Kind Charles III will be crowned at Westminster on Saturday 6th May

The last 70 years have seen some incredible changes; we reached the moon; we sequenced a full DNA profile (DNA was discovered in 1952), Concorde came and went and we now have the internet for good or bad!

So how has the housing market faired? Some might say that it is far worse than 1948 as then we were about 250,000 short of our needs mainly due to the Blitz. 70 years on there are several pundits that suggest we are about 3 – 5 million houses short of our needs today. Which is not all down to growth in the population.

Surprisingly there have been two periods in 20th century, when housing needs met the populations need.

The first time was between 1918 and the mid-30s when the Government offered grants to builders, to build affordable homes. This meant that middle income families could afford to buy. It was a time when building spread out horizontally and homes were built on what we would now consider green field spaces.  You can see lots of examples of this type of build on the edge of local villages in Cambridgeshire.

Social housing was born after the First World War as the then local authorities (councils) were required by law to provide council housing. The original aim of council housing was to provide decent housing for army recruits.

However, the age of social housing only truly arrived after World War II, when the Labour government built more than 1 million homes – the second time needs were met and  80% these houses were council homes. This was also the time of the prefab which filled the need for cheap housing that could be built quickly. Plonked on top of pre-plumbed ­concrete slabs, these homes could be built in a day by teams of German and Italian prisoners-of-war who were in no hurry to return home. They were built to last 10 years but there is still a community in Southeast London who will not move from their prefabs!

The 50s

After the Second World War there was a house-building boom.

During the 1950s, more than two million homes were built and two-thirds of these were local authority housing including large-scale new estates.If you could afford to buy a home after the war, it was likely to be a brand new one. The average price you would have paid was £1,500 for an older property (most probably part of the 30s sprawl outside of London or a Victorian two-up-two-down, loo in the garden and no bathroom in London and £2000 for a modern one. Bear in mind the average salary was £10 a week, so buying a property was no mean feat.

Laws that changed the landscape 

There were two main laws which tried to readjust the housing market.

1956 Housing Subsides Act and 1957 Rent Act

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.

Due to reduced subsidies for richer households, there was a push for them to move out of social housing and purchase a home.

The Rent Act came in 1957 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 and into social housing.

The average kitchen in the 1950’s would have a free-standing oven and not many of the appliances that we count as imperative today.

The 60s and 70s

Housing statics started in 1969 which 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 Ranchman Scandal (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 aging housing stock. Matched with this the Government took away the funding. Which some might say was a good thing considering what was being built.

During that late 70s completions of mass housing fell rapidly, matched with rising inflation and interest rates putting pressure on 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.

From 1955 to 1975 around 440,000 flats were built by local authorities. The words ‘slum clearance ‘comes into to 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 were 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. 

In the 60s, you would have had a fridge with a frost-free freezer compartment. In higher end homes the oven would have been built it with hobs built into the counter. As the place in the cabinetry was not yet there a dishwasher was mainly portable – being moved in and out of the room when finished! 

If you were looking to buy a home at the start of the 1970s the average house price was £4,057

When the average weekly wage in 1970 was £18.37. By the end of the 70s wages had risen to £68.92 and house prices had risen to £20,268.

The 70s also saw the introduction of Housing Associations. Which are private, non-profit organizations 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 

By the 80s the sale of social housing had gone through the roof with some 1.6m council homes  sold off under 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 when it has generally dipped- see later) the policy has also led to a sharp decline in social housing availability. 

The 1988 Housing Act was bought in to readdress the imbalance and it did have 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 1980s brought us fun gadgets like the SodaStream, but what really revolutionized the kitchen were the large appliances that we take for granted today. The washing machine, the microwave and the dishwasher all became accepted norms.

The 90s 

In early 90s the average house price was  £58,153. We also saw the lowest percentage of renters at around 7% of the population. 

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.  Which started to increase the stock to the PRS. 

Housing construction declined to fewer than 200,000 homes from 1990 onward. The lowest was in 2012, when fewer than 136,000 new homes were constructed. From 2013, figures started to grow again, partly because of the economy recovery, reaching about 190,000 new homes in 2017. 

The 2000’s

The next blip on the housing market happened due to the financial crisis in 2008, 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 remained relatively stable at around 10%, whereas the share of council houses had decreased over the same period from nearly 9% to under 7%.

In 2004 the Housing health and safety rating system (HHSRS) operating guidance came into being which listed out categories of defects in a property. This was aimed at both social and private landlords and gave the local authority the ability to deal with them.

More recently

Homeownership in the U.K. peaked around 2004 when it stood at about 72% of the population dropping to 64% in 2018. The decline has coincided with a revival of the private rental market, with the latter roughly doubling its share from below 10% in the mid-1990s to nearly 20% in 2018.

Renting is widespread among younger households; only about 41% of household heads aged 25 to 34 own their homes. More than half of renters live in terraced single-family houses. Roughly one-third live in apartments, with the rest living in detached houses.

The key challenge facing home ownership is the construction drought matched with the inability to obtain a deposit unless helped by the bank of mum and dad.

Housing associations and local authorities built 17% and 1.8% of these new properties, respectively. The continued decline of social housing is largely due to a lack of adequate public funding.

Today we have seen a reduction of 35% of available rental homes in the Cambridgeshire area matched with a 17% increase in the number of people seeking a home so no wonder that rents are increasing at the highest level since the 1990s.