Abstract
In contrast to education, housing policy enjoyed little wartime consensus and remained throughout the postwar years at the heart of party conflict. During the war, admittedly, a white paper had been published on the related issue of land use; and after the mid-1950s the Labour Party endorsed the Conservatives’ earlier call for a ‘property-owning democracy’. However, the wartime coalition was unable eventually to agree upon the white paper’s proposals and the ownership of land, as Michael Foot has remarked, became ‘the rock’ upon which it was broken.1 Thereafter it was to remain a key election issue. So too were the management and finance, if not the principles, of the housing programme. In the 1951 and 1964 elections, for example, the Conservative and Labour Parties respectively used the promise to build 300 000 houses a year and the Rachman scandal over the terrorising of private tenants to discredit the ‘socialist’ and ‘free-market’ approaches to housing and thereby their opponents’ overall attitude towards the welfare state.
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Further Reading
Two good general introductory books are J. R. Short, Housing in Britain: the postwar experience (1982)
and D. Donnison and C. Ungerson, Housing Policy (Harmondsworth, 1982).
The latter is strong on international comparisons, as is M. Daunton, A Property-Owning Democracy? (1987) which also places postwar developments in historical perspective.
Another excellent introduction, within an explicit Marxist framework, is S. Merrett, State Housing in Britain (1979).
Although concerned mainly with the period after 1979, P. Malpass and A. Murie, Housing Policy and Practice (2nd ed., 1987) has a useful historical introduction and an even more useful bibliography.
The definitive political history of planning is A. Cox, Adversary Politics and Land: the conflict over land and property in postwar Britain (Cambridge, 1984).
This may be supplemented by G. Cherry, The Politics of Town Planning (1982)
and M. Aldridge, The British New Towns: a programme without a policy (1979).
Three other classic works are: P. Dunleavy, The Politics of Mass Housing in Britain, 1945–75 (Oxford, 1981);
M. Boddy, The Building Societies (1980); and on Rachman and rents in the 1960s,
K. G. Banting, Poverty, Politics and Policy (1979).
The complexities of policy can be enlivened by the exploits of three particularly charismatic housing ministers recorded, respectively, in M. Foot, Aneurin Bevan (vol. 2, 1975),
H. Macmillan, Tides of Fortune, 1945–1955 (1966)
and R. H. S. Crossman, Diaries of a Cabinet Minister (vol. 1, 1975).
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© 1993 Rodney Lowe
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Lowe, R. (1993). Housing. In: The Welfare State in Britain since 1945. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22549-1_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22549-1_9
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