Between 1951 and 1979, an average of 324,000 homes a year were built in the UK. The 1947 planning system did not prevent this, nor did protections such as Green Belts, national parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs). The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) and other amenity groups were active and influential throughout the period.

House building was popular; it won votes. Addressing the housing shortage was the top priority in the 1945 general election, and the Labour manifesto promised to ‘proceed with a housing programme with the maximum practical speed until every family in this island has a good standard of accommodation’ (Lund, 2016: 1). The 1951 Conservative manifesto declared: ‘Housing is the first of the social services…. a Conservative and Unionist Government will give housing a priority second only to national defence. Our target remains 300,000 houses a year.’ Churchill put the Tory programme more succinctly: ‘housing and beef and not getting scuppered’ (quoted in Addison, 1982 [1977]: 412).

Housing completions in England peaked in 1968 at 352,540 units, of which 143,680 were local authority homes, almost all built for social rent, and another 5,540 were housing association properties. Even allowing for the fact that demolitions were running at a high level, this is a striking contrast with the 140,660 homes completed in 2016, of which 2,080 were council homes and 23,939 were housing association properties, many for sale or market rent. More council homes were completed in 1968 than the total number of homes in any year since 2008.

This chapter explores why we have failed to build enough new homes for almost 40 years. It begins by looking at the extraordinarily successful ideological assault on the planning system waged by a few influential free-market think tanks who blame it for our failure to build, distracting attention from the real causes. It then looks at four related issues that help explain why we need a new approach: the rise and fall of council housing; the economic model of the big developers; the rise and fall of the ‘property-owning democracy’; and land values.

The chapter’s five sections make a number of propositions.

• 1. The policy panacea of the free-market think tanks – liberalise planning policy in order to free more land for development – will not return Britain to pre-1979 levels of house building.