ABSTRACT
As a direct consequence of the enabling provisions of the 1974 Housing Act, this ‘weakness’ is of debatable salience in this field. We know (Section 7.2) that a number of ‘expansionist’ associations managed to build up quite significant levels of reserves during the ‘golden age’ of ‘risk-free’ capital allocations between 1974 and 1988, and by taking advantage of some of the other factors in their favour noted earlier. This situation was seen positively by our experts. For them, it had legitimately provided the organizations which had grasped such opportunities with deserved scope for growth. The statistics of significant expansion in the early 1990s also testify to the voluntary sector’s capacity in this case to avoid the adverse effects of the economic cycle in this case. We noted in Chapter 2 that during this recessionary period, housing growth accounted for a significant part of the voluntary sector’s overall expansion, and this is underlined from a comparative sector perspective within the field by the data in Table 7.1.
