ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on quantitative and qualitative deficiencies in the housing stock. It explains how resource expenditure is dependent upon borrowing, and examines the connection between investment cuts and the repair, improvement and replacement of the housing stock. In contrast, investment in the owner-occupied sector was affected by cyclical changes in market conditions, with booms in 1988 and 1997 and slumps in 1980 and 1992. Investment in new and rehabilitated housing was severely reduced, but housing subsidies actually increased - families in need of housing, in effect, being penalised to the benefit of those reasonably accommodated. Housing is to a great extent a commodity like any other good or service and, like any other commodity, investment is necessary for its production. By European standards, the proportion of total investment and gross domestic product spent on housing investment in the United Kingdom in the 1980s and 1990s was deplorably low.
