A. E. Holmans - Housing Policy in Britain

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: HOUSING POLICY AND HOME OWNERSHIP

Volume 10

HOUSING POLICY IN BRITAIN

A History

A. E. HOLMANS

First published in 1987 by Croom Helm Ltd

This edition first published in 2021

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

1987 A. E. Holmans

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ISBN: 978-0-367-64519-9 (Set)

ISBN: 978-1-00-313856-3 (Set) (ebk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-68129-6 (Volume 10) (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-00-313475-6 (Volume 10) (ebk)

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A HISTORY

A.E. Holmans

1987 A.E. Holmans

Croom Helm Ltd, Provident House, Burrell Row,

Beckenham, Kent, BR3 1AT

Croom Helm Australia, 44-50 Waterloo Road,

North Ryde, 2113, New South Wales

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Holmans, A.E.

Housing policy in Britain.

1. Housing policy Great Britain History

I. Title

363.5560941 HD7333.A3

ISBN 0-7099-3789-X

Croom Helm, 27 South Main Street,

Wolfeboro, New Hampshire 03894-2069, USA

Holmans, A.E.

Housing policy in Britain.

Includes index.

1. Housing policy Great Britain History. I. Title.

HD7333.A3H64 1987 363.58 86-19930

ISBN 0-7099-3789-X

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham Ltd, Kent

Preface

II The Pre-1914 Antecedents of Housing Policy

III The Inter-War Years: The Economy, Population, Households and Housing

IV From World War II to the 1970s

V The Growth of Owner-Occupation and of Local Authority Housing

VI Finance of Owner-Occupation

VII Local Authority Housing Finance

VIII Privately Owned Rented Housing

IX Overview and Concluding Observations

When this book was being written, the author was a Senior Economic Adviser in the Department of the Environment. All the views expressed are of course the authors own and do not reflect any views of the Department. The views expressed and the conclusions reached are based on published information, and no reference has been made to unpublished records relating to the formation of policy. Likewise, for reasons of propriety, no comments are made about the policies of the present Government, and the policies of the previous Government are commented on sparingly. All the calculations and estimates, other than those drawn from official published sources, are the authors own and have no official status.

The author is indebted to David Donnison, Duncan Maclennan, and Mark Boleat who read all or part of the text and made helpful comments.

Tables V.16 and V.17 are reproduced from the General Householder Survey by kind permission of the Controller of H.M. Stationery Office.

A.E. Holmans
London, 1986

The purpose of this book is to examine why, how, and with what results government became so deeply involved with housing; and especially why the degree of involvement increased so much in the three decades after 1945, notwithstanding the exceptionally rapid rise (by past British standards) in real income and owner-occupation taking place of renting as the majority tenure. The policies pursued in the three decades after 1945 followed directly from the policies of the inter-war years, so the inter-war experience must be recounted in some detail. The pre-1914 background to the policies of the inter-war years has necessarily to be discussed in somewhat less detail, but an outline of it is essential for an understanding of what happened after 1918. In discussing the nineteenth century origins of housing policy as a function of government in England, it is important to consider how far the conditions and problems to which the policies were addressed really were novel in any sense other than scale. Insanitary housing and overcrowding did not begin with the Industrial Revolution, even though the response was different in the nineteenth century from what had gone before.

Public policy can only be described and assessed in terms of the circumstances of the time and the underlying causes of the problems with which it sought to deal. Much of this history is therefore devoted to the way in which housing conditions responded to demographic change and to development and change in the British economy. The number of households to be housed, what they were able and willing to pay for housing and what housing cost to provide were all of the greatest importance for public policy, and so must be described in enough detail both to explain the context of policies and to provide the material required for any conclusions about the appropriateness or otherwise of the policies pursued.

The history of housing policy after 1918 in England cannot be recounted except with a heavy emphasis on housing tenure. For the period from World War I to the 1970s there are, therefore, separate chapters on owner-occupation, local authority housing, and renting from private landlords, with overview chapters on the inter-war years and the post-war decades to describe the economy, population and households, and housing conditions in the aggregate. The pre-1914 background is discussed in a single chapter, to set the scene for what came after. World War I, far more than World War II, was the watershed for British housing. Both the development of the housing system and the evolution of policy in the sixty years that followed World War I contrasted very sharply with the century that preceded it. The difference between pre- and post-1914 were far greater than any differences between sub-periods within those eras.

Given the long period to be covered, the present book must necessarily be written from secondary sources, for instance reports of surveys and censuses, reports and minutes of evidence of Royal Commission and Departmental Committees, and statistical publications. This secondary material is voluminous but very scattered, and much of value may be derived from bringing it together in a coherent way. This is as true of the recent past as of the more distant past, if anything more so owing to the greater volume of material. There are, indeed, risks and disadvantages to crossing the boundary between history proper and current affairs in the way that is inherent in writing in the mid-1980s about the 1960s and the 1970s. Lack of perspective long enough to see any but short term consequences limits a history of housing policy in these decades to being an orderly record of what was happening and what was done, and the immediate consequences. But such an orderly record has considerable value, for the speed with which events become overlaid with myth and legend is great. What was said in the heat of the moment on controversial issues may be remembered as if it were the last word on the subject, and forebodings of feared consequences very readily become mixed with actual consequences. Moreover, the boundary between history and current affairs is not the same for everyone. By the mid-1980s there was a whole generation of younger householders, voters, councillors, and MPs for whom the 1957 Rent Act was not even a childhood memory.