary London.

80

Peter Damesick, "The Inner City Economy," The London Journal 6, no. 1 (1980): 32.

John McCarthy,

"The Evolution of Planning Approaches: North Southwark 1971-1994," Land Use Policy 13, no. 2 (1996):
149.

31

receiving planning permission for these schemes). This led to periodic calls to
liberalise the planning system or at least to allocate more land for housing, which
always aroused fierce political opposition, and normally ran into the sand.81
For the modestly affluent outside London, and especially those whose parents could
afford to help them put down a larger deposit, falling interest rates meant that
aspirations to owner occupation could still be met by the market (albeit with the
assistance of a growing volume of help from tax subsidies from interest relief until
these were reformed and largely removed in the late 1980s and early 1990s). (Figure
11).
Figure 11: Affordability of Dwellings for Lower-Income Households, 1974 to
(projected) 2030.82

Liberalisation of financial markets also made lenders much less risk-averse than they
had previously been; the multiple of incomes on which they made loans increased,
and the deposits they required shrank. Most building societies (hitherto members
organisations) de-mutualised in the early 1990s and turned themselves into banks (or
81

K. Barker Review of Housing Supply: Final Report. (London, March 2004). HM Treasury/ODPM The

Governments Response to Kate Barkers Review of Housing Supply, (London, December 2005). Tim
Leunig and James Swaffield, "Cities Unlimited: Making Urban Regeneration Work," ed. Oliber Marc
Hatrtwich (Lonon: Policy Exchange, 2008)..
82

Reproduced from Hills, "Ends and Means.", Figure 12.3 p.138

32

sold themselves to banks). Competition between them caused them to over-extend

their loan books, and created periodic crises for both lenders and borrowers. 83 But
these setbacks did little to check the overall growth of the sector. New house building
for owner occupation continued at pretty-much the same level as it had done since
1959 (with occasional mini-booms and busts), right up to the onset of the credit
crunch of the early twenty-first century (Figure 12).
Figure 12 Permanent Dwellings Completed, by Tenure, 1949-201084

What was hard to do, however, was to build new housing that was affordable for
purchase by people on more marginal incomes, especially in areas of high demand.
The widespread selling of council housing at high discounts under the Right to Buy
scheme introduced by the Conservative government in 1981 was a partial answer to
83

Peter Malpass and Alan Murie, Housing Policy and Practice, 5th Edition ed., Public Policy and Politics
(London: Macmillan, 1999). p.85
84

The Conservatives built on average just over 50,000 socially rented houses each year from 1979 and

1996, (though the numbers decreased signifiantly year by year); from 1997 to 2010 the New Labour total
decreased still further, to an average of 25,000 dwellings.
Table 241 House building: permanent dwellings completed, by tenure, United Kingdom historical calendar
year series, from
http://www.communities.gov.uk/housing/housingresearch/housingstatistics/housingstatisticsby/housebuildin
g/livetables

33

this problem. Right-to-Buy provided a relatively lower-cost route into home

ownership for precisely the skilled, better paid, upper working-class families that had
for so long been the life and soul of local Labour Parties. In many ways, it catered for
groups similar to those who had bought the freeholds of previously privately rented
houses between 1938 and 1975. The properties that were sold tended to be the better
sorts of houses and bungalows, or flats on the nicer estates which were somewhat
more likely to be occupied by the first wave of council tenants, than by those later
allocated houses on the basis of need. And in any case, more-prosperous families
found it easier to afford the cost. Thus, the older moral economy reasserted itself; the
subsidies involved with these sales went overwhelmingly to the more prosperous
working people the respectable rather than the rough. The programme was
extremely popular, and accounted for a significant proportion of the increase in
owner-occupation for the following twenty five years (Figures 13, 14); it proved
impossible for the Labour Party to sustain its initial opposition to the scheme.
Another tenurial group had been created, which henceforth it would be essential to
placate if further reform was proposed.

Figure 13: Sales under the Right to Buy 85

85

Chart 671 Social housing sales: Local Authority and Registered Provider stock sold through the Right to

Buy scheme, England : from

http://www.communities.gov.uk/housing/housingresearch/housingstatistics/housingstatisticsby/socialhousin
gsales/livetables/

34

Figure 14: Changes in Tenure, England and Scotland, 1971-2009/1086

This left the problem of the poor. Right-to-Buy had no initial impact on the
availability of housing for them, since the houses were sold to sitting tenants. But by
removing the best properties from the rental market, it further reduced the range of
choices available in the longer-term to those who could not afford to buy. And when
these Right-to-Buy houses were eventually sold on, the purchasers more closely fitted
the profile of ordinary buyers of owner-occupied homes, than that of those who had
first bought them; the houses took their place in the supply chain based on their
amenities and location.87
The only feasible option for lower income householders remained, as it had always
been, to rent. But the stock of available rental dwellings decreased steadily until 1990,
and did not increase significantly in the ten years after that date (Figure 15).

86

Table 104 Dwelling stock: by tenure1, England : Table 107 Dwelling stock: by tenure, Scotland

http://www.communities.gov.uk/housing/housingresearch/housingstatistics/housingstatisticsby/stockincludin
gvacants/livetables/
87

Malpass and Murie, Housing Policy and Practice., pp256-7.

35

Figure 15: Rental Property net Increases or Decreases88

At the same time, trends in the national and international economy reduced the
resources that they could bring to the market, when seeking rented homes. In a
powerful and intensely moving article, Avner Offer has charted the decline and fall of
the once self-confident world of the British working class.89 There was an increasing
gap between the income of those at the bottom of the income distribution, and the rest
(Figure 16) especially as society tended to polarise between households where two
people had a job, and households where nobody did. There was also collapse in
employment in manufacturing industry (Figure 17). More and more jobs were
accounted for by government service (which used proportionately far fewer men than
manufacturing had done) and by financial services (which normally required more
formal educational qualifications than had manufacturing industry). Unemployment
and rates of economic inactivity also rose.

88

Calculated from: P. Malpass and A. Murie, Housing Policy and Practice (London, 1999) Table 532 p.88

89

Avner Offer, "British Manual Workers: From Producers to Consumers, C.1950-2000," Contemporary

British History 22, no. 4 (2008).

36

Figure 16: Real Household Disposable Income by selected deciles, UK 1981-2007/890

Figure 17 Employment by Sector, 1979-200991

90

Reproduced from Social Trends 40 (London, 2010) Figure 5.2 p.61

91

Calculated from Social Trends 40 (London, 2010) Table 4.8 p.49

37

Under these circumstances, although home-ownership increased in most British

regions until the turn of the century (Figure 18), it remained out of reach for many
families (especially in London, where house prices were very high).
Figure 18: owner occupation by region, 1991-200792

Social housing remained a viable option for some of the people who could not buy.
But as demand due to new-household formation increased, as stock turnover fell, as
some social houses were sold, and as pressures from immigration (in some local
areas) increased competition for dwellings,93 families were forced into a damaging
game of catch-up, claiming multiple disadvantages in order to stand any chance of
getting a home. Homelessness in particular gave access to priority allocation, but the

92

Table 109 Dwelling stock: by tenure and region from 1991 -

http://www.communities.gov.uk/housing/housingresearch/housingstatistics/livetables: authors calculations.

93

For example, Hills reports that in the nine months from October 2005 to June 2006, 3,045 (or 5 per cent)

of the 61,300 statutory homelessness acceptances by local authorities were recorded as being of foreign
nationals, 71 per cent of these coming from outside the EEA and therefore likely to be primarily refugees;
but that while most parts of the country, only 2 per cent or fewer of homelessness acceptances were of
foreign nationals, in London, 14 per cent of the acceptances were. Hills, "Ends and Means." p.135

38

largest cause of homelessness was eviction from the homes of family or friends (and
thus may have involved some exercise of discretion) (Figure 19).
Figure 19: Households accepted as homeless94

This did not mean that there was not real need. But personal need had to be matched
to official categories of need. One especially poignant example came in 1991 when
Hanna Baiden, a 36-year old mother living in extremely crowded conditions, refused
to take the advice of housing staff in Southwark and claim that she needed to be rehoused because of racial harassment. She said:
I told staff straight away that I would not say I was the victim of racial
harassment. Black or white, we all get on very well together here and
there is no need for me to do that.95
However, she could not, therefore, be re-housed. Southwark gives priority to
homeless people and can only rehouse her if she is the victim of racial harassment.
Allocation was becoming a bridge-game, in which categories of need had to be used
94

Social Trends 2010, Figure 10.8 p.144

95

South London Press, 12th November 1991

39

as trumps. This started to undermine many of the implicit moral bargains that
underlay the welfare state.
Governments faced an intractable problem. Faced with scarce social housing, they
had to impose rationing.96 But rationing had to be consistent in its application and
was increasingly subject to legal challenges. Allowing what many residents wanted
for example, promotion to better homes by movement within the housing stock for
better-behaved tenants, priority to the children of existing residents so that they could
live near their families, and priority to applicants who had lived for a long time in a
particular area97 was increasingly made impossible by court decisions.
While the physical conditions of their housing had improved, many families found
themselves compelled to live near to a small minority of households who were
criminal, violent, or simply anti-social in their habits.98 The best empirical study of
what might constitute a British underclass suffering from lack of qualifications,
low cognitive ability and chronic joblessness with distinctive [characteristics] in
terms of patterns of family formation, work commitment and political allegiance
estimated its size as at most 6 per cent of the population and many such families led
blameless lives. 99 But there was no way, within the social housing system, to move
away from difficult families, if they happened to live near by. Houses were allocated,
not chosen; and choice-based lettings gave priority not to the respectable, but to
those in the greatest need. It had not always been like this. From at least the turn of
the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, a key feature of the life of the
poor was the fine grained distinction of the rough and the respectable; and the way in
which neighbourhoods, streets, or even sides of individual streets were the preserve of
the one or the other; there was also significant defence by members of the community
to local leaders, who were often prominent trades unionists in the workplace as well
as being active in the community.100 But this world was lost, along with the settled

96

Including housing-association houses, access to which government also largely controlled, as a condition
of providing subsidy.
97

Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron, and Michael Young, The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict (London:

Profile Books, 2006).

98

Nick Davies, Dark Heart : The Shocking Truth About Hidden Britain (London: Vintage, 1998). Field,

Neighbours from Hell. Mark Hudson, Coming Back Brockens: A Year in a Mining Village (London: Vintage,
1999). Beatrix Campbell, Goliath: Britain's Dangerous Places (London: Methuen, 1993).
99

Alan Buckingham, "Is There an Underclass in Britain?," British Journal of Sociology 50, no. 1 (1999).

100

Brian Jackson, Working Class Community: Some General Notions Raised by a Series of Studies in
Northern England (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972). Joanna Bourke, Working Class Cultures in
Britain 1890-1960: Gender, Class and Ethnicity (London: Routledge, 1994). Peter Willmott and Institute of
Community Studies, Adolescent Boys of East London, Reports of the Institute of Community Studies

40

nature of the working-class communities in which such stratification was possible. It

took very few badly behaved families to make an estate a nightmare to live on, if the
community had no mechanism to check deviant behaviour.101 Nor, in an era of
human rights and moral relativism, was it so readily possible for the majority to
enforce its standards of behaviour on the disruptive minority.
By the first decade of the twenty-first century, politicians started to grapple with the
issue in their speeches: for example, in September 2011 Ed Milliband said in his
leaders speech at the Labour Party conference that:
Even after reforms of recent years, we still have a system where reward
for work is not high enough. Where benefits are too easy to come by
for those who dont deserve them and too low for those who do.Take
social housing. When we have a housing shortage, choices have to be
made. Do we treat the person who contributes to their community the
same as the person who doesnt? My answer is no. Our first duty
should be to help the person who shows responsibility. And I say every
council should recognise the contribution that people are making.102
Perhaps less surprisingly, similar commitments had already been made by the new
Coalition government, for example in their framework document for the expansion of
affordable housing, and in a speech by the Minister on September 29th.103 But
however much politicians recognised that there was a problem, it was hard to see how
under conditions of scarcity, and within existing legal frameworks, they could do
much about it; the Ministers speech said that the government was to introduce new
allocation criteria for social homes, giving more points to someone who had been in
work for two years; but simultaneously stressed the duty of councils to look after the
most vulnerable in society.104 It was not clear that any government would seriously
contemplate leaving a young mother homeless with her child, in order to give priority
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966). Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures : England 1918-1951
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
101

Alice Coleman, Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing (London: Hilary Shipman,

1985).
102

The Labour Party, http://www.labour.org.uk/ed-milibands-speech-to-labour-party-conference:

downloaded 30th September 2011
103

Provided that a local authoritys overall scheme is framed around the Reasonable Preference categories,

local authorities can opt to reserve certain properties for allocation to other client groups. They may decide
to exercise this discretion in relation to Affordable Rent, eg to target it at households in work but on low
incomes. Similarly, providers will have discretion to allocate properties to households who are in work
where those properties do not form part of nominations agreements with local authorities. 2011-15
Affordable Homes Programme Framework (London, 2011) p.18 - Section 3.21
104

Daily Telegraph, 29th September 2011

41

to good citizens who had contributed years of service to the community; or would
leave the jobless shivering on the streets. It was also unlikely that any government
would be able to expand social housing sufficiently to give access to it for families of
modest means who were not facing a crisis. But many of them could not buy a home,
either.
Since this was so, private rented housing the Cinderella of UK housing policy for
eighty years increasingly had to take the strain. Earlier attempts to lift restrictions
on private renting had failed miserably, amid scandals.105 It was not until the late1980s that governments began to reform security-of-tenure and rent-control for new
lettings, and this liberalisation was initially hedged around with complicated rules.
But by the mid 1990s new rentals were effectively uncontrolled. At the same time,
purchase prices resumed their upward trajectory, making the purchase of rented
homes seem a one-way bet for speculators. Landlords were also unlike owneroccupiers entitled to offset any interest they paid on debt incurred in buying rental
properties against the income they derived from renting. This resulted in the
provision of over 2.2 million new privately rented dwellings, in a period of under
twenty years (Figure 20) almost as many as had vanished from private renting
between 1960 and 1975. This was an astonishing change in the nature of housing
provision in the UK, though it is one that has so far attracted surprisingly little
comment.

105

Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century : A City and Its People (London: Viking, 2001).. John

Davis, "Rents and Race in 1960s London: New Light on Rachmanism," Twentieth Century British History
12, no. 1 (2001).. Chrstine Keeler and Thompson. Douglas, The Truth at Last (London: Pan, 2002)..

42

Figure 20: The rebirth of the private landlord106

The regional impact of the change was even greater: in London by 2011, probably
because of its much higher house-prices, private renting accounted for almost a
quarter of all dwellings (Figure 21).
Figure 21: Private renting, by region107

106

Table 101 Dwelling stock: by tenure, United Kingdom -

http://www.communities.gov.uk/housing/housingresearch/housingstatistics/livetables: authors calculations.

107

Table 109 Dwelling stock: by tenure1 and region, from

1991http://www.communities.gov.uk/housing/housingresearch/housingstatistics/livetables: authors
calculations.

43

Once more, however, this shift owed as much to government intervention as to market
forces. The two tenurial groups small capitalist landlords buying houses on
borrowed money, and tenants with limited security of tenure would have been
familiar one hundred years earlier.108 What was different this time around was that
the government was paying the rent, for one in four of the new tenants.
This was essential if they were to be able to have anywhere to live. Without
government help of some sort, many working families on average or below-average
incomes would have been unable to pay private-sector rents in areas of high housing
demand. Average private-sector rents were 198 per week in London, 134 per week
in the South East and 116 in the East standard region. The minimum wage in 2008
was between 221 and 229 per week. Median earnings for all workers were 400;
for those in the thirtieth percentile of earnings, they were only 277. 109 The average
weekly pre-tax income of private-sector tenants receiving Housing Benefit was only
231 in 2009-10; about a quarter of all private sector tenants depended on Housing
Benefits to meet their housing costs.110
Assistance to families to pay private rents had started in a modest way in 1972, as a
result of the governments attempt to raise social housing rents closer to market
levels, accompanied by the introduction of mandatory rent-rebates. Since private
renting was rent-controlled there were few public-expenditure implications in
extending rent allowances to private sector tenants also, especially since that sector
was shrinking in size. From at least the 1950s, there had been some pressure from
central government to raise rents in social housing. The 1980 Housing Act took this
process to its logical conclusion; it first cut, and then eliminated, tax- and ratesubsidies to council rents (though these rents still incorporated a considerable
economic subsidy, since the cost-based rents were considerably below the costs of
108

Also, in 2005 landlords tended to anticipate windfall capital gains, because of widespread belief that

house prices were bound to go on rising, rather than a steady stream of rental income; loan-to-value ratios
were high. This was a very fragile situation.
109

Table 715 Rents, lettings and tenancies: rents and rent types, by tenure and region, from 1994

http://www.communities.gov.uk/housing/housingresearch/housingstatistics/livetables.
Table 1.7a Annual pay - Gross () - For all employee jobs: United Kingdom, 2008: Annual Survey of
Hours and Earnings: from http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/publications/re-referencetables.html?edition=tcm%3A77-48266
110

(a) After 1997 means-tested government help was also available via Tax Credits (these extended far up

the income scale, to middle income families), and that these payments are likely to have supported housing
payments amongst other things, though they were not earmarked for that purpose.
(b) Social sector tenants receiving benefits had an average income of 203 per week. 62 per cent of socialsector tenants were in receipt of housing benefit. Department of Communities and Local Government
English Housing Survey: Headline Report 2009-10, London: 24 February 2011 p.17.

44

comparable private-sector housing).111 To protect poorer tenants, the 1982 Social

Security and Housing Benefits Act provided them with funding to meet these new
higher rents, if necessary in full.112 Similar payments were allowed to private tenants.
This marked the start of a major shift of subsidy, away from buildings and towards
people (Figure 22).
Figure 22: The Growth of Rent Rebates and Rent Allowances 113

The Housing Act of 1988 created Assured Shorthold tenancies (which allowed
landlords to regain possession of houses at the end of a rental term), but at controlled
fair rents set by a council rent officer. For Housing Benefit recipients, the rent could
be paid in full. From 1996, Assured Shorthold tenancies became the norm, and
landlords were allowed to charge full market rents.114 While government had always
paid the full costs of (much lower) social housing rents to eligible claimants, there
were obvious problems about what level of benefit to pay for private sector renting.
Between 1989 and 2008 a variety of formulae were used, which aimed to pay actual
rents in full if they were reasonable for the area. After 2008 this system was
changed; tenants were allowed to claim for particular types of properties based on
their family size and type, and were paid a Local Housing Allowance (set at the

111

Malpass and Murie, Housing Policy and Practice. pp.80-1. Hills, "Ends and Means." p.113.

112

After 1992, the relevant act was the Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act, 1992.

113

Hills, "Ends and Means." p.113,Table 6.1

114

Department for Communities and Local Government, Assured and Assured Shorthold Tenancies: a guide

for tenants (London, 2007)

45

median market rent for similar-sized properties locally), with which they could go
shopping in the open market.
This means-tested support was vital to the financial survival of poorer tenants who
needed to rent homes, to the survival of many buy-to-let landlords at the lower end of
the property market, and to the survival of some lending institutions (such as Northern
Rock).115 In effect, the government became the guarantor of a new generation of slum
landlords, while shifting the capital assets involved in housing the poor off its own
balance sheet (just as happen in other spheres via the Private Finance Initiative, used
to construct new hospitals and new schools). But it was not clear just how much of
the risk had truly been shifted to private sector investors and lenders; faced with a
potential collapse in the value of those homes in 2008, government intervened to prop
up the market. Yet another tenurial interest had been created, which governments
had little choice but to appease.
There were also two more immediate and practical problems. First (as has been
discussed earlier in this paper) Housing Benefit produced major disincentives to
participation in labour markets. Since support was withdrawn at very high rates as
income rose, tenants in London could find themselves almost no better off if their
gross household income from work rose from 100 to 400 per week.116 By 2010, the
Local Housing Allowance for parts of London had reached 2,000 per week for five
bedroomed properties, and rents for two bedroomed properties could be over 300. It
would have been irrational for tenants receiving such rent allowances to seek work.117
This was less of a problem in regions where there was less pressure on rent levels
(such as the North East); but there, there were many fewer jobs to go to.
Secondly, there was no effective way to cap the costs of these allowances, since
entitlement to them was automatic. There was still despite the expansion of the
sector a considerable shortage of low-cost rental property, caused by lags in supply,
by the high cost of construction on brownfield sites, and by severe planning
restrictions on suburban expansion. This helped to increase nominal rents much faster

115

Especially landlords who had purchased former council-owned properties who have been described
earlier in this paper as th new generation of slum landlords.
116

Hills, "Ends and Means." p.5

117

Department of Work and Pensions Impact of changes to Local Housing Allowance from 2011, from

http://www.dwp.gov.uk/local-authority-staff/housing-benefit/claims-processing/local-housingallowance/impact-of-changes.shtml (Consulted 2nd October 2011).

Social rents were much lower than market rents (just under half the level, across England as a whole, in
2009/10). Department of Communities and Local Government, English Housing Survey: Headline report
200910, (London, 2010) p.7

46

than average earnings (Figure 23). Thus, expenditure doubled, rising from 11 billion
in 2000 to 22 billion in 2010.118
Figure 23: Private rents, Housing Benefit Rents, and average earnings, 2001-2011119

Government moved to cap these costs, by reducing the benefits payable. From April
2011, the allowance was reduced to the level at which it would meet the rent at the
thirtieth, rather than the fiftieth, percentile of rents in the local area (and maxima were
set). It was uncertain what the impact of this would be on tenants, or indeed on their
landlords and on the banks that had loaned them the money to buy those assets.

Conclusions
Over sixty years, housing assets became simultaneously the most important
investment goods owned by most households in the UK, and the largest single item in
118

around 70% of this being, in both years, payments to working-age recipients see Department of Work
and Pensions Impact of changes to Local Housing Allowance from 2011 from
http://www.dwp.gov.uk/local-authority-staff/housing-benefit/claims-processing/local-housingallowance/impact-of-changes.shtml (Consulted 2nd October 2011).
For total expenditure number see Work and Pensions Select Committee , Impact of the changes to Housing
Benefit announced in the June 2010 Budget, analytical supplement, 3rd November 2010 p.3 - from
http://www.dwp.gov.uk/docs/wpsc-analytical-supp.pdf (Consulted 2nd October 2011)
119

Work and Pensions Select Committee , Impact of the changes to Housing Benefit announced in the June

2010 Budget, analytical supplement, 3rd November 2010 p.5 - from http://www.dwp.gov.uk/docs/wpscanalytical-supp.pdf (Consulted 2nd October 2011)

47

most families consumption expenditure.

They underpinned much of the
consumption in the economy, since increasing house prices made many families
willing to spend more. Housing construction was an important economic activity in
its own right. Do-it-yourself labour, although not counted in national accounts, added
substantially to the countrys capital stock, and became a major hobby. Speculation
about future house price movements created a new cohort of small capitalists, risking
their wealth on buying property with borrowed money, and sometimes adding (or
destroying) value by ambitious projects of redecoration and renovation. At its peak,
seventy per cent of households in England owned their own homes. It was the
apotheosis of the liberal revolution; the market had triumphed, and the state (apart
from a residual social housing sector, catering to the feckless poor) had withered
away.
But there was a puzzle here. As, on the surface, the British housing market moved
away from social democracy and towards market liberalism, its underpinnings moved
in the opposite direction. Each government intervention created a new set of clients
or a new set of interests; these could seldom be ignored or over ridden when it came
to introducing the next set of changes. So measure was piled on measure, and subsidy
on subsidy, until at the end of the century the influence of government had become
all-pervasive. It controlled the physical expansion of the housing stock by imposing
planning rules; it controlled the form of the stock through building standards; it
controlled who could live in social housing by increasingly tortuous and potentially
self-contradictory criteria of need (which also came to determine the nature of whole
neighbourhoods, by acting as a lens to focus deprivation); it underpinned owneroccupation through tax subsidies and direct sales of its own housing stock; and it
provided financial support for private renting, at the bottom end of the market by
paying the rent, and at the top by providing continued tax-breaks for loan interest, and
by propping up lending institutions. A great deal of other economic activity by
consumers depended crucially on the health of the housing market, so the impact of
decisions about housing reverberated way beyond the walls of the nations homes.
Even when government wanted to withdraw from the market, it could not do so.
Avner Offer commented on the attempts at rational reform before 1914:
Why did reform end in such a miserable failure? Arguably, because
of a misconception of the problem. Registration, which appeared on the
face of it to be a rather mild measure of legal and administrative reform
was really a measure for nationalisation without compensation.
Bentham would not have fallen into this error. He reserved his greatest
eloquence to condemn the analogous case, suppression of places and
pensions, without indemnifying the individuals who had possessed
them", not only on grounds of utility, but also of justice.

48

Expropriation by main force of middle-class interests was not

practicable in Edwardian England and may still not be so today. 120
By 2011, the range of interests that had to be preserved went way beyond the middle
class, and the task of any would-be reformer had become immeasurably harder.
To those of a conservative disposition, followers of Burke not Bentham, who think
that society is made up of obligations, duties and rights that accrue through time, this
is less of a problem than it might be to a rationalist reformer. Housing conditions have
improved immeasurably, most people have been satisfied, and adjustment of the
patchwork quilt of provision to cope with problems as they arise is probably the best
that can be hoped for. But social amelioration of this kind faces two major problems.
The first problem is that it tends to reward the majority at the expense of minorities
and the weak, whose claim on government attention may be sufficient to attract
enough resources to buy them off, but is seldom enough to become the focus of
concerted policies that could transform their lot. Markets can satisfy the needs of
minorities (if they have the buying power), and so can Commissars; but pluralist
politics cluster around the median voter. This is what has happened to the housing
situation of the poorest households in Britain over the past hundred years.
The second great problem is that it depends on a continuing flow of new resources, to
fix each new problem while still maintaining preserving the interests of existing
clients. In particular, in housing, this demands the provision of enough new houses at
least to keep prices in balance. By 2008, it was no longer clear that this was
happening in the UK. Should this lead, as the Barker review predicted, to a major
crisis of affordability, then it seems likely that something will have to give.
More generally, the history of post-war housing provision in the UK poses questions
about the political economy of the welfare state in general. If pursuit of the median
voter and the preservation of vested interests created at earlier stages of reform have
been the two great forces driving forward state involvement in the political economy
of housing, what might that tell us, for example, about education? And if liberal
democracies survive by buying-off trouble from new problems, while continuing to
support the vested interests that have accrued in the past, how will they to manage in
situations in which economic growth can no longer be relied upon? If the history of
intervention in housing gives us anything to go by, it seems likely that they will focus
their resources on preserving the interests of those in the middle. This does not bode
well for the poor.

120

Offer, Property and Politics, 1870-1914 : Landownership, Law, Ideology and Urban Development in

England. pp.85-6.

49

Harold Carter
Oxford, October 2011.

[email protected]

50

P. Barker, The Freedoms of Suburbia (London, 2009).

J. Bourke, Working Class Cultures in Britain 1890-1960: Gender, Class and Ethnicity
(London, 1994).
N. H. Buck, Working Capital : Life and Labour in Contemporary London (London,
2002).
A. Buckingham, 'Is There an Underclass in Britain?', British Journal of Sociology, 50
(1999), pp. 49-75.
J. Burnett, A Social History of Housing 1815-1985 (London, 1986).
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53

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