John Boughton

Introduction -- 'How to provide housing for the people': origins -- 'The world of the future': the interwar period -- 'If only we will': Britain reimagined, 1940-51 -- 'The needs of the people': council housing, 1945-56 -- 'Get these people out of the slums': 1956-68 -- 'Anti-monumental, anti-stylistic, and fit for ordinary people': 1968-79 -- 'Rolling back the frontiers of the state': 1979-91 -- 'Thrown-away places': 1991-7 -- 'A different kind of community': 1997-2010 -- 'People need homes; these homes need people': 2010 to the present

The Rise and Fall of Council Housing

Municipal Dreams

Jim Hagan

"Meanwhile the local authority building control departments whose job it is to enforce fire safety regulations have been 'eviscerated'. Some of their functions have been privatised while the oversight role of independent fire officers has been replaced by a form of self-certification. No-one is likely to use the phrase 'a bonfire of red tape' again - its echoes have become too chilling - but here is the value, the absolute necessity, of the health and safety measures so widely derided in recent years. And if 'austerity' can sometimes seem a piece of empty political rhetoric, this is its reality. For almost four decades, we have been taught the neoliberal mantra 'private good, public bad' and encouraged to see public spending as an evil; ruthless economising as a virtue. We have come to know the price of everything and the value of nothing and have ended with the funeral pyre of Grenfell tower."

"Currently, the Government pays around £9.3 billion a year to private landlords supporting some 1.5 million households, almost half of whom are in work. If all those people were renting socially, we'd be saving almost £1.5 billion on benefits payments at a time when the country is investing just £1.2 billion annually on building new 'affordable' housing."

Municipal Dreams The Rise and Fall of Council Housing

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