Housing Policy in the Developed Economy by Bruce Headey

Author:Bruce Headey [Headey, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000299267
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 54880647
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

Comprehensive Policy Projected then Abandoned: the Labour Government, 1964-70

Labour’s moves towards and then away from a comprehensive housing policy were all of a piece with the party’s attempts at indicative economic planning. The Housing Programme 1965-70 was launched with much fanfare as was the National (economic) Plan.107 It promulgated the ambitious target of building 500,000 houses a year by 1970, just as the National Plan aimed for a 4 per cent a year economic growth rate. But, as with the National Plan, the government lacked adequate controls – adequate sanctions and incentives – to induce adherence to the programme and, instead, relied on jaw-boning, on consultations with representatives of building societies and the building industry.108 These representatives came from the larger building societies and from building firms which were willing to make quasi-oligopolistic arrangements with government while it suited them, but would not adhere to the government’s objectives if these conflicted with their market interests or other incentives to which they normally responded. In any case, large organisations in the building industry could not control the behaviour of the thousands of small building societies and construction firms any more than, for the sake of the National Plan, business and trade union leaders who served on the National Economic Development Council (‘Neddy’) and the specific industry Economic Development Councils (‘little Neddies’) could control the behaviour of individual business and worker organisations in their sectors.109

The Housing Programme and the National Plan were, de facto, abandoned at the same time and in response to the same economic ‘crisis’ – the devaluation of the pound in November 1967. Housing ministers, in common with other Ministers, continued to make speeches of the kind that had stirred optimism about the new government in 1964-5 – they spoke of ‘purposiveness’, ‘priorities’ and ‘planning’ – but in reality their actions reflected the ad hocery for which they had repeatedly criticised their Conservative predecessors. Once their original plans were aborted they had no contingency or fall-back plans to replace them. Housing policy had again proved subordinate to macro-economic concerns and government programmes, instead of being based on any overview of housing requirements, consisted as before of legislation dealing separately with the owner-occupied, private rental and local authority sectors.

Despite its eventual fate, though, the Housing Programme 1965-70 was a fascinating document embodying the first officially endorsed assessment of national housing needs. One million dwellings, it was found, were required to replace slums and another two million to replace old dwellings which were not yet slums but were not worth renovating. 700,000 new dwellings were needed to remove local shortages and provide a small surplus to make labour mobility more feasible, 300,000 would be needed to replace dwellings demolished for roadworks and similar purposes and, finally, 150,000 new units were required to match rising population and headship rates.110 In addition to these overall targets, certain priority areas were designated – Greater London and 130 other localities – and local authorities were, in the short term, to replace private enterprise as the main supplier.

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