The 50s

There was a house-building boom throughout the 1950s, largely to replace the 250,000 that had been destroyed during the Blitz.

The 1956 Housing Subsidies Act encouraged councils to raise their rents to a realistic level, while providing rent rebates for some of the poorer households. This meant less subsidies for richer households, and therefore encouraged them to move out of social housing and purchase a home if they were capable of doing so. Eventually this became compulsory in the 1970s, generating a huge migration of people moving from social housing to private tenancy or home ownership.

In addition to ‘help’ with the housing shortage the Government introduced 1957 Rent Act which swept away protected tenancies and controlled rents, in order to free up more housing and encourage more landlords into the market. This not surprisingly had dire consequences as long-term tenants were forced from their homes.

What did it cost to buy a house in 1950s?

In the late 50s about 150,000 – 200,000 houses were being built in the private sector. If you had bought a house in 1952, the average price you would have paid was £1500 for an older property. These were most probably part of the 30s sprawl outside of London or a Victorian 2-up-2 down-loo-in-the-garden-and-no-bathroom number in London. It would have cost around £2000 for a modern property at the time.

Today you are looking at an average cost of £216,000 for an older property and £269,000 for a modern build (figures from Nationwide).

Compare this with what we were earning:

In the 50s, the average weekly wage was £7.08 against £473 now. This means it is much harder to buy a home now than it was in the 1950s. However, buying a house in the 50s was not the top of everyone’s wish list!

The 60s and 70s

Housing statistics started in 1969 and showed that in the 1960s, we were still largely a nation of renters.

House building increased to 400.000 homes in the 60s when publicly funded council homes got into gear. From a design point of view the wonderfully leaking flat-roof came into its own!

It was also the time of the Rachman Scandal (a 1963 slum landlord supremo) which really identified that the Rent Act (1957) was a dreadful piece of legislation. The 1970s saw local authorities building far less housing, instead placing their resources into the repair and maintenance of an ageing housing stock. Matched with this, the Government took away the funding. Some might say was a good thing considering what was being built.

From 1955 to 1975 around 440,000 flats were built by local authorities. The words ‘slum clearance’ comes into being at this time. Councils were given the right to pull down the Georgian and Victorian slums, which had past their sell-by…with what some consider to be the next batch of slums!

Futuristic architecture gave us the ‘streets in the sky’. Sadly, they were poorly constructed and turned out to be rather expensive to repair. We were left with high-density housing which caused huge problems for the families living in them. Particular faults were chemicals that errored the steel which held them up, poor quality concrete and materials which were not suited to the British climate. That was just a few of the issues that had been overlooked during the push to solve the housing issue. For this reason, it is no wonder that we became disillusioned by the mass housing that has been constructed, and the Government weren’t particularly pleased with the outcome either.

The 70s also saw the introduction of Housing Associations. These are private, non-profit organisations that provide low-cost housing for households in need of a home. Although formally independent of the government, they are regulated by the state and receive public funding.

The 80s

During the late 70s, completions of mass housing fell rapidly, matched with rising inflation and interest rates. This put pressure on the Government to increase spend on housing…so they decided to sell them!

In 1970,  7000 social homes were sold, and this increased to 46,000 in 1972. By the 80s this had gone through the roof with some 1.6m council homes sold off under the Right to Buy scheme. A cynical person might think that the idea of letting someone else repair the poor-quality homes that had been built saved the Government quite a few bob.

While this policy helped owner-occupation rise from 55 per cent in 1979 to 72 per cent in 2004 (since then it has generally dipped- see later), the policy has also led to a sharp decline in social housing availability. Hence, the introduction of 1988 Housing Act which had the effect of stimulating the supply of private rental housing. This legislation introduced the Assured Shorthold Tenancy as the default legal residential tenancy in England and Wales. Thus, making it easier to evict undesirable tenants, thereby reducing the risk of investing and supplying rental units.

Since the population was growing, Housing Associations started to take up some of the slack left by the councils for the first time providing a majority of social homes.

The 90s

As Right to Buy increased, those living in the PRS (private rental sector) reduced until the mid-1990s to around about 7% of the population. However, the 1996 introduction of “Buy to Let” mortgages, which offer loan terms similar to traditional residential mortgage loans, made it easier for higher-income earners to invest in rental properties. As a result the the stock started to increase for the PRS.

The 00s

The next blip on the housing market happened due to the financial crisis, bought about by the bankers betting on the fact that the price of housing would always increase regardless of what people could afford to pay for them.

By 2008, housing associations outstripped local councils for the first time in providing the majority of social homes in the UK. However, the share of rentals that housing associations provide has remained relatively stable at around 10% over the last decade, whereas the share of council houses has decreased over the same period from nearly 9% to under 7%.