From Slums to Slums in Three Generations; Housing Policy and the Political Economy of the Welfare State, 1945-2005

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.