ABSTRACT
There are housing needs and housing wishes. It is essential that people should be adequately accommodated in good-quality housing; it is desirable that they should be given meaningful and equal choice between buying and renting. These are two ‘housing goals’ which are to the fore of the British housing question and must be confronted by the Labour Party. They are not mutually exclusive, and I shall argue that positive policies designed to regenerate the public sector of housing, and thereby to rescue it from the danger of becoming a residual sector, will serve to tackle both housing need and the desire for choice between forms of tenures. Along with this, a revitalised public sector that provides and builds goodquality units of housing will succeed in alleviating other pressing housing problems, such as unemployment in the construction industry and the pitifully low levels of new starts in house-building.
