ABSTRACT
Despite the undeniable long term improvements in housing conditions in Britain there have been increasingly frequent references to a new housing crisis in the mid 1980s. Among the first to predict a growing shortage was the then recently established House of Commons Select Committee on the Environment which, in its first report in 1980, predicted a deficit approaching half a million dwellings by the middle of the decade. (1) Later two academic economists, Fleming and Nellis, published a paper which looked at the projections of house-building in the Labour Government’s Green Paper on Housing Policy (1977) compared with actual building rates achieved up to 1981, and they too foresaw a gathering problem of shortage by the mid 80s. (2) Meanwhile the Association of Metropolitan Authorities (AMA) has produced a series of reports warning not only of housing shortage but also of growing problems of disrepair and unfitness in the older housing stock. (3) Gibson and Langstaff also drew attention to the emerging crisis in urban renewal. (4) Other writers to identify the impending housing crisis have been Ball (5) and Lansley, (6) plus a whole series of individuals and organisations submitting evidence to the Duke of Edinburgh’s enquiry into British housing. (7)
The worsening housing situation can be measured in various ways. On close examination the apparent surplus of dwellings over households soon melts away, once allowance is made for factors such as empty houses that are derelict or undergoing improvement, the large number of empty houses in the process of exchange and the growing popularity of second homes. In 1981 Shelter estimated that there was a true national shortage of 830,000 dwellings. (8) In
consequence local authority waiting lists are lengthening, and recorded homelessness is increasing. (9) At the same time the production of new houses to let by local authorities has fallen from 75,500 in 1979 to just 32,806 in the whole of Great Britain in 1983. (10) This level of new building is the lowest for sixty years (apart from the war years). To make matters worse for people in need of rented housing, the sale of over 500,000 council houses since 1979 must have reduced the flow of dwellings available for letting. In the past slum clearance provided a useful route into council housing for many low income households, but in 1982-83 only 21,000 dwellings were demolished in Great Britain, compared with 88,700 in 1972-73. (11) This is despite the existence of over one million occupied dwellings which are acknowledged to be unfit for human habitation. However it might be argued that rehabilitation, funded by improvement and repair grants, represents a preferable alternative to clearance. Unfortunately there has been no guarantee that grant expenditure is channelled towards helping households in the worst conditions, and the continued cuts in public expenditure on housing seem certain to make grants even harder to obtain. Meanwhile the numbers of dwellings in need of substantial repair continue to grow. (12)
Public expenditure on housing has been cut by more than 50% since 1978-79. (13) The cuts might not be seen as a serious matter if it could be shown that private builders were increasing their output and providing suitable accommodation for households who would previously have looked to the local authorities for help. However, what has occurred during the first half of the 1980s is a major slump in the building industry as a whole. Private sector output has failed to increase in line with the fall in public sector production: local authority completions in Great Britain fell by 57.5% between 1979 and 1983, but private sector production also fell, although by less than 1%.
