ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the scale of the renewal problem, discusses the history of housing rehabilitation policy to 1969, and considers the Housing Act of 1969. It reviews rehabilitation policy under Labour 1974–1979 and under the Conservatives in the 1980s, and highlights some of the inadequacies of private sector rehabilitation in the 1990s. In the immediate post-war period, housing rehabilitation, or ‘patching up’, as it was disparagingly called, was discouraged. The decline in house-building and the recognition of the extent of the problem of poor housing inevitably resulted in a shift of emphasis to rehabilitation. Stemming from the 1968 White Paper, the Housing Act of 1969 was intended substantially to hasten the pace of rehabilitation. Local authorities faced with the need to undertake renewal have traditionally had a choice of either clearance and redevelopment, or rehabilitation. Despite worries about the scale of rehabilitation, the Treasury became sceptical in the 1980s about the cost-effectiveness of improvement grant expenditure.
