Textbooks
Explore our diverse range of digital textbooks designed for course adoption and recommended reading at universities and colleges. We publish over 140 textbooks across the social sciences, and an annual subscription to digital textbooks is possible via BUP Digital.
Our content is fully searchable and can be accessed on and off-campus through Shibboleth, OpenAthens or an institutional authenticated IP. For any questions on digital textbook pricing and subscription information, please contact simon.bell@bristol.ac.uk.
We are happy to provide digital samples of any of our coursebooks by completing this form. To see the full collection of all our core textbooks, browse our main website.
Books: Textbooks
The number of local authorities that own and directly manage council housing has declined dramatically since 1997. About 200 local authorities in England, Scotland and Wales now own and manage council housing. In Northern Ireland, the Northern Ireland Housing Executive manages all the council housing there on behalf of local authorities, but changes to this arrangement are likely too. The focus in this chapter will be on England, given the limitations of space.
The most significant feature of council housing in recent years is its numerical decline from 4.9 million properties in 1976 to 1.7 million in 2011. From a tenure that represented 29% of the housing stock in England in the late 1970s (and higher in Scotland), it now represents less than 7.6% of the total. This chapter will explore how politicians have set in motion the processes that have led to this situation, not least establishing the right to buy and large-scale stock transfers. Neither of these processes could have happened to the extent that they did if the reputation of the sector had not declined too. Years of under-investment, enforced by tightening government control of local authorities’ HRAs, produced a situation where councillors were often responsible for council property that had increasing problems of disrepair, outdated fixtures and fittings, and poor local facilities. Council tenants saw landlord services decline year on year, despite paying their rents. At the same time, tenants were not immune to the attractions of the right to buy. Wanting to own your own home was promoted as natural and profitable.
The global financial crisis of 2007-08 was triggered by sub-prime mortgage mis-selling in the US and the global sale of these debts as new bonds.
Austerity programmes are designed to reduce the borrowing that governments undertook to stabilise failing banking systems but the UK’s Coalition government is using ‘austerity’ as a cover to dismantle the welfare state. Housing is at the forefront of these changes. Mortgages and rental costs are rising as ‘the market’ dictates them, while people with low incomes now receive substantially less financial help from the welfare state.
In this much-needed text by an experienced author with a policy background, current housing finance issues (and their history) are linked with broader social policy and political themes. It covers the finance of building and refurbishment, managing and maintaining property for all the different tenures (owner occupation, council housing, housing association and private renting), and discusses whether current arrangements are sustainable. Written for housing, social policy and politics students and staff, it is also accessible to anyone concerned about housing in Britain today.
Following the 2010 general election, a coalition of Conservative and Liberal Democrat politicians came to power. They have a markedly different approach from New Labour to handling the long-term effects of the 2007–08 global financial crisis and subsequent recession. The circumstances that led to the global crisis and how the turmoil in financial markets was handled by the New Labour government will be considered first. This is important, as senior Coalition politicians claim that the country’s financial deficit is simply due to New Labour’s financial mismanagement, when clearly it is not. The first part of the chapter will consider:
-
New Labour’s approach to the economy and financial management;
-
the effects of deregulation of the banking system on UK mortgage lending and the role of the financial regulator;
-
sub-prime mortgages in the US and the effects of mixing these with tradeable bonds;
-
poor financial management in UK banks, leading to nationalisation and recapitalisation.
The chapter will then move on to look at the impact of the global financial crisis on New Labour’s spending plans laid out in the 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR). It will consider how additional government investment in rented housing and tax foregone were used as strategies to encourage economic growth in the face of the recession that followed the upheaval in the international banking system and money markets.
The way this issue was dealt with in the 2010 general election is then considered. The Coalition government continues to downplay the global financial crisis and chooses to blame New Labour for the financial deficit that it inherited.
The term ‘housing association’ covers a wide range of organisations. It can include small associations and housing trusts (like York Housing Association), large-scale voluntary stock transfer organisations (like New Charter Housing Trust) or, increasingly, groups of associations that appear to be independent of each other but that are in fact linked. For example, Your Housing Group has resulted from the merger of Arena Housing Group (with six subsidiaries) and Harvest Housing Group (which included seven other associations in its group structure). Associations may be small: 30% have no paid staff and 80% have fewer than 100 homes to manage. A relative few are very large: 1% have over 10,000 homes. Stock transfer associations (or companies) are likely to be big, with more than 500 staff. In the late 1980s there were approximately 475,000 association homes for rent. Now the figure is just over two million.
The work of housing associations will be considered by looking at:
-
some key financial features of associations and the tension between commercial and welfare-oriented values;
-
housing management in Leafy Glades Housing Association (Leafy Glades HA) – a medium-sized housing association working in 2011/12;
-
financing new rented homes and the changing relationship between public grant and different kinds of private finance or private contribution.
Until 1988 many associations occupied a semi-public position, working closely with local authorities, but Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wanted them to become part of a new ‘independent rented sector’. Following the Housing Act 1988, which enabled associations to use private finance as well as public grant to develop housing, the Conservatives’ ‘independent rented sector’ was made up of housing associations and private landlords.
At the centre of all the changes that have occurred in the UK’s housing system is the debate about the extent to which the state can and should intervene to influence ‘the market’. These arguments can be seen clearly as long ago as the First World War, when controlled rents were introduced to protect private tenants (and the war-time economy) from the self-interested profiteering of private landlords. One hundred years later, roles have switched so that ‘the market’ is now seen as the saviour from all that the state provides in relation to housing: in the eyes of critics, ‘dependency’ and a lack of ‘social mobility’. How did we get to this point and how can we move beyond it?
This final chapter will look at this question in different ways. It has been written to provoke discussion and debate. The themes are:
-
the market and the state – the 2007–08 financial crisis in retrospect;
-
the re-emergence of class;
-
changing times: owner-occupation and individualism – the end of a dream?
-
changing times: the state reconsidered – another paradigm shift?
The 2007–08 global financial crisis generated enormous problems for governments across the ‘developed’ world. New Labour under the Prime Minister Gordon Brown responded in a way that was reflective of Keynesian economics. What was of great significance was the central role of the state. Central government took action to protect the country from the imminent collapse of the banking system. Britain’s best banks did not like it much, but, at the time, they had no alternative to nationalisation and recapitalisation.
Housing advice, homelessness services including temporary housing, housing support services, strategic work across the area and the maintenance of housing standards in the private sector are all important, locally provided local authority services. The local authority also can undertake or support a range of building and improvement work associated with these housing services.
Local authorities in England are more reliant on central government for funding than their European counterparts, so the impact of austerity measures is particularly severe. The Labour leader of Birmingham City Council remarked in 2012 that the £600 million that has to be cut from that authority’s budget up to 2017 marked ‘the end of local government as we have known it’. This chapter will explore this view from the perspective of housing services and will discuss:
-
the range of housing services provided through the General Fund and their main sources of revenue funding;
-
funding issues connected to three important services: the homelessness service, the Supporting People programme and the housing benefit service;
-
possible sources of capital funding for new building and improvement work, including funding to achieve the DHS in any retained council housing.
The management of any council housing will be discussed in Chapter Five. The limitations of space are such that this chapter is focused mainly on England.
Central government has exercised considerable influence at local government level in recent times. Practically, this has been to maintain a firm control over public expenditure. Overall, local authority General Fund expenditure (of which general housing services form a part) accounts for 25% of total public expenditure in England and Wales.
Political discussion about owner-occupation has usually focused on the supposed positive attributes that ownership brings: a sense of independence, security and feeling of ‘paying your own way’. Margaret Thatcher was fond also of asserting that citizens needed a stake in society, hence she promoted the right to buy with the idea of the ‘property-owning democracy’. In turn, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown believed that extending homeownership would spread ‘wealth’. There can be no denying that owner-occupation is popular in the UK, but the attributes claimed for it are not universal across the tenure. The positive view needs to be tempered with an awareness of the financial implications of extending owner-occupation down the income scale at a time when the ‘safety net’ for owner-occupiers who run into difficulties paying their mortgage is minimal.
Different aspects of owner-occupation at the margins will be considered in this chapter in order to demonstrate this darker view, as well as wider points. These are:
-
moving into owner-occupation: first-time buyers and the implications of large deposits; shared ownership and equity sharing as a way into owner-occupation; council tenants and discounts under the ‘right to buy’;
-
staying in owner-occupation: paying for repairs and maintenance;
-
leaving owner-occupation: ‘prime’ owner-occupation, mortgage rescue and the likelihood of repossession; sub-prime owner-occupiers and the likelihood of repossession; ‘spending the home’ on long-term care.
First-time buyers have found it increasingly difficult to buy. In the early 2000s, the price of property increased by over 60%. However, before 2007 it was possible to obtain 100% mortgages or mortgages with a very high ‘loan to value’ ratio, generated from calculations of four, five or even six times the household income (see Box 2.2).
