ABSTRACT
The background to the development of council housing and housing policy in Britain has been the need to subsidise housing costs. This has been necessary to achieve objectives relating to the supply of dwellings and their standards and to enable producers to obtain an acceptable rate of return on capital. Housing is a durable, fixed location commodity. Both shortages and improved standards of housing have maintained costs at a high level relative to incomes. In this situation various forms of subsidising and spreading costs have developed. Tax reliefs, loans and grants for housing purposes and subsidies for local authority house building have all represented mechanisms to relieve the problems of a quantitative shortage of housing, problems of sub-standard houses in the stock and problems arising from the gap between what many householders could pay and the cost of providing adequate housing. Public sector housing in Britain has been the product of subsidising dwellings rather than people — object rather than subject subsidies. It has provided high quality housing for the working classes. It has also contributed to the number of dwellings built, the standards they were built to, the speed of replacement of obsolete stock and the raising of general housing standards.
