Housing

Abstract

Comparing the housing situation in Britain today with that at the turn of the century there are obviously huge differences, but there are also features which remain relatively unchanged and even a sense in which the situation has turned full circle. Features of the late 1990s which contrast sharply with the situation in 1900 include the enormous improvement in the quality of housing, government housing policies costing around £20 billion or 3 per cent of GNP each year, and the growth of owner occupation to include two-thirds of households. In 1900 overcrowded, insanitary and insecure housing conditions were experienced by a substantial minority of the population. Beyond legislation governing the closure of the worst slums and the rehousing of those housed therein, there was nothing that could be described as housing policy. In 1900 around 10 per cent of housing was owner occupied and 90 per cent was rented from private landlords, who, in England and Wales, were middle class or petit bourgeois with modest investments. Throughout the century housing has continued being consumed predominantly in the private sectors, albeit regulated and subsidised in various ways. Hence in 1995, 77 per cent of dwellings in Britain were either owner occupied or rented from private landlords (excluding housing associations, 82 per cent if these are included). This is a very significant contrast with other fields of social welfare such as health care and education where consumption has been predominantly in the public sector since the Second World War. As at the turn of the last century, today there is considerable uncertainty about the future of housing consumption and housing policy, with a strong emphasis in governing circles on individual households meeting their housing needs on their own in markets kept as free as possible from state intervention. For fifty or sixty years in the middle of the century, from the 1920s to the 1970s, governments developed interventionist approaches to housing. Since the mid-1970s, or arguably even earlier, governments have sought to disengage from housing, although by no means successfully. This aim has been pursued much more vigorously since 1979. Hence there is a sense of turning if not a full circle, then certainly some way back towards Victorian values in housing.