ABSTRACT

The dominant feature of British housing policy in the 1980s was the promotion of home ownership. In 1979, when Mrs Thatcher formed her first government, 54.7 per cent of households were home owners (Department of the Environment, 1991). Ten years later the proportion had risen to 66.6 per cent, placing Britain close to the top of the Western industrialised nations’ league table of home ownership. Since, over the same period, the local authority sector decreased from 31.4 per cent to 23.3 per cent, the 1980s was a decade in which there was a significant shift from state to market provision. These developments cannot be adequately explained as the result either of unguided, market forces or of the unintended consequences of other policies. Rather, they occurred mainly because they were deliberately fostered and explicitly supported.