ABSTRACT
The supply of new and renovated housing is inextricably linked to the level of housing investment. While in recent years there has been an increase in investment in the private housing sector (interrupted only by the house-price slump in the owner-occupied market in the early 1990s), investment in the social rented sectors tended to fall throughout most of the 1980s and 1990s, a result of cuts in public expenditure and the promulgation of the free market within an increasingly neo-liberal welfare state. In analysing that scenario, this chapter:
• focuses on quantitative and qualitative deficiencies in the housing stock; • Rindicates the broad relationship between investment and housebuilding; • explains how resource expenditure is dependent upon borrowing; • examines the connection between investment cuts and the repair, improvement and
replacement of the housing stock; • discusses the impact that monetarism had on housing investment, and suggests how the
presentation of Treasury figures probably misinformed constructive debate on the level of housing investment; and
• concludes by reviewing policy developments in the 1980s and 1990s, and under Labour, post-1997.
