The Future of Council Housing by John English

Author:John English [English, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367678234
Google: 25e2zQEACAAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Limited
Published: 2021-03-24T01:01:47+00:00

Those Seeking to Enter the Public Sector or Home Ownership

For households and individuals who are neither public sector tenants nor owner occupiers, the effects of council house sales will vary according to individual preferences and circumstances. For those wishing and able to buy, as former council houses are resold on the open market, greater choice and value for money may be available. Evidence which is available on this issue indicates that, while former council houses are valued slightly lower than similar dwellings elsewhere in the private sector, they are unlikely to be the cheapest properties available.28 In other words, former council houses do not add an extra rung at the bottom of a notional housing ladder and thus do not create opportunities for purchase for those households who would not have been in such a position anyway. In Birmingham, 25 per cent of purchasers of former council houses were already existing owner occupiers. Compared with the original sitting-tenant purchasers, the new purchasers were younger, at an earlier stage in the family cycle and a considerably higher proportion were in middle-class employment.

Predictably, as public sector dwellings become subject to allocation through market processes, they become part of a general pool of houses available for purchase. They no longer have any specific function in the housing market. Claims, therefore, that ‘when a house is subsequently resold after the pre-emption period a cheap house for sale is provided which may well go to a family on the waiting list’ reveal a considerable misunderstanding of housing market processes.29 While the above suggestion may have some limited validity where local authorities operate open waiting lists on which anyone can register, it is extremely unlikely that the resale process represents an alternative route for households in categories of need. The benefits accrue to a group of households more directly comparable to first-time buyers generally than new council tenants.30 Many would not have been allocated dwellings, and certainly not the particular ones they had purchased, on grounds of need.

For those households in the privately rented sector, concealed and sharing households, and the homeless there is likely to be less opportunity to enter the public sector and less choice available. There are of course suggestions that measures to revitalise private renting through legislative changes, increased involvement of building societies in the rental market and the growth of housing associations could create an adequate substitute for public renting. Whether such measures can ever generate adequate accommodation in sufficient quantity and at sufficiently low rents is, however, unlikely. If there is one element of consistency in the history of British housing it is the failure of the private sector to provide working-class dwellings. Those who advocate a freer market in housing must accept the consequences of their ideology. They must accept either the need for state intervention in relation to those groups unable to pay the going rate or a high degree of deprivation and homelessness.

This takes us on to the feasibility of universal ownership. If such a situation were foreseeable, then it could be argued that the temporary inequalities would ultimately disappear.

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