LOCKED OUT

摘要

How should we finance social and affordable housing in the UK? This question has been at the heart of housing policy for the past 50 years or more. In the immediate post-war era when there was an obvious need for a large-scale housebuilding programme, the government provided a "bricks and mortar" subsidy to cover a large part of the capital cost, so that council housing could be let at affordable rents. This underpinned a rapid expansion of council housing, which by the late seventies had come to account for around one third of all housing in Britain. In the early seventies the Conservatives under Edward Heath proposed a shift in favour of personal subsidies, accompanied by an increase in rent levels. Although this did not survive the fall of the Heath government in 1974, the policy returned in the eighties under Thatcher.