Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing
by John Boughton · 14 May 2018 · 325pp · 89,374 words
Council (LCC) the power to build these homes. The 1890 Act, extended in 1900 to other local authorities, provided the basis of the relative surge in council house building that followed. Paradoxically, this seems both an unintended and inevitable consequence. It was unintended on the part of the Conservative legislators who had passed the reform
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In the 1920s, council housing policy was marked, firstly, by the reduced space standards and subsidies of the 1923 Housing Act implemented by Conservative Minister of Health and Housing, Neville Chamberlain. Its intended thrust was to boost, by means of a subsidy to building contractors, the private housing market, but where local authorities could persuade the
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Labour government assumed office in 1924. In contrast, Labour’s 1924 Housing Act, masterminded by John Wheatley, placed council housing centre stage. It offered local authorities a £9 per house per year subsidy for forty years and, though it maintained the reduced space standards of the Chamberlain Act, it now required that the ‘fixed bath
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improvement in housing standards at least since the war, and probably since local authorities began building houses to rent.30 Despite this, home ownership was increasingly adjudged the significant metric of progress; in fact, Labour’s own 1959 general election manifesto proposed a Right to Buy for sitting council tenants. Overall, the proportion of owner-occupied households rose
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from 32 per cent in 1953 to 43 per cent in 1961. That trend had its own longer-term implications for the status of council housing, but the most immediate and pressing issue was the vast numbers
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duty on local authorities to rehouse vulnerable groups with priority needs; typically pregnant women, families with dependent children and those with health issues. This was a well-meaning socialist measure, almost the embodiment of the precept ‘to each according to his needs’, but it had unintended consequences. Practically, it increasingly reserved council housing to the
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visit the city, you’ll see a representative range of local authority housing from cottage suburbs to mixed development to deck-access and high-rise. But, to many, the most inspired and attractive of the city’s council housing was built in the later 1960s and 1970s as City Architect David Percival pioneered what’s been called
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per cent of all households in England – were rented from a local authority.46 Almost 1.2 million council homes had been built since 1969. The focus on council housing might, however, lead us to miss the bigger picture. It remained a vital and valued form of housing tenure; the numbers make that obvious, but
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eleven members personally surcharged and removed from office – its famous Rents Rebellion was defeated. Other councils toed the line. The legislation’s introduction of a National Rent Rebate Scheme for council tenants – to replace the contemporary patchwork of local authority provision – was a palliative which did have the effect of making council housing more affordable to some
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was no pretence that new council housing was to be built to replace homes lost to the market. In 1978–9, 79,160 new council homes were started in England and Wales; by 1996–7, this figure had fallen to 400.4 Further legislation in 1984, which extended the Right to Buy to tenants of two
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years’ standing, and increased maximum discounts to 60 per cent, only underlined the radicalism of this assault on local government provision and ownership.5 Over 1.8 million council homes were sold by 1997 – around one in four of the total. Council housing, which had formed
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choice; more negatively, they suggested it thwarted the ‘natural’ disciplines of the market. ‘Choice’ was limited by the top-down nature of council housing provision and its bureaucratic and allegedly unaccountable management. The political accountability that public housing’s defenders pointed to was inadequate, vitiated by the ‘vested interests’ – Labour councils in cahoots
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the same of council housing. Council housing, then, was an easy target and served as ‘the perfect symbol of the failings of the public sector’ for its ideological opponents. More broadly, it was ‘unpopular, socially stigmatising, incompetently managed and oblivious to consumer preferences’.8 Critically, of course, Right to Buy was a very popular policy among council tenants. To many,
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properties to the poor’.12 Far from stabilising communities, Right to Buy contributed to social polarisation and the concentration of poorer residents on poorer estates. That may have been an unintended consequence but it fed a powerful and damaging narrative that held, to put it crudely, that council housing was for losers. Owner occupation increased from 55
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being slashed. In contrast, the central government subsidy to council housing construction and maintenance fell from £2.13 billion in 1980–1 to £1.21 billion by 1990–1 – a cut of 43 per cent. In the same period, those accepted as homeless by local authorities (which therefore had a duty to rehouse them) rose
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part of the intended shift from a ‘bricks and mortar’ subsidy to personal housing allowances – means-tested in the case of the poorest in receipt of Housing Benefit, but a significant perk to the middle class. At the same time, local authorities were forced to increase council housing rents – they tripled from an average £7
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of the decade.13 For all the statistics, the bottom line is clear: this was a perfect storm of policy and law with the clear and largely accomplished aim of diminishing and marginalising council housing and, by extension, those who needed it. For those on the ideological right, for whom the ‘state’ was not an
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the enemy of freedom and personal enterprise, council housing offered a prime and ready target for their project to limit and discredit government intervention and the communitarian values which underlay it. Another strand to the assault on council ownership and management came in the 1988 Housing Act that introduced ‘Tenants’ Choice’. This gave council tenants the right to transfer
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thought our instincts were to stop him. But that was never our history or purpose.20 Owner occupation and Right to Buy had become the symbol of such aspiration and council housing its antithesis. This was a sad fall from grace for a form of housing provision that had provided millions with their first decent homes –
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to that borough’s minorities. Liverpool, Oldham and Walsall were other local authorities found wanting. Amid all this – the statistics, the tensions, the inevitable contradictions of well-intentioned (and less well-intentioned) policies – it seems to me that an essential truth about this new world of council housing is captured by a resident of the Manor
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location of ten of the thirty-nine NDC schemes – where the combination of soaring house prices and rising demand made investment in building for sale particularly attractive.19 Actual regeneration has reduced council housing stock and forced many council tenants to move, often to peripheral areas far from their original homes. Inner London has become increasingly
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as we saw at the Aylesbury. The group Defend Council Housing brought an activist political agenda to the fight but found a sympathetic audience among many council tenants with a well-founded concern that their rights might diminish under the new regime. For all the storm and stress, however, of 133 tenant ballots between 1999
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established Housing Inspectorate.25 By 2010, ALMOs managed over half of all council housing – more than one million homes across sixty-five local authorities. Nottingham City Homes, set up in 2005 and managing 28,000 properties, and Hackney Homes, set up one year later and managing almost 34,000, were among the largest. Changes in funding rules
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of council housing, but it was a modestly successful attempt to deal with the problem of low-demand estates and introduce some of the market rigours of supply and demand now believed essential. An attempt to launch a National Mobility Scheme in 2004 with the aim of enabling tenants to exchange homes across local authority boundaries
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time when, once again, the free market is failing ordinary people. There was, however, no revival of council house building under New Labour. Between 1997 and 2010, of 2.61 million new homes constructed, just 0.3 per cent were local authority – a grand total of 7,870 new council homes built under the Blair
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most cases, the homes themselves become an asset, not only to those who live in them but a financial – and income-generating – asset to the local authority. To those to whom council housing did not cater – the ‘submerged tenth’, the ‘residuum’, the casually employed, low-waged or unemployed slum working class, a ‘filtering up’
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clearance in the 1930s combined with the impact of the Great Depression brought a poorer working class into council housing for the first time, and with it some of the perceived problems and demonising stereotypes applied to council tenants more generally in recent years. The policy shift reflected a political division between Conservative politicians who believed
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council housing should properly be reserved for the neediest (the market would provide for the rest) and those on the left who saw it as
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the less well-off, was a significant factor in the shift. The 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act, prioritising council housing for the most vulnerable and cementing a system of needs-based allocations, was central to it. Right to Buy and the near cessation of new build in the 1980s was determinant. The concomitant collapse – or destruction – of
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the traditional manufacturing economy and loss of jobs that went with it was, in this context, just a bonus. All that made for, in one word, residualisation: the increasing confinement of council housing (and by this
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345,000 new council homes built to replace them in the period.12 Scotland’s devolved government has halted Right to Buy in that country; similar proposals were promulgated in Wales in March 2017. As council housing households declined, the numbers renting from housing associations rose – to about 2.5 million in total. Going
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into the 2015 general election, the Conservatives promised Right to Buy 2; legislation which would give housing association tenants the same right to purchase their property as council tenants. Conservative strategists hoped to
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new build, a small renaissance of council housing – more or less – in a very changed world. One significant factor in this was the reforms announced by Gordon Brown’s Labour government in 2009 – enacted in the coalition government’s 2011 Localism Act and implemented in 2012 – relating to local authorities’ Housing Revenue Accounts (HRAs). Since
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local government activities.59 Stroud District Council in Gloucestershire, run by a Labour-Liberal Democrat-Green coalition, has found £38 million to invest in new council housing and the refurbishment of existing estates by making interest-only payments on its debts.60 According to its head of tenant services, they estimate they can
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tenants’ spokesperson quoted in Quintin Bradley, ‘The Birth of the Council Tenants’ Movement: A Study of the 1934 Leeds Rent Strike’, tenantshistory.leedstenants.org.uk, accessed 26 January 2016. 33Robert Finnigan, ‘Council Housing in Leeds, 1919–1939’, in M.J. Daunton (ed.), Councillors and Tenants: Local Authority Housing in English Cities, 1919–1939 (Leicester University Press, 1984
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319. 6Quoted in Alan Murie, ‘Housing’, in Paul Wilding (ed.), In Defence of the Welfare State (Manchester University Press, 1986), 58. 7Quoted in Alison Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture: The History of a Social Experiment (Routledge, 2001), 97 (emphases in original). 8Quoted in John Burnett, A Social History of Housing 1815–1970 (Methuen
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6Norman Tebbit, Speech to the Conservative Party Conference, 15 October, 1981. 7Brian Lund, Housing Problems and Housing Policy (Longman, 1996), 123. 8Ian Cole and Robert Furbey, The Eclipse of Council Housing (Routledge, 1994), 188–9. 9Quoted in Brian Milligan, ‘Right-to-Buy: Margaret Thatcher’s Controversial Gift’, BBC News Online, 10 April 2013, bbc.co.uk, accessed
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com, accessed 2 May 2017. 10Tim Ross, ‘Council Houses Go to Professionals Earning £100,000’, Daily Telegraph, 16 February 2014, telegraph.co.uk, accessed 2 May 2017. 11Cited in Helm, “Pay to Stay” Trap will Force Working Families Out of Council Homes’. 12Patrick Collinson, ‘Right to Buy: How Will it Work?’ Guardian, 14 April 2015
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– Reform of Council Housing Finance, October 2009, 6, england.shelter.org.uk, accessed 12 May 2017. 49Price Waterhouse Cooper, HRA Reform: One Year On, July 2013, 2, pwc.co.uk, accessed 12 May 2017. 50Janice Morphet, ‘Is Austerity the Mother of Invention? How Local Authorities are Providing Housing Again’, LSE British Politics and Policy, blogs
Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy
by Quinn Slobodian · 4 Apr 2023 · 360pp · 107,124 words
and sovereign wealth funds. One of Thatcher’s greatest policy victories was her Right to Buy program, which sold council housing
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and Guannan Luo, “The Right to Buy
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and as patron saint of Euroskeptics Right to Buy program Singapore and
Good Times, Bad Times: The Welfare Myth of Them and Us
by John Hills · 6 Nov 2014 · 352pp · 107,280 words
in her case, a two-bedroom housing association flat in Salford, not so far from the council house her parents Jim and Tracy still lived in – that Henry was so exercised about. In 2010 she was 28, and her daughter, Chloe was 8. After her partner Wayne had left, leaving her on her own
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generally with their rates (the predecessor but one of Council Tax). These were systematised into national model schemes of ‘rent rebates’ (for council tenants), ‘rent allowances’ (for private tenants) and ‘rate rebates’ in the early 1970s. Separate support for rents of those who were out of work continued, however, until two phases
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poorest fifth of the population.2 But over the next two years, things got easier. Michelle moved out, and for the first time Gary and Paul had separate bedrooms in their three-bedroom council house. Gary started earning a little alongside some time in college for the next two years. By 2003, if
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to new tenants each year dwindled – fewer new houses were built; property was sold off through the ‘Right to Buy’, so that when occupants moved or died it was not available as social housing; and fewer tenants moved out of social housing or died. The reaction was increasingly to allocate what became available
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to social landlords,33 and the then Chancellor George Osborne suggested in January 2014 that this was one of the ways in which the ‘welfare’ budget might be cut after the 2015 General Election.34 Provision for this was implemented in the ‘Pay to Stay’ rules for council housing introduced in the
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off, they may be in a position to build their lives in other ways, and to start building up assets. At the moment, the main way for existing tenants to do this is to exercise the Right to Buy, moving straight from being subsidised tenants to being owners – if they can raise the
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including all their personal possessions, furniture, the car Jim uses to get to work, and £6,000 in a building society account came to £16,000. Half of (slightly older) council tenant households aged 55–64 had more physical and financial wealth than this, half had less.5 It was only in the last
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With a bit more capital or ability to borrow at the right moment, they might have been able to buy their council house at a very substantial discount. A 50 per cent Right to Buy discount in the 1990s on a property now worth, say, £120,000 would effectively have represented being given equity of
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have been treated much more favourably – to some extent that would be the luck of the draw (depending on whether they had bought under the Right to Buy or ended up needing residential care, for instance). As the first part this chapter describes, that is now a very big draw indeed, given
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short-lived schemes, however, by far the most important example of public policy boosting wealth, beyond the tax advantages described above, is the Right to Buy council (or former council) housing at a discount. These accumulated discounts now represent perhaps £150–200 billion, or about 3–4 per cent of all non-pension wealth.
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surviving longer when people are over 50. At the start of their lives, even if all we knew about them was which local authority area they were born in and nothing else, on average we would expect Edward to live nearly four years longer. As things stood when they were born, George
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and Tracy had managed to accumulate had not been so favourably treated by the tax system, and if this sum had been a little higher, they would have been penalised at times when they claimed benefits. There is some luck in this – if they had been in a position to exercise the Right to Buy
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their council house in the 1990s, they would have
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-efficient levels of savings since the late 1980s. 5 Based on the ONS Wealth and Asset Survey for 2008–10 as revised in May 2014. Median total wealth for 55- to 64-year-old council tenant households was £16,000 excluding private pension rights, or £30,000 including them, but as things
The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010
by Selina Todd · 9 Apr 2014 · 525pp · 153,356 words
public housing. The housing problem was not solved during the 1920s because private builders constructed very few houses for rent, local authorities were not given the money or incentive to build many council houses, and those that were built had rents that were beyond the reach of poorer families. ‘In practice,’ the historian John Burnett
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writes, ‘council houses went to … small clerks and tradesmen, artisans and the better-off semi-skilled workers with average-sized families and safe jobs.’17 Demand fell woefully short of need. The government’s unemployment policies focused not on
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£500 per year was subject to light taxation. From the mid-1920s, private house building increased, and middle-class home owners were the prime beneficiaries. Council house building remained slow and sporadic in the 1920s, and rents in new council houses were too high for most manual workers to afford. Salaried professional workers, on the other hand
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did not take the initiative on reform, Baldwin’s government introduced the 1936 Housing Act. This charged local authorities with providing homes for ‘the working classes’, and led to a big expansion in council house building. Whereas the council houses of the early 1920s had been aimed at the most prosperous manual workers, this heavily subsidized scheme
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, an estate of prefabricated houses hastily constructed on Liverpool’s southern outskirts. Robert’s injuries left him in constant pain and permanently lame. Nevertheless, the Rigbys were reassured both by their council house and by the knowledge that, in Nellie’s words, ‘there was a scheme where disabled veterans would be found jobs.’5
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Act stipulated a generous minimum standard for council houses: they were to be solidly built, well-insulated, well-ventilated, light and airy and equipped with that luxury – an indoor bathroom. Bevan was determined to make council housing available for all who needed it. The 1936 Housing Act had charged local authorities with housing ‘the working classes’; Nye Bevan
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End’.44 In 1948 Bill Rainford’s family moved out of the small, dilapidated house they shared with relatives in Everton in Liverpool and into a newly built council house at Belle Vale. Bill himself was just a baby at the time, but he grew up knowing how much his parents welcomed the
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one.’1 Here was a rare opportunity to exert some control over their lives – council housing was to help them shape a new and brighter future. For Betty Ennis and the other two and a half million people who moved into council housing over the next twenty years, their new home was not just a house, but
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themselves from Bevan’s commitment to constructing socially mixed communities. They sought to revive the pre-war understanding of council housing as accommodation for the poorest, and assiduously promoted home ownership. The new estates and neighbourhoods became communities because of the efforts their inhabitants made, often in the face of government indifference or hostility
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publication. But these researchers overlooked one vital aspect of working-class ‘community’: work. Ann Lanchbury, the daughter of a car worker and a former servant, grew up in a council house on a Coventry street named Pinley Fields. What she loved about it ‘was that it had life’: women chatting on doorsteps, children
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’s Housing Act of 1948 stipulated generous provision for council houses, with spacious rooms and an indoor bathroom. In 1957 Donnison’s national survey found that most would-be home-movers ‘are likely to prefer the larger newer, and better-equipped dwellings available to the Council tenant’, rather than taking their chances in the private sector
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returning to a pre-war conception of council housing as inferior to private building. It relaxed Bevan’s stringent regulations, encouraging local authorities to scrimp on space and to use cheaper materials in order to meet housing targets. It also lifted controls on private building. ‘Local authorities and local authorities alone can clear and rehouse the slums,’ acknowledged the Housing Minister
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declared, encouraged ‘independence’.17 The millions of people who needed a home disagreed with Macmillan. Many of them considered council houses better than private accommodation, both in quality and in the security they offered. Christine and Jack Elliott were among them. In 1951 they were renting a tiny, dilapidated cottage in Willenhall village, on
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home owners nationwide would have preferred to rent.20 For those who did get a council house, the event was a memorable and happy one. Particularly noticeable is the effect that the move had on children. Their delight and their vivid recollections of it reveal the extent to which worry over housing permeated family
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lovely new home of a higher standard than most working people could enjoy! A fitted kitchen with a fridge!’22 Council housing offered thousands of people the chance of their own home – and a good home at that. But once they moved in, the hard work of making their new neighbourhoods into communities
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encouraged to do so. Municipal councils were given the power to sell off their housing stock, although very few did so. Council housing became a less attractive option: local authorities used cheaper materials, and focused on building housing as quickly as possible. The Conservatives jettisoned Bevan’s vision of socially mixed communities through investment in
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of high-rise flats. Social divisions began to fracture the new communities. Municipal councils sometimes exacerbated these. Two tiers of council housing became apparent – that built before the mid-1950s, and that built after – and councils chose who to house where. Many municipal authorities, including London County Council, assumed that the families who came
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from the inner-city slums were likely to misbehave and concentrated them in the poorest housing available.37 Elaine Leather moved into a council house on Coventry’s Willenhall estate in 1958. By this time, four years after Betty Ennis had chosen her
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this way, tension between established residents and newer migrants was avoided. Relations between working-class council tenants and their middle-class neighbours were frequently more fraught. While owner-occupiers in Willenhall were sanguine about the new estate in their midst, middle-class owner-occupiers often worried that council housing would reduce the value of their homes
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neighbourhoods. By 1960, two-thirds of Dagenham’s workers were employed in local factories, shops and offices. Their ability to earn a living close to home enabled them to afford the rent on their comfortable council house and to have a bit extra – enough to visit ageing parents left behind in the East End
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close to work, council housing offered unprecedented security and comfort; but if the work ever dried up, their situation would radically alter
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. Despite their frustrations and annoyances, Betty and Michael Ennis knew themselves to be lucky. Those who moved into council housing experienced a new level of comfort, but also a
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once Viv’s son Stephen was born, she began to find life a strain. She and Matt had a home of their own, a council house, but it was one of those built before 1918, and was small and dilapidated, dark and difficult to keep clean. Motherhood was more demanding than Viv had expected. Stephen had
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. One was the increase in slum clearance, which meant that the Kiddeys had finally been allocated a new council house, after years on the waiting list. At the same time, the wages of unskilled and semi-skilled workers finally began to rise, as unions like the AEU at last woke up to the
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importance of this expanding group of workers and agreed to represent them.34 As well as being able to enjoy council housing, workers could now afford a few luxuries for their new homes. In 1955 a third of British households had
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the affluence that Macmillan described. For those families in work, ‘prosperity’ did not mean a life of ease and plenty, but long hours on a never-ending assembly line, a lino-floored council house, a rented television, a three-piece suite paid for by hire purchase, regular spending money for the kids, the
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in the 1960s that most working-class people experienced affluence for the first time. The 1950s was the decade when television entered most British homes and a council house became an aspiration for many people. During the 1960s that aspiration became reality; by the end of the decade overcrowding had fallen, families could
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’. Their wives didn’t work; instead they held coffee mornings, looked after their quiet, biddable children and tidied their houses. Viv had luxury and ease, but she felt as cooped up as she had in her old council house. To Viv’s chagrin, her new neighbours looked down on her; ‘not one of them
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increased for the first time since the 1930s.12 Other changes directly affected adult workers. Between 1964 and 1970 the Labour government built more council houses than the Conservatives had managed in the previous ten years, and reintroduced rent controls into the private sector.13 People could afford to fill their homes with new
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. Like Harold Macmillan before him, Heath sought to establish home ownership as the most preferable form of housing tenure, and to turn council housing into residual accommodation for the very poorest by reviving the privately rented sector. His 1972 Housing Act directed councils to prioritize providing housing for the
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limited space of time. This caused chaos to the still very long council house waiting lists, and emphasized that council housing was now firmly targeted only at the most needy. The Act also took control for council rent levels out of the hands of local authorities by demanding that they set rents at market rates, meaning that
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much council accommodation was immediately made far more expensive that privately rented property. At the same time, council tenants were given the right to buy their home, although it was possible for local authorities to delay or veto the implementation of this right.6 In the 1960s the housing expert J.B. Cullingworth had
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, instigated rent strikes. ‘The rent kept going up, year after year,’ said Betty. ‘We went everywhere, got coaches, demonstrated, to the council house [town hall] in Coventry, to the Parliament, and we said, “Not a penny on the rent.”’ For women like Betty, rent increases were simply the latest in a long list
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political act. People took advantage of the Act in large numbers, primarily because it seemed to make economic sense. Ron and Edna Jones of Liverpool were among the first to buy their council house. As Edna explained, they did so because the new, subsidized mortgage available to them was ‘cheaper than rent’. Many
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tenants bought for this reason. The IMF deal of 1976 had led to further cuts in public spending on housing. In the late 1970s and 1980s council tenants were faced with
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for the miners’ children. But support also came from more surprising sources. Bob Jackson and his wife were among the hundreds of Labour-supporting mining families who had enthusiastically taken advantage of the right to buy their council house. By 1984 they had a large mortgage, which might have been assumed to be an impediment to
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. By 1991 this dismal picture was replicated across the country. By then, 67 per cent of the housing stock in England and Wales was owner-occupied, and just 20 per cent was council housing. In the same year, 75,500 home owners had their homes repossessed for defaulting on their mortgage – almost 1 per
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gang, retired in the late 1990s. By the 2000s his wife had died, he lived alone in a condemned council house and enjoyed ‘doing the Lottery. I always get my numbers, and I sit here and I dream for hours about what I’d do with the money.’ It provided a distraction from ‘worrying about
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sector employees like teachers, who benefited from the post-war welfare state. After the Second World War, industrial and office workers became more numerous than servants, their lives shaped by trade unionism, council housing, free education and healthcare. In those exuberant post-war days, Viv experienced the excitement that came from expanding horizons, when
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desire among working-class people for greater control over their lives. An aspiration for autonomy from politicians, employers and landlords shaped many people’s actions, whether joining a picket line, buying their council house or filling in a pools coupon or a Lottery ticket. People like Viv did not simply want more money
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. 25. Ibid., pp. 29–31. 26. R. Croucher, Engineers at War (London, 1982), pp. 24–8. 27. B. Jones, ‘Slum Clearance, Privatization and Residualization: The Practices and Politics of Council Housing in Mid-twentieth Century England’, Twentieth Century British History, vol. 21, no. 4 (2010), pp. 510–39. 28. Quoted in M. McKenna, ‘The
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, Women Workers Will be Able to Live Near Jobs’, Liverpool Echo (2 June 1965), p. 19. 25. Holmans, Housing, pp. 487–9. 26. C. Peach and M. Byron, ‘Council House Sales, Residualisation and Afro Caribbean Tenants’, Journal of Social Policy, vol. 23, no. 3 (1994), pp. 363–83; Taylor
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’, History Workshop Journal, vol. 75, no. 1 (2012) Hatton, T.J. and R.E. Bailey, ‘Seebohm Rowntree and the Post-war Poverty Puzzle’, Economic History Review, vol. 53, no. 2 (2000) Jones, B. ‘Slum Clearance, Privatization and Residualization: The Practices and Politics of Council Housing in Mid-twentieth-century England’, Twentieth Century British History, vol. 21
The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay
by Guy Standing · 13 Jul 2016 · 443pp · 98,113 words
resurrected by chance or by free markets. The UK’s present housing crisis has its origins in Thatcher’s decision in the 1980s to give council tenants the ‘right to buy’ their homes at a substantial discount, a subsidy scheme that decimated the stock of social housing. Nearly 2 million tenants have since taken advantage
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The share of social housing continued to decline, spurred by the coalition government’s decision to increase the ‘right-to-buy’ discount. The number of households renting from private landlords more than doubled between 2001 and 2015 to 5.4 million, a fifth of all households. By 2025, a quarter will be renting privately
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5 million just before the financial crash to over 2 million. They own 5 million properties, including more than a third of all former council houses sold under the ‘right-to-buy’ programme. While 80 per cent of landlords own just one property, according to the Bank of England, the remaining 420,000 own on
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It has stoked demand for homes to buy, raising prices further, while the supply of affordable properties is dwindling, worsened by extending the ‘right to buy’ to housing associations and forcing local councils to sell their most valuable properties. The subsidies help the better-off with the wherewithal to start on the housing ladder
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in 2015, has been billed as the biggest home ownership programme since Thatcher introduced the ‘right to buy’ for council houses. The £22 billion scheme, which runs to 2020, comprises interest-free loans and a subsidised savings account (Help-to-Buy ISA) for a deposit to buy new-build homes up to £250,000 (£450,
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is a shortage of affordable homes. In the 1970s, four-fifths of public spending on housing went on new homes, mostly for rent. The Thatcher council house sell-off depleted the social housing stock, but the New Labour government compounded the shortage, building even fewer houses than its predecessor. By 2000, most
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association) housing has shrunk too. This has reduced the stock of affordable housing and pushed more low-income families into expensive private rental accommodation, making indebtedness more likely. Extension of the ‘right-to-buy’ subsidy scheme to housing association tenants will make the situation worse by further reducing the social housing stock. Everything
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is subordinated to the desire to privatise and commodify housing, for the benefit of landlords and property speculators. The right-to-buy scheme, which allows tenants to buy their home at a big discount to the market price, has enriched a few
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Garden area, sold for £130,000 in 1990, went for £1.2 million in 2015. This example, though not typical, is indicative of what the right-to-buy policy implies. What was built as a public asset provided somebody with private riches. While the government was boasting of economic growth, with national income
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Barcelona, a housing activist elected in 2015, has fined banks for keeping properties empty and negotiated the temporary transfer of apartments for use as social housing. More than 100 other Spanish municipalities have taken similar powers. Although local authorities in England can levy extra council tax on long-term empty properties, many do
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social commons are under attack from the forces of privatisation and commodification. Social housing is a prime example, in Britain and around the world. The UK’s coalition government reinforced the original right-to-buy policy by increasing the discount, giving a further boost to council house sales. In 2014–15, 12,300 council properties in
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December 2014. 20 S. Sassen, ‘Who owns our cities – and why this urban takeover should concern us all’, The Guardian, 24 November 2015. 21 Vasagar, 2012, op. cit. 22 Vasagar, 2012, ibid. 23 Standing, 2014, op. cit. 24 D. Boffey, ‘Tory right-to-buy plan threatens mass selloff of council homes’, The Observer, 28
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3, 4, 5, 6 organisational forms 1 potential growth of movement 1 progressive political reengagement 1, 2 and rentier platforms 1, 2 rights as demands 1 sovereign wealth funds 1 wage and labour regulation 1, 2 ‘right to buy’ schemes 1, 2, 3, 4 Robbins, Lionel 1 Rockefeller, David 1 Rockefeller, John D. 1 Rolling
Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City
by Anna Minton · 24 Jun 2009 · 309pp · 96,434 words
the key figure behind Exhibition Road. For him, a factor central to the success of the scheme is that it is public, adopted by the local authority. ‘When local authorities adopt a highway it remains absolutely clear what the position is – it is effectively public land in every way. It is a structure that
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of this kind of development – which is generally very poor – but the way in which architecture and places are created in the image of the retailer.’45 In every one of these places the local authority has been very keen to get the proposals through, often in the face of huge public protest
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opposition which swelled as local government grew in power. By 1864–5, after two major parliamentary inquiries, 163 miles of road were passed over to local-authority control and 140 toll bars were removed. By the 1880s, anger at the remaining restrictions caused the Daily Telegraph to denounce the ‘persistence on the part
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the country,6 but a typical pattern of ownership in most British cities would include a mix of property owned by the local authority, institutional investors, small and large businesses and individual property owners. As the twenty-first-century corporate estates take over large parts of the city, the last decade has seen
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surprised to hear him say, ‘We are often asked, “Who owns Britain?” and people are astonished and shocked when we say we don’t know.’7 What is well known is that the sale of what are described as ‘local-authority assets’ is a major plank of government policy, with a government target of
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but remains opaque, mired in jargon and complex legal arrangements, as well as the reluctance of the big landlords to point out the changes that private ownership involves. Often they claim the developments are not even privately owned because they tend to be leased from the local authority. Invariably, though, that is a
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policy transfer’ had worked. ‘Our company was formed on the basis of the US BID model after a series of visits to the US by local-authority officers,’ he said. Another added, ‘We use the New York Mayor’s office documentation as the model.’ Although the principles are the same, there is
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and the press is controlled by the ‘press office’, which aims to present the local authority in the best possible light. This inevitably means sweeping these problems
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great untold story. Housing, by which we invariably mean ‘poor housing’, is not a sexy subject. It’s rarely covered by the media and so press offices and local-authority marketing departments collude in presenting a rosy picture of housing, with stories which focus on the building of aspirational new apartment blocks rather than
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the Conservatives and then more aggressively under successive Labour governments, the market began to enter every aspect of housing policy, each policy change bringing with it its own impenetrable jargon. First off was the introduction in 1986 of ‘stock transfer’, which oversaw the ‘transfer’ of millions of council homes from local authorities to
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voluntary-sector housing associations, also known as ‘Registered Social Landlords’, or RSLs. This is when council housing underwent its first major linguistic change and confusingly started to be called ‘social housing’. Ironically, given the increasingly market-orientated nature
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Birmingham, tenants voted ‘no’, leaving the policy and the local-authority housing department in disarray.24 When the Tories started to introduce the market into housing, they didn’t plan to do away with building public housing completely; the idea was that in place of the council-house building programmes of the post-war period
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they may be ‘sofa surfers’, who move around sleeping on friends’ sofas. If they can convince the council that they really are ‘unintentionally’ homeless, the local authority has a legal duty to house them. The result is that they are placed in emergency temporary accommodation, perhaps in executive apartments like the ones
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mixed communities, but it is the opposite of the current government policy of selling off land, property and ‘local-authority assets’. Instead, mirroring the civic achievements of the Victorians, it would rely on ring-fencing land, property and housing for the public good. This could be done by creating trusts in local areas, supported
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sure this new body of law became an entrenched part of British life, blurring the boundaries between civil and criminal law. An ASBO is applied for by a local authority, Registered Social Landlord or the police and is a civil matter, imposed by a magistrate’s court. If the orders are breached, as they
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whether the old park keepers had more respect because of the job they did, compared to the new local-authority ranger with his book of fixed-penalty notices. It means the interaction between people and their relationship is different,’ he said. Although a warden or a private guard is not quite the same
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are part of our national heritage, have been removed from the public realm. This policy of selling off land and buildings is gathering pace, with the sale of what are known as ‘local-authority assets’ a key aim of the government. There is a lot of uncertainty about the way in which cities
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, consultation draft, Greater London Authority. http://www.london.gov.uk/publication/olympic-legacy-supplementary-planning-guidance, 8/9/11 29. At the time of writing local authorities are still required to discharge their duty to house homeless people by placing them in social housing. But under changes proposed by the Localism Bill
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Nations Convention on Human Rights 1948 enshrines the right to adequate housing. 19. ‘Council tenants will have “right to buy”’, BBC, On This Day, 20/12/79 20. Holmans, A., Monk, S. & Whitehead, C., Homes for the Future, Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research, University of Cambridge, Shelter, 2008 21. Ibid. 22. Housing Completions in
The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain
by Polly Toynbee and David Walker · 3 Mar 2020 · 279pp · 90,888 words
, especially on the psychological consequences for residents, showed NHS staff at their best. But Grenfell also exhibited the disjointed, uncommunicative nature of public services and the downdraught from outsourcing. Fire officers connected only haphazardly with council housing departments; no one looked at the emergency services in the round. The Department for Work
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with over half of their funds spent on one function alone: adults’ and children’s social care, which went unseen by most voters. Government added to their financial woes with a 2015 pre-election sweetener: they imposed a cut in council house rents costing £2.6 billion, which was uncompensated for. Councils lost
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hard for little reward. Emma Percy might have been exactly in her sights. A generation ago, she, husband Rob and their three children would have had the choice of renting a council house or, like their parents, buying a home of their own. Instead, like so many young families of their generation
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, were £40 a week under the national average, and joblessness among young people was still twice the average. A local head teacher told us all his high-achieving pupils left the area in search of better prospects elsewhere. The local authority had lost 57 per cent of its funds from government.
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from 2012 to 2016, the Chartered Institute of Housing reported, as dwellings were sold under the right to buy and not replaced; a further 370,000 dwellings were predicted to go by 2020. Social renting from councils and non-profit housing groups had fallen from 30 per cent of tenures to 17 per cent.
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rents increased 32 per cent in the ten years to 2016, when average earnings rose by only 16 per cent. In a council house at an affordable rent, Emma and Rob Percy would have lived well. Their experience exposed the fiction of a ladder open to all. Children of well-off parents
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ended up in high-cost rental accommodation, thus reducing the housing benefit bill. Labour had similarly discouraged council building, favouring housing associations. Encouraging both local authorities and non-profit landlords to build would have been cost-effective, their borrowing costs in an era of low interest rates dwarfed by the high cost
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flagship Thatcher policy of selling off council homes at a high discount. Instead, right to buy was strengthened. In 2012 discounts were increased, and in 2016 powers were taken to force housing associations to sell cheaply to their tenants. Once council tenants bought their homes, many resold for a high profit; the new buyers filled
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them with students or transients at higher rents, upsetting previously stable communities of long-term residents. In London, 40 per cent of dwellings sold under right to buy had found their way back into
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homes the council could afford to build were for private sale. Sir Peter Soulsby, the city’s Labour leader, said, ‘At the very least right to buy ought to be suspended in cities like Leicester until we have dealt with the housing crisis.’ Councils showed enterprise by creating arm’s-length companies
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the masterplan, but it is a better place. What was learnt was that regeneration demands unrelenting effort, stop–go is wasteful and volunteering depends on funds and council services, and they disappeared. After 2010 the government showed scant interest in improving such estates, beyond selling off their precious housing. No Solidarity
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a whole, ethnic concentration had grown in certain towns. There, residential areas, schools and workplaces were more segregated. Figures from 2015 showed 511 schools across forty-three local authority areas where at least half the pupils came from Pakistani and Bangladeshi ethnic backgrounds. ‘That is driving more prejudice, intolerance, mistrust in communities,’ Casey
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Harvey’s Bristol Cream used to be made here; the site was then acquired by the local authority, which oversaw its transformation. In a decade when Netflix and Amazon grew hugely as producers of content, film and television nonetheless still depended heavily on the public sector, as illustrated by Bristol council’s role
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as lower than the UK average, if measured after housing costs, thanks to more generous provision of council and not-for-profit rentals. Right to buy for social housing rents was ended for new tenants in 2011, and in 2016 abolished altogether. Subsidies for building new social dwellings increased – to twice the English level.
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UK-wide spending plans. The Welsh government chose not to use its additional powers to improve social security and left the bedroom tax in place. The assembly did, however, legislate to end right to buy, and while the Welsh government’s target for affordable dwellings was less ambitious than the Scottish one, it compared
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our homes, as well as our eating habits, water use, air travel and more. In places, and in patches, the work has begun. Take one example: in September 2018 the Highways Agency and local authority began upgrading a three-kilometre stretch of the A421 into Milton Keynes. The new dual carriageway is to have
Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?
by Brett Christophers · 17 Nov 2020 · 614pp · 168,545 words
far as the ‘business’ is concerned, the owner is the trust that runs the academy; in terms of the land and buildings, the owner is sometimes the academy, but sometimes the local authority, with the academy holding the site on a long lease for a nominal charge.19 Last but not least, is
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introduced for construction, maintenance and highways work by the Local Government, Planning and Land Act (1980). Under CCT, a local authority can carry out activities in-house only if the work has first gone out to tender
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be, simply because it will be done better. Becky Francis’s assessment of the government’s true rationale for school academization – ‘a strong dislike of local authority influence, and a faith in autonomy and marketisation’ – can probably be safely extended to public-sector outsourcing more generally.24 Whatever the real reasoning behind public
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extreme cases – 50 per cent is only an average – commissioning is increasingly the core activity of local authorities. A wide variety of policy slogans have been invented to normalize this profound transformation in local authority operations. Colin Copus and his co-authors list seven of the most common: ‘Co-ordinating Council’, ‘Catalyst Council’, ‘Co-operative
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see, land rentierism – letting property and/or investing in it for capital gain – is what these companies do, or at least constitutes a significant component of their businesses. Then there is the issue of housing land. From 1980 the UK government famously gave social (‘council’) housing tenants the right to buy the dwellings they occupied. Did
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this not crystallize a new generation not of land rentiers, but of owner-occupiers? Yes and no. Yes, council house tenants were given the right to buy (and in England and Northern Ireland, at least, they still have it); and yes, well over 2 million have since exercised that right, becoming owner-occupiers. Crucially, however, many of
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private landlords – who, as James Meek notes, have come to represent an increasingly substantial and significant ‘rentier class’.22 Research carried out in 2017 found that over 40 per cent of all council flats sold under the Right to Buy in England were now being rented out privately, the local proportion rising to a
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70 per cent (Figure 7.2). The biggest tenure-related difference between 1979 and today lies not in the split between owner-occupation and rental, but rather in the private sector’s share of rental stock – which, thanks largely to Right to Buy, has more than doubled, from a quarter to just over a half
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police stations, between 2011 and 2017 – specifically in order to soften the blow of budget cuts.44 Local authorities and NHS trusts have been doing likewise.45 Perhaps the most significant category of public land sold at less than market value under conditions of compulsion is housing land, under the Right to Buy. In 1980, the Housing
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Act summarily removed local-authority discretion over whether council housing should be sold.46 In
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this case, though, it is not such compulsion – councils’ obligation to respect tenants’ right to buy – that explains the low prices paid; rather, discount is written into
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for the English case suffices to signal the extraordinary scale of the value not realized by the taxpayer on council house sales. Since 1979, around 1.9 million properties have been sold under the Right to Buy scheme in England.47 Let us assume an average discount against market value of 40 per cent, which
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at the time of sale, in today’s prices, of £100,000 (again, this is conservative: the halfway point of Right to Buy in terms of dwellings sold was reached in 1989– 90, and the average UK house price in today’s prices had already passed £100,000 by 1986), then the cumulative absolute
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is true that not all of this value has accrued to rentiers: many Right to Buy homes have remained in owner-occupancy, and many of those now in the private rental sector will no doubt have got there through sale by former council tenants after a seemly period of time. Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that much
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of the government giveaway has indeed gone into the pockets of rentiers. Large numbers of Right to Buy homes have
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her home within five years of buying it. But the amount of repayment declines by 20 per cent per annum, and there is enough evidence of Right to Buy homes being sold with unseemly haste – a BBC investigation carried out in 2019 unearthed 140 buyers who had resold within one month, of whom twenty
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that they had previously privatized at a discount. This has happened with housing land: in the face of a mounting housing crisis, numerous local authorities have reacquired homes sold under Right to Buy – Ealing council in London, for instance, spending over £100 million buying back 516 properties originally sold for less than £20 million.57
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of rail services to contract rentiers has led to increased passenger rail fares (Chapter 5), and the sale of water and electricity networks to infrastructure rentiers has led to increased household utility bills (Chapter 6), so Right to Buy has led to increased housing rents. Much more than in either the rail or utility contexts
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in the Introduction, the ascendancy of rentierism in general has generated in the UK increased inequalities of both income and wealth. But the substantial Right to Buy–facilitated expansion of private rental housing – housing owned and let predominantly by petit-rentier landlords – is clearly special. Not only has this expansion dramatically exacerbated the inequalities that
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one answer in Chapter 2, in the form of the country’s North Sea oil-and-gas dividend and its cushioning welfare provisions for workers thrown onto the metaphorical slagheap. But Right to Buy is plainly also part of the answer. Right to Buy was, in many respects, Thatcher’s defining achievement. It was the privatization that gave
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all on former council estates), but actually robbed them of the public wealth they had formerly owned. Borrowing terms from Harvey, we might say that Right to Buy, and the land privatization it entailed, performed a legitimizing ideological function for neoliberalism more broadly – to which, in the UK, privatization always was central. The transformations
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in the housing sector to which Right to Buy was so central lubricated the neoliberal shift in other ways, too. As we have seen, deregulation and liberalization of the mortgage market, which had been necessary to enable Right to Buy, precipitated unprecedented growth in residential land prices from the early 1990s
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into more expensive private rental accommodation – all of which measures are underpinned by a financial system heavily dependent on mortgage lending.115 In a sense, Right to Buy, in aiming to reduce levels of rentierism (albeit public-sector rentierism), was always a contradictory, doomed project. Rentierism, as this book has shown, is integral
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communities the right to contest the use only of land owned by public bodies. Scotland’s Community Right to Buy, by contrast, gives communities a preemptive right to buy certain types of land regardless of who owns them, and growth in community landownership in Scotland since the 1970s has occurred principally through buyouts from private estates, mainly
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, Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else (London: Verso, 2015), p. 193. 23. N. Barker, ‘Councillor Renting Out 10 Ex-Authority Homes in “Right to Buy to Let” Capital’, 17 January 2018, at insidehousing.co.uk. 24. W. Self, ‘A Rentier Nation’s Fading Dreams of Home’, Financial Times, 16 January
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. 46. R. Fincher, ‘The Political Economy of the Local State’, in R. Peet and N. Thrift, eds, New Models in Geography: The Political-Economy Perspective (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 338–60, at p. 351. 47. ‘Table 671: Annual Right to Buy Sales for England’ – spreadsheet at gov.uk. 48. See S. Wilcox, ‘A Financial
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Evaluation of the Right to Buy’, 24 January 2008, p. 6 – pdf available at assembly.wales; Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, ‘Social Housing Sales: 2017–18, England’, 28 November
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Adjusted For Inflation – Nationwide’ – spreadsheet at nationwide.co.uk. 50. See, for example, P. Apps, ‘Right to Buy to Let’, Inside Housing, 14 August 2015. 51. An important 2003 report on Right to Buy explains: There is considerable evidence that the Right to Buy is being abused for profit in some areas. This includes the letting of newly purchased
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the company. This is done in order to circumvent the requirement to pay back the rebate granted by the Council if a property is re-sold within three years of the Right to Buy having been exercised. See House of Commons ODPM: Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions Committee
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, The Draft Housing Bill, 22 July 2003, HC 751-I, Tenth Report of Session 2002–03 (Volume I), p. 53. 52. A. Homer, ‘Right to Buy Homes Re-Sold since 2000 Made
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Land (London: Cabinet Office, 2017), p. 22. 55. H. Watt, ‘Property Firms Make Millions Buying and Selling on MoD Land’, Guardian, 18 March 2018. 56. House of Commons Communities and Local Government Committee, Housing Associations and the Right to Buy, 10 February 2016, HC 370, Second Report of Session 2015–16, p. 7. 57. T. Copley
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, ‘Right to Buy: Wrong for London’, January 2019, p. 7 – pdf available at tomcopley.com. 58. ‘Rail Land Privatisation
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platforms, 184–187 Common Market referendum, 111 Common Wealth (think tank), 402, 403, 405–406 Communication Workers Union, 320–321 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 29–30 community landownership, 406–407 Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs), 265 Community Right to Buy (Scotland), 407 Community Right to Reclaim Land, 407 Compass Group, 7 competition: contract rents
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, David, 363, 364 Reuben, Simon, 363, 364 revenue tax, 224–226 Rhodes, Chris, 280 Ricardo, David, xx, xxii, 66 Ridley, Nicholas, 319 Riesewieck, Moritz, 215 Right to Buy, 336–337, 344–346, 373–376, 457n51 Rightmove, 9, 184–186, 188, 198, 199, 222 Rio Tinto, 7, 106–109, 432–433n15, 433n24 River Medway
Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth
by Selina Todd · 11 Feb 2021 · 598pp · 150,801 words
Liberal and Conservative coalition, headed by the Liberal prime minister David Lloyd George. But Labour gained fifteen MPs. With an eye to Labour’s growing strength, the government passed not only the 1918 Education Act, but also the 1919 Housing Act, which set out an ambitious plan for 500,000 council houses.
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or consolation is the class on whose behalf I write.’64 Clerks and their families were among the members of new ratepayers’ associations like the Anti-Waste League and the Middle Classes’ Union, which campaigned for lower taxes and against expenditure on council housing and medical provision for the poor. The Anti-Waste League scored some
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workers to deal with paperwork. In more prosperous towns and cities, chain stores and department stores proliferated to sell the furniture and fashions that the manufacturers were producing. Meanwhile, many local council bureaucracies grew in size, first to deal with the increase in council housing and secondary-school places legislated for in the immediate post-
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the League encouraged the new Conservative government to cut public spending, including axing the post-war coalition’s commitment to increasing council housing and reducing secondary-school scholarships. Anxiety about organised labour, and the Conservatives’ success in presenting socialism as a ‘foreign’ import from communist Russia, helps to explain why they held power
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– committed to ‘free enterprise’ and ‘the small man in business’74 – and Clement Attlee’s Labour Party, which promised ‘Jobs for All’, fair shares (‘no more dole queues in order to let the Czars of Big Business remain kings in their own castles’), social security, council housing for all who needed it, a
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down … At one time there were twelve of us living there’. White landlords would not rent them accommodation, and estate agents refused to sell houses ‘to “coloured people”’. Avtar quickly realised that ‘council housing wasn’t an option.’ Smethwick was one of many local councils that ruled that only those who had lived
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fee-paying junior department of a girls’ direct grant school ‘as a springboard’ for the school’s own entrance test. Anthea subsequently passed this and qualified for a local-authority scholarship for her secondary education there. By the time she was sixteen Anthea was keen to go to university
…
not only more pay but greater say over their working conditions, feminist rallies for equal rights, rent strikes by council tenants, and student rebellions in Britain’s universities.1 Among the agitators both on and off campus, journalists identified a new group: upwardly mobile young people apparently biting the hand that fed them.
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only had that, but felt entitled to stamp his personality onto it. His artistic career began to take shape on the walls of his parents’ council house. Paul Salveson was the son of ‘respectable’ working-class parents in Lancashire, where he attended a deeply conventional Catholic grammar school. As a teenager
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career.20 A study in the mid-1980s found that former manual workers who had got off the dole included many beneficiaries of local-authority schemes, including youth workers and community sports leaders.21 Sociologically speaking, some of these workers were taking a step ‘up’ from manual to white-collar work; others,
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and shares could not alone bring about upward mobility. Those who did buy shares in the newly privatised utilities could not afford to buy enough to make any significant difference to their living standards.29 Far more people became home owners than shareholders. The 1982 Housing Act ushered in ‘Right to Buy’, obliging local authorities
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and mobility and that prospect of handing something on to their children and grandchildren’, the prime minister said of her scheme.30 The popularity of Right to Buy suggested many
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agreed. In 1981, 58 per cent of housing in England and Wales was owner-occupied and 29 per cent was council housing. By 1996, 67
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-occupied, and just 18 per cent was council housing.31 But a major study
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in the first half of the 1980s did so because they were worried about rising rents – the result of government cuts to local-authority budgets. Uncertainty about the future of council housing also made people decide it would be better to go it alone.32 Among them were the Brown family of Birmingham. Concerned
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the tenants of the council houses that remained were changing – ‘“problem families”’ were being moved in as unemployment rose and the council (faced with a housing shortage as more affluent tenants bought their homes) could only accommodate those with very serious needs.33 The Browns appeared to be one of Right to Buy’s success stories
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the family to contribute. Mrs Brown found part-time work in a launderette, and they also relied on the earnings of two adult children living at home.34 Right to Buy returned many families to the strategies for getting by and getting on that had been so common in the 1930s, when the very
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social ladder. Like thousands of other council tenants, they took advantage of Thatcher’s hugely popular right-to-buy initiative. Lucy Young’s parents were among those who contributed to this change. She grew up knowing how proud they were of becoming ‘homeowners due to being able to buy their council house’. The Youngs’ home was in
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own. Some of the upwardly mobile benefited from the expansion of technological work and the construction boom in south-east England. Many welcomed self-employment and the Right to Buy as an escape from the control of employers, trade unions or the local council housing department. But private enterprise was far less important than the public sector
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was the daughter of an upwardly mobile couple – her father was the print-worker-turned-computer technician who was able to buy the family’s council house in the 1980s. Her parents decided against the local comprehensive school, instead sending Lucy to a highly selective grammar school a long bus ride from
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her homework in the library. Enthusiastic teachers, and the librarians, encouraged her interest in the humanities, and helped her to achieve excellent GCSE and A level results. Poorly maintained schools, the low expectations of some teachers, and cramped council housing were obstacles that only the most self-motivated and hard-working student could overcome. But for
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. In fact, reforms touted as assisting upward mobility primarily helped the wealthiest. The government encouraged more private providers to take over state schools, replacing local-authority comprehensives with privately run academies and free schools. In 2011 the Conservative education minister Michael Gove justified this by arguing that it would raise ambitions
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back on’.53 For the magpies, home ownership had offered stability and security as their prospects at work became more uncertain. Those born from 1972 grew up aspiring to own their own home. New Labour championed home ownership and reduced council housing, as did all successive governments. The housing market was almost entirely
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couldn’t afford to live down south’.67 * After the financial crash, politicians’ emphasis on home ownership as a means of acquiring security and even wealth diminished. There was no attempt to build more council housing or deal with rising house prices. Instead, politicians increasingly urged voters to achieve social mobility via education
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’ six times. In 2017 ‘social mobility’ did not appear in Labour’s manifesto and ‘aspiration’ only once, to describe a collective desire for secure homes which was used to justify plans to increase council housing. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party didn’t promise great riches, but instead collective uplift – ‘a fairer’ Britain
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, Alan, 56 Registrar General, 4, 32 Reith, John, 86–7 Representation of the People Act (1918), 35, 62, 63, 91 Rigg, Arthur, 76, 77 Right to Buy, 257–9, 263 Rise of the Meritocracy, The (Young), 147 Robbins’ Report (1963), 207–8, 313 Robinson, Joan, 212–13 Rochdale, Lancashire, 17 Room at
An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy
by Marc Levinson · 31 Jul 2016 · 409pp · 118,448 words
government introduced a bill granting tenants in housing owned by local authorities, known as “council housing,” the right to buy their units at prices far below market value. This was privatization for the masses: three in ten British households lived in publicly owned housing. Those who had been council tenants for over twenty years could buy their house or
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apartment at a 50 percent discount; if they were uncertain, they could pay a hundred-pound deposit and preserve their right to buy at a fixed price for two years. The local authority that was selling the property was obliged
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to offer a mortgage.18 Right to Buy, as it was known, targeted a core Labour constituency. Most of the council estates
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had been built under Labour governments, and their residents were reliable Labour voters. By the spring of 1983, two-and-a-half years after Parliament enacted Right to Buy
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into law, 274,650 council tenants in England alone had acquired their homes. A poll showed that 59 percent of
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Labour again. Right to Buy was privatization conducted at a level that
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grounds had to pay a few pounds to the private contractor who trimmed the grass, and applicants for housing assistance found themselves presenting their claims to a company hired by their local authority. Private-sector workers picked up Great Britain’s waste and imprisoned its undocumented immigrants. Market forces found their way into schools
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, MTFA, document 110247. 18. Paul Pierson, Dismantling the Welfare State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 76. 19. U.K. Department of Communities and Local Government, Table 671, “Annual Right to Buy Sales for England,” November 20, 2014; Patrick Cosgrave, Thatcher: The First Term (London: Bodley Head, 1985), 158. 20. On the origins of
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The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
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Be Your Own Financial Adviser: The Comprehensive Guide to Wealth and Financial Planning
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Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
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Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice
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Home: Why Public Housing Is the Answer
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The Fields Beneath: The History of One London Village
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When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain
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Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
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Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First
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Respectable: The Experience of Class
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The City on the Thames
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The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain
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Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else
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No Such Thing as Society
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Tory Nation: The Dark Legacy of the World's Most Successful Political Party
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Hedge Fund Market Wizards
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The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery
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Reaching for Utopia: Making Sense of an Age of Upheaval
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Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016
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Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World
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The Liberal Moment
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Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump
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Commuter City: How the Railways Shaped London
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The Tyranny of Nostalgia: Half a Century of British Economic Decline
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Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats
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There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century
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The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain?
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A History of Modern Britain
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Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care About Inequality
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Urban Transport Without the Hot Air, Volume 1
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Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-Racist Comedian
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The Global Money Markets
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The New Snobbery
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The English
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The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common
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No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age
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The Money Machine: How the City Works
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Silk Road
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A World Beneath the Sands: The Golden Age of Egyptology
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Palace Coup: The Billionaire Brawl Over the Bankrupt Caesars Gaming Empire
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Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation
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Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World
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Cocaine Nation: How the White Trade Took Over the World
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Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
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Security Analysis
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The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
by Francis Fukuyama · 11 Apr 2011 · 740pp · 217,139 words
Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference
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How Asia Works
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The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America
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Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health
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The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future
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Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities
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The Satsuma Complex
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A Pipeline Runs Through It: The Story of Oil From Ancient Times to the First World War
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The Handbook of Personal Wealth Management
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Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World
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J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax
by J K Lasser Institute · 30 Oct 2012 · 2,045pp · 566,714 words
J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2022: For Preparing Your 2021 Tax Return
by J. K. Lasser Institute · 21 Dec 2021
All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work
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The Power Makers
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J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2016: For Preparing Your 2015 Tax Return
by J. K. Lasser Institute · 19 Oct 2015
Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership
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Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy
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J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2014
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Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain
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When Money Dies
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Debt: The First 5,000 Years
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Egypt
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