Having outlined the multiple discontents that estate regeneration involving demolition gives rise to, I hope that the question raised in the Introduction – ‘why do London estate residents pray that regeneration won't be coming to their neighbourhood anytime soon?’ – has been answered. This concluding chapter summarises the key findings and makes various policy recommendations.

Policy and estate regeneration

Chapter 2 examined the rise and fall of public housing in London. The expansionary period involved local government initiatives up until the 1940s, and then reached its apogee under the post-war Keynesian welfare state. The development of public housing in the capital was enabled by the Labour Party's unbroken 30-year control of the LCC which embedded council estates into the physical landscape of the city – municipal socialism in action. The expansionary period allowed hundreds of thousands of working-class Londoners to escape from the manifold inadequacies of the PRS via the decommodification that public housing facilitated.

In challenging notions of a Butskellite consensus in post-war housing policy, I identified how Conservative local government interventions in London began to undermine housing decommodification during the 1960s and 1970s via a series of proto-Thatcherite reforms, including encouraging discretionary sales of council housing. During this period, Labour councils consistently reversed these reforms. Wholesale housing recommodification was then initiated by 1980s’ Thatcherite privatisation and demunicipalisation policies, notably the RTB, which brought about the neoliberal decoupling of public housing from the UK welfare state. New Labour continued this decoupling, albeit in a less damaging form. It was more generous in terms of overall public spending on local authority housing, notably via the DHP which helped to redress the Conservative government's disinvestment and the national £19 billion backlog of repairs. However, New Labour's interlinkage of the DHP with its demunicipalisation governance agenda rendered it cumbersome and over-complex, resulting in delays and lack of universal coverage in London. Austerity policies have further intensified the city's social housing depletion. Chapter 2 outlined the reasons for the contraction of public/social housing in London, with estate demolitions resulting in an estimated gross loss of between 17,000 and 37,000 social rental properties from 2002 to 2017, and net loss of over 8,000 such homes from 2004 to 2014 (Chapter 3).

Chapter 3 traced the development of urban policy in London with reference to estate regeneration via an early–contemporary binary periodisation from the 1980s to 2010s.