ABSTRACT
In Britain, housing policy (like town and country planning policy) developed out of sanitary policies, and it was therefore natural that it should be the responsibility of the department concerned with ‘the health of towns’ problem – Department of Health for Scotland, and the Ministry of Health in England and Wales. At the same time, a major review of housing finance within Department of the Environment developed into an even bigger review of housing policy. This rapidly found itself involved with bigger questions concerned with assistance to low-income families. In the words of the housing policy review, ‘the key to the success of national housing policy now lies in development of effective local housing strategies, planned and carried out by local authorities with the minimum of detailed intervention from the centre’. Building societies are the main source of finance for house purchase yet they were curiously isolated from the mainstream of housing policy until house price explosion of early seventies.
