Report into 25 years of housing policy points to undesirable consequences

The report, which evaluated housing policy between 1975 and 2000, was published yesterday for the ODPM.

It found individual policies tended to be successful in their own right but often had undesirable consequences. The researchers, from York, Cambridge and Heriot-Watt universities, cited the increase in the number of social landlords after stock transfers as one obvious example of this.

In another example, transferring social housing to associations had helped to improve the quality of homes but increased management costs, and led to less choice in some parts of the country.

Similarly, the right to buy had delivered more homeownership but also contributed to widening inequalities in wealth and had created problems for new entrants to the housing market.

Writing in this issue of Housing Today (see page 25), housing minister Keith Hill said the review highlighted the need to link housing policy with wider economic and social change.

He said the government has made progress on many of the issues raised in the report, for example, by modernising the right to buy.

The ODPM said it would not act on the report’s conclusion that associations should share their surpluses in order to target the areas most in need of investment.“This report wasn’t intended as a series of recommendations but as food for thought,” a spokesman said. “We’re open-minded about what form policies might take in the future.”