ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the political aspects of privatisation in the 1980s and 1990s; explores the relationship between privatisation and rehabilitation, and examines policy relating to estate transfer in the 1990s. It considers the origins of council house sales, reviews Labour’s plans to hasten the demise of council housing. In the early 1980s sales began to exceed local authority housing completions, and for the first time the local authority sector began to contract in absolute terms. Council house sales and estate transfer - mainly involving the best housing and the more affluent tenants - are increasingly residualising the public rented sector. Estate privatisation was motivated by the perceived fiscal need to transfer the responsibility of repairs from government to housing associations and the private sector, and by awareness that there was a limit to the number of council dwellings that could be sold off under right to buy and rent to mortgage policy.
