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From the archive - a housing spending freeze
Inside Housing looks back at what was happening in the sector this week 10, 20 and 30 years ago
30 years ago
Thirty years ago social landlords had just found out that housing spending had been frozen for the year ahead.
Figures announced in the Autumn Statement revealed a planned gross housing spend of £3.8bn in 1988/89, compared with an anticipated spend of £3.7bn the year before (a rise almost exactly in line with inflation).
Inside Housing’s story also suggested that longer-term change was on the way, with a housing bill promising to reform the system in 1988.
The then housing minister William Waldegrave was hinting at the need to redistribute council housing receipts nationally. This led to some accusations that this would be breaking faith with councils.
Inside Housing also reported that the Housing Corporation’s budget for mixed private finance schemes was likely to rise from £50m to £70m.
20 years ago
Richard Caborn, planning minister at the time, was in the spotlight as the government said it hadn’t ruled out building on green belt land to meet the demand for 4.4 million new homes by 2016.
Mr Caborn pointed out that the area of green belt land, designated to prevent urban sprawl, had jumped by 100% in the previous 20 years.
Mr Caborn, speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, said that the existing planning system was working well, with 88% of England’s population living in just 12% of the land mass. He said the green belt was “up for grabs, in the sense that it is always up for grabs”.
“There are planning guidances to say that you can build on green belt in certain circumstances,” he said.
Twenty years later and it seems Mr Caborn’s prediction that the green belt was up for grabs in the way it is always up for grabs has been proved correct – but perhaps not in the way that readers might have interpreted it at the time.
The level of the green belt is the same in 2017 as it was in 1997 – as the Housing and Finance Institute pointed out in a guide published last week.
10 years ago
Plans for a revamp of housing in Scotland made front-page news, with the Scottish National Party’s then deputy first minister Nicola Sturgeon calling for the country’s 25,000-a-year rate of housebuilding to rise. She said she wanted to increase the build rate to 35,000 homes a year by 2015.
Ms Sturgeon made council housing the centrepiece of her announcement, saying she intended to “reverse the 30-year rundown of the local authority landlord role”.
She said councils had a “continuing and developing role to play” in the provision of social rented housing.
The proposals were set out in the green paper Firm Foundations: the Future of Housing in Scotland, which confirmed the plan to abolish the Right to Buy on all new social homes.
