ABSTRACT
Urban renewal policy is concerned with two major housing objectives, first to improve the housing stock of the nation by concentrating on some of the worse conditions to be found in it and second, to improve the housing situation of those who are obliged to live in the same. It has also been the case that the worst housing conditions have been concentrated in older privately rented and owner-occupied property. Urban renewal policy has often supplied a platform for municipal and parliamentary debates which have demonstrated a greater concern for the simplistic orthodoxies of state socialism and laissez-faire Toryism than for the economic and social realities of inner-city housing. The Conservative government made some small changes in its approach to the improvement of rented property in the 1964 Housing Act. The new Labour government was in the process of considering its housing policies in the mid 1960s.
