Housing Policy in England Under Thatcher A

According to Ingemar Elander (913), during recent decades, rented housing estates throughout Europe and particularly in Great Britain have become the object of a veritable flood of programs targeting physical and social renewal and neighborhood or community regeneration. In the United Kingdom, under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party which came to power in 1979, a major housing policy shift was undertaken. This essay will examine English housing policy and regeneration strategies under Margaret Thatcher, focusing on the benefits and problems associated with Thatcher's policy initiatives.

Elander (914) has noted that when Thatcher office, only 12 percent of all rental property in England was rented privately while owner-occupation and local authority housing together comprised about 86 percent of the housing stock. Consequently, under Thatcher, the government decided to facilitate the privatization of housing stock and private ownership of what are known as "council houses" or publicly owned units. A major goal of the Thatcher Government was to facilitate private ownership and neighborhood regeneration funded by the private rather than the public sector; overall, Thatcher was convinced that government should remove itself (particularly at the local level) from the housing business, allowing the market to provide for housing needs. Further, offering the working class an opportunity to own their own homes was seen ad assisting this class in ac

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l housing sector's role and to implement necessary policies that were designed to allow the market to function autonomously. Thus, the major goal of Thatcher's housing policy was fostering private ownership or the Right to Buy initiative. In this first phase of housing policy shifts between 1979 and 1987, the Thatcher government did not appear to have what Tiesdell and Allmendinger (319) considered to be a comprehensive strategy for neighborhood regeneration. In phase two of the Thatcher initiative, between 1987 and 1990, neighborhood regeneration took on new meaning. A number of problems have been observed with respect to the Thatcher housing policy. Anne Ferguson (60) has argued that many of the properties that were made available for sale to council residents were substandard, poorly maintained, deteriorating, and otherwise significantly flawed. Simultaneously, the urban high-rise blocks of flats were not particularly amenable to conversion into U.S.-style condominiums or cooperatives because of poor management systems and a distinct probability that only a small handful of such units would actually be purchased by renters. However, Ferguson (61) did claim that a major effect of the Housing Act was the expansion of ten

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