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From the archive - minister says councils ‘have had their day’
Inside Housing looks back at what was happening in the sector this week 10, 20 and 30 years ago
30 years ago
The role of councils in providing housing “had had its day”, housing minister William Waldegrave told delegates at an Institute of Housing seminar.
The role of housing associations would be vitally important, he said, setting out plans to move the housing association programme to a mixture of public and private finance and increase rents.
At the National Federation of Housing Associations (NFHA) annual conference, the NFHA chief executive Richard Best warned that a London nurse could end up paying 45% of their take-home pay for housing under the plans.
Mr Best said the bottom line in negotiations with government must be that private finance would only be introduced in schemes where it could produce genuinely affordable levels of rent.
20 years ago
The Association of London Government called for a new strategy to drive down rents and make housing affordable in the capital.
It claimed that the recent Conservative government’s strategy of increasing rents by more than inflation had exacerbated many of London’s housing problems.
In its submission to the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review, the association said it wanted to consider ways of cutting guideline rent levels as a way of combating welfare dependency.
“Many jobless people would be only marginally better off in a low-paid job,” said housing chair Pete Challis. “High rents keep people unemployed or make them worse off if they take a job,” he added.
Elsewhere, the Housing Corporation warned in a report that there would be one million more potential social housing tenants than available homes by 2011.
It said a crisis would develop once projected population increases began to bite and that divorced, separated or unmarried people would make up most of the expected extra 2.8 million single person households.
10 years ago
Inside Housing revealed that England’s largest housing associations were set to build more homes for private sale than
for social tenants.
Saying the move would “change the face of the sector”, the magazine reported predictions that some housing associations would soon have “more in common with Barratt” than community-based landlords.
The article reported that up to 20 housing associations would build more private than socially rented homes within the next decade.
It followed the publication of a National Housing Federation report that called for the corporation to relax a rule requiring the majority of housing association business to be social housing-related.
