Written by Classical Liberal
(You can read Part 1 here)
The Second World War virtually halted house building for a second time. As the war ended, the UK faced its worst housing shortage of the twentieth century. Thousands of houses had been destroyed by heavy bombing, and many more were seriously damaged. The 1945 General Election brought a Labour Government into office. Housing policy was central to the welfare reforms at the centre of Labour’s election-winning manifesto.
Part of Labour’s initial response was the rapid construction of factory-built single-storey temporary bungalows, known as ‘prefabs’. Despite the construction of 156,622 prefabs, the country still faced an acute housing shortage, and waiting lists soared in urban areas.
A new means of construction was developed, Pre-cast Reinforced Concrete (‘PRC’), to meet this shortage and reduce the cost of house building. PRC’s were quick to assemble and needed less skilled labour than traditional building methods, constructed from concrete panels reinforced with steel and then bolted together or with a steel frame. Unlike the prefabs, they were permanent and were expected to last for at least 60 years. At the time, these quick new build houses appeared to offer an innovative solution to the housing crisis. However, as we will see, they were later to cause severe problems for many tenants and councils.
By 1955, 1.5 million homes had been completed since the end of the war. Some of the demand for housing had been alleviated. And, the percentage of people renting from local councils rose from 10% in 1938 to 26% in 1961.
The country was still faced with large areas of slum housing. Many had been due for demolition under slum clearance plans devised before the war and neglected since. Inner-city populations were snowballing. And the shortage of good quality housing combined with vacant inner-city sites caused by bomb damage created an opportunity for modernisers to promote a new urban vision. Architects and planners favoured a modernist approach, and the ‘streets in the sky’ were devised. This occurred against a backdrop of political change. A new Conservative government was elected in 1951. After initially pledging to increase council house production in line with manifesto targets, sizes and standards were reduced. A greater emphasis on house building was given back to the private sector.
However, the concept of high-rise flats was criticised in later years for creating poor quality housing and high-density estates. Indeed, many new estates had become hard to let and hard to live in by the 1970s.
The increased development of high-rise blocks of flats during the 1950s and 60s can be directly attributed to a response to the Government’s subsidy system. From 1956, the subsidy was confined to new houses built to replace those lost to slum clearance, and there was more money available for blocks of more than six storeys high.
In the 1970s, councils built increasingly fewer homes, concentrating instead on repairs to their now aging housing stock.
The introduction of the Right to Buy (RTB) under the Housing Act 1980 was a watershed event for councils all over the country. From the start, local authorities have been able to sell off their houses, but until the introduction of the RTB, they were not forced to do so. Nationally one million homes were sold within ten years. Discounts available to tenants under RTB of up to 60 per cent off the market price meant that good houses could be purchased for less than £10,000 in the early 1980s. So for many people, RTB has been a great benefit.
But for some purchasers and the Council, however, RTB caused severe problems. In 1981 it began to be revealed that there were significant structural problems with some types of PRCs. Various kinds of the PRCs had issues caused by corrosion of the metal reinforcing bars in their concrete structure. This made them unmortgageable, and therefore people who had bought these sorts of houses found that they were effectively impossible to resell. There are approximately 140,000 cases nationally. The Housing Defects Act, 1984, gave buyers of certain types of PRC houses the right to insist that the Council carry out the work necessary to repair or rebuild their houses.
Until 1980 the production of new homes tended to exceed the numbers sold. Spending restrictions were also introduced simultaneously as RTB, which meant that it was no longer possible to build new houses in large numbers. After fifty years of virtually uninterrupted growth, the number of council houses began to fall and have continued to do so ever since.
Local councils are now faced with a stock of older houses, and they will continue to need an extensive programme of investment to keep them up to date. With changing tastes and preferences, accommodation that is no longer suitable or acceptable to tenants will need to be replaced. Many councils were saddled with housing debt, and this, combined with restrictions on investment, has effectively brought a halt to the new building by councils themselves. Council housing has increasingly become a residual housing tenure, providing a home for only the very poor, homeless and those with no alternative form of accommodation. This process of residualisation can be traced back through government policy to the 1930s and confirmed by Conservative governments since 1979.
Improvement and regeneration became priorities. Housing providers had an obligation to bring all their homes up to the set ‘decency’ standard by 2010 and to ensure that no one is disadvantaged by where they live. New funds have been available from the central Government for a succession of regeneration programmes. However, they were often conditional on transferring the management of their housing stock to housing associations or Registered Social Landlords (RSLs). This option has been widely taken since the 1990s as the nation’s stock aged and maintenance costs rose. The process is known as stock transfer and was introduced in the Housing and Planning Act 1986. Already a quarter of local housing authorities in the country are no longer landlords. They do not have specific responsibilities such as rent collection or repairs and maintenance. However, they remain in law the local housing authority responsible for providing strategic and community leadership within their locality.
Today the social rented sector (houses managed by Councils and RSLs) makes up 20% of the housing stock. The importance of social rented housing in meeting housing shortage has diminished, and Government has placed more importance on its use as a safety net for vulnerable households.
Photo by alainalele 
In 1945 Britain had a real labor party those days are long gone now it’s full of people who hate Britain and led by a red conservative
True Adam. 1945 a real Labour Party. I’m sure some of those pre-fabs were still in use and working well years later. Also many of the other welfare measures that Government introduced.
The Labour Party is, as you say full of people who hate Britain. I think Starmer simply can not find any policies of his own.
A lot of prefabs around south birmingham were made of asbestos , I seem to remember.
Well at least asbestos doesn’t catch fire easily!
No, seriously the Government immediately post war had an awful lot to deal with and did better than many others would have done in the same circumstances.
Technology and science tend to take two steps forward then fall back one, don’t you think.