ABSTRACT
In contrast to all the effort that went into its design, little thought was given to what the management of council housing would involve. Like the construction of the dwellings, this was left to local authorities, and the fact that it was almost a completely new role for them was something that many, including the journal Housing, were nervous about. Central government guidance and control, however, were surprisingly small. Some discussion of problems, with recommendations, was offered by a special subcommittee of the Central Housing Advisory Committee (CHAC), which published two reports on the management of estates in 1938 and 1945, and a number more dealing with special aspects of management through the 1950s. But the management responsibilities of authorities were not regulated by central government, and in many cases it was years before they set up special departments of housing. Of fifty-seven consulted by CHAC in 1959, only twenty-seven had a separate housing department; eight had a housing manager without a department or section, and eleven still had no housing managers at all.1 Even in the 1980s some small authorities still had no special department for housing.
