¹ A distinct housing market can be equated with the Huddersfield Employment Exchange Area (EEA). In 1967 only 1,600 people (1.7 per cent) of the area's economically active population travelled to other areas for work, and only 1,700 workers travelled into the area, although there is considerable daily commuting between the constituent authorities. Before April 1974, the area included Huddersfield County Borough (CB) (with 62.3 per cent of the total 1971 population of over 206,000 and 60.1 per cent of the area's private housing stock), and five surrounding urban districts. As regards local government housing policies, of course, these authorities remained distinct until April 1974.

² Harvey, D. W. and Chatteriee, L., ‘Absolute Rent and the Structuring of Space by Governmental and Financial Institutions’, Antipode, 6: 1 (1974). 22–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For other descriptions of credit allocation in local housing markets, see Boddy, M., ‘The Structure of Mortgage Finance’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 1:1 (1976), 58–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Harloe, M., Issacharoff, R. and Minns, R., The Organization of Housing, Heinemann, London, 1974.Google Scholar

³ See Ghosh, D., The Economics of Building Societies, Sage Publications, London, 1974.Google Scholar

⁴ In 1974 Society A had assets of £3.767 million, Society B £297 million (following a merger), and Society C £1,547 million. Detailed information on mortgage allocation was taken from 20 per cent systematic samples of mortgage registers for Branch A (February 1971-March 1973; February 1974-February 1975, 211 transactions); and for Branch B (October 1972-February 1975, 196 transactions); from a complete coverage of mortgages from Branch B made to property in Huddersfield CB (October 1972-October 1973, 164 transactions); and from a complete coverage of local authority mortgages, still outstanding in 1974, for 1969 (56 from 84 original transactions) and 1972 (232 from 256). A series of inter views was conducted with the managers of Branches A, B and C, and the local authority department dealing with mortgages, with local estate agents, and, under pretence of buying a house, with a money-lender involved with house purchase.

⁵ ‘To service any kind of loan you are talking about people buying an average semidetached house and borrowing £8,000’ – branch manager of West Yorkshire building society, Huddersfield Examiner, 9 May 1975.Google Scholar

⁶ See Boddy, op. cit.

⁷ See Harloe et al, op. cit. for an examination of the attitudes of building society executives. Nationally, loans through repayment failure amounted to only 2 per cent of the value of the general reserves (1969–74), and in Huddersfield the number of cases was below 1 percent of the total approved mortgages in any one year.

⁸ Interview with the manager of Branch B.

⁹ See also Boddy, op. cit.; Harloe et at., op. cit; and Barbolet, R. H., Housing Classes and the Socio-Ecological System, Centre for Environmental Studies, Working Paper 4, London, 1969.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Report of the Select Committee on Race Relations: Housing, Minutes of Evidence, Bradford, House of Commons, HMSO, London, March 1971, para. 1,900.Google Scholar

¹¹ Interviews.

¹² Interview with the manager of Branch C.

¹³ Subsidies for option mortgages, where tax relief is replaced by lower mortgage interest rates, totalled £77 million in 1974/5, and now amount to 15 per cent of all building society mortgages. Total tax relief on mortgage payments stood at over £600 million in 1974/5, and the building societies received a loan of £500 million (at 10 per cent interest) early in 1974.

¹⁴ See Godfree, S., note in New Society, 4 March 1976, 493–4Google Scholar. Of 700 recommendations made by London boroughs up to Christmas 1975, only 62 (9 per cent) were known to have resulted in offers of finance.

¹⁵ The Huddersfield waiting list included approximately 3,900 households in mid-1975, compared to 2,400 in 1972. Certain groups, such as the young, the childless or the ‘undeserving poor’, remain low in local authority housing priorities; see Culling-worth, J. B., Problems of an Urban Society, Vol. 2, Allen and Unwin, London, 1972Google Scholar; and Smith, D. and Whalley, A., Racial Minorities and Public Housing, PEP, London, 1975Google Scholar. Not unrelated to this, Asians prefer to avoid local authority housing.

¹⁶ Report of the Select Committee on Race Relations, para. 1,910.

¹⁷ Ibid., paras 1,916 and 1,917.

¹⁸ For local authority and private rented housing, see Cullingworth, op. cit. chs 2–4; and Harloe et al, op. cit. chs 2, 5 and 6. For an assessment of ‘gainers and losers’ in the national context, see Hall, P., Gracey, H., Drewett, R. and Thomas, R., The Containment of Urban England, Vol. 2, Allen and Unwin, London, 1973, p. 405ff.Google Scholar

¹⁹ From a 1953 white paper, quoted in Cullingworth, op. cit. p. 57. See Crosland, A., Towards a Labour Housing Policy, Fabian Tract 410, 1971Google Scholar, for an apparently similar view.

²⁰ See Engels, F., The Housing Question, Progress, Moscow, 1954 (originally published in 1872), especially pp. 52–68Google Scholar, for the implantation of building societies in the prevailing social ethos of Victorian England. Owner-occupation is still seen as morally virtuous, and indeed the institution of private property (and the associated debt encumberment) is central to the smooth operation of capitalist society. Renting, seen as inadequate and unacceptable by the received ideology, is also inimical to the welfare considerations now embedded in housing policy.

²¹ See Greve, J., Voluntary Housing in Scandinavia, Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, University of Birmingham, Occasional Paper 21, 1971Google Scholar. One recent estimate for Britain, for mid-1975, gives the average weekly rent subsidy for each council tenancy (including rebates) as £3.64. For each mortgage (tax relief on interest and capital gains) the average is £3.75, but £9.25 when subsidies from building society depositors are included (The Sunday Times, 29 June 1974). It appears that the tenants of unfurnished private property receive an indirect subsidy of about £2.00 per week, and the tenants of furnished property (excluding any rebates), nothing. The average incomes for owner-occupiers, local authority tenants and the tenants of private unfurnished and furnished property were, in 1975, £2,432, £2,021, £1,700, and £1,812, respectively. See ‘Redirecting Housing Aid’, editorial in New Society, 1 May 1975. Over 20 per cent of public housing funds are also destined for the private market, through improvement grants, option mortgages, and local authority mortgages, while the domestic element of the rate support grant is highly regressive between and within areas. See Nevitt, D. A., ‘The Burden of Domestic Rates’, Policy and Politics, 2:1 (1974), 1–25.Google Scholar

²² In this section I will draw heavily on recent policy papers, especially Webster, D., ‘House Prices and Allocation’, Housing Review, 01–02 1975, 12–15Google Scholar. See also Crofton, B., ‘Better Use of the Housing Stock’, Housing Review, 05–06 1975, 73–8.Google Scholar

²³ Pahl, R. E., Whose City?, second edition, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1976.Google Scholar

²⁴ For telling criticisms of this view see Davies, J. G., The Evangelistic Bureaucrat, Tavistock Publications, London, 1972Google Scholar; Preteceille, E., ‘La Planification Urbaine’, Economic et Politique, 236 (1974), in translation in Antipode, 8:1 (1976), 69–76.Google Scholar

²⁵ Quoted in Webster, op. cit.

²⁶ See Moreton, P. and Tate, N., ‘The Housing Vacancy Reserve’, Town Planning Review, 46:1 (1975), 5–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nationwide Building Society, Occasional Bulletin, 1976.Google Scholar

²⁷ See Counter Information Services, The Recurrent Crisis of London, London, 1973Google Scholar; Ambrose, P. J.; ‘British Land Use Planning’, Antipode, 8:1 (1976), 2–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁸ Fair Deal for Housing, Cmnd 4728, HMSO, London, 1971.Google Scholar

²⁹ Webster, op. cit. p. 13.

³⁰ Ghosh, op. cit.

³¹ The use of average measures disguises important variations by region, class, age, and so on, for which see the cited sources.

³² See for example Counter Information Services, op. cit.; Kilroy, B., ‘Improvement Grants Threaten North Kensington’, Housing Review, 05–06 1972, 79–81Google Scholar; Byrne, P., ‘The Poorest: Their Homes’, New Society, 22 02 1973Google Scholar; Duncan, S. S., ‘Cosmetic Planning or Social Engineering’, Area, 6:4 (1974), 259–71Google Scholar; and National Community Development Project, The Poverty of the Improvement Programme, Centre for Environmental Studies, London, 1975.Google Scholar

³³ National Community Development Project, Inter-Project Report, 1973, Centre for Environmental Studies, London, 1974.Google Scholar

³⁴ P. Townsend (1973), quoted in Webster, op. cit. p. 13.

³⁵ Byrne, D. and Boddy, M., ‘Council Housing and Owner-Occupation’, 1975Google Scholar, unpublished. For similar calculations, but under different assumptions about house and retail price inflation, see Hare, P. J., ‘Comparing the Costs of Owning and Renting in Scotland’, Housing Review, 05–06 1973, 113–17.Google Scholar

³⁶ Engels, op. cit. p. 30.

³⁷ See Kenny, A., ‘The Implications of the Rent Act, 1974’, Housing Review, 03–04 1975. 37–41Google Scholar; and Byrne, D. and Beirne, P., ‘Towards a Political Economy of Housing Rent’, in Political Economy of Housing Workshop, Political Economy and the Housing Question, 1975Google Scholar, available from Fred Gray, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton.

³⁸ See Engels, op. cit. pp. 16–38.

³⁹ See Webster, op. cit.; Lipsey, D., ‘Towards Equality in Housing’, Housing Review, 01–02 1974, 21–2Google Scholar; and Grear, R., Building Societies?, Fabian Research Series, 1975 p. 319Google Scholar. for similar reform schemes. With tax relief on a normal mortgage, an 11 percent borrowing rate becomes 7.7 per cent with a basic tax rate of 33 per cent (that is, a negative interest rate of 7–12 per cent with current inflation rates). This becomes 4.22 percent with a 58 per cent tax rate, and 1.87 per cent at 83 per cent (the top tax rate). With option mortgages, people pay the same effective rate as those receiving the standard rate of tax relief, and the government pays the subsidy direct to the building society.

⁴⁰ See in particular the plans for a public mortgage authority in Grear, op. cit.

⁴¹ Byrne and Boddy, op. cit.

⁴² See Cullingworth, op. cit. ch. 2; Gray, F. G., ‘Selection and Allocation in Council Housing’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 1:1 (1976), 34–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and S. Merrett, ‘Council Rents and British Capitalism’, in Political Economy of Housing Workshop, op. cit.

⁴³ Cullingworth, op. cit.; Gray, op. cit.; and Tucker, J., Honourable Estates, Gollancz, London, 1965.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Housing Allowances and Inequality, Young Fabian Pamphlet 36, 1973Google Scholar; and see note 21 above for the present distribution of housing subsidies.

⁴⁵ See Swedish Ministry of Housing and Physical Planning, Housing, Building and Planning in Sweden, ECE Study Tour 1974, 1975Google Scholar; and Towards a New Swedish Housing Policy: The Housing Bill 1974, 1975Google Scholar (both available from Bostadsdepartementet, Fack, 103 20, Stockholm). See also Greve, op. cit.; and Boberg, M., Horentzon, M., Lundgren, R., Löwendahl, B., Modh, B., Nilsson, K. and Wikner, C., Bostad och Kapital (Housing and Capital), Prisma, Lund, 1974.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Riksbank, Sveriges, Sweden: Key Characteristics of Institutions and Instruments of Housing Finance, 1974, unpublished.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ See Boberg et al., op. cit.

⁴⁸ But see, for instance, Gough, I., ‘State Expenditure in Advanced Capitalism’, New Left Review, 92 (1975), 53–92Google Scholar, for a summary of theories of the nature of the state in advanced capitalism; Harvey, D. W., ‘Class Monopoly Rent, Finance Capital and the Urban Revolution’, Regional Studies, 3 (1974), 233–95Google Scholar; and Political Economy of Housing Work shop, op. cit. and Housing and Class in Britain, 1976Google Scholar, for an analysis of similar ideas in relation to housing.