ABSTRACT
Commentaries on British housing policy since the mid-1970s, and especially since the election of the Conservative government in 1979, have tended to emphasise two prominent features: reductions in public expenditure and more pervasive support for the growth of home ownership. Both academic and policy debates have been preoccupied with fiscal crisis and fiscal austerity. Ministers have frequently referred to ‘what the country can afford’ as the background to public policy and public expenditure decisions (Murie, 1985). While there have been significant changes in the pattern of public expenditure, it would be misleading to attribute changes in housing policy as logical and inevitable outcomes of fiscal constraint. An overemphasis on expenditure cuts directs attention from some of the other shifts which have occurred in housing policy. Rather than representing what has happened in terms of reductions in public expenditure it is more appropriate to set the reshaping of housing policy against a broader fiscal background which highlights a reorientation rather than an overall reduction in expenditure in the housing sphere.
