Although no country of Britain is yet entirely a ‘nation of homeowners’, each has seen a movement in this direction for several decades. The level of home ownership in Britain as a whole is one of the highest in Europe, built on (until the 2007/08 credit crunch) accessible mortgage credit and fuelled by a housebuilding sector that has perfected the art of erecting identical starter homes (almost invariably two-bed semis) on greenfield sites up and down Britain. In some rural markets, levels of private ownership come very close to 100 per cent, as a result of: early movement away from private renting; high levels of take-up of the right to buy; decades of counter-urbanisation, which has brought salaried commuters, retirement migrants and second home owners to many rural areas; and an economic transformation that has seen seasonal workers, lacking the income and wealth to buy their own homes, supplanted by newcomers who rarely choose to rent their homes. Notwithstanding some local differences, this general picture is repeated across England, Scotland and Wales, with home ownership becoming by far the most dominant tenure, sometimes to the detriment of households unable to compete in more exclusive markets.

Successive governments have lauded the personal and social benefits of owneroccupation to the extent that its expansion has become an ideological goal fixed within most party manifestos. These governments have frequently come to the electorate with grand plans to ‘expand home ownership’: to give those still ‘locked into renting’ or languishing in social tenancies the opportunity to buy a home of their own. The biggest strides towards Eden's dream of a ‘homeowning democracy’ were made by the Thatcher governments during the 1980s, which began by giving council tenants the right to buy their homes from local councils before embarking on an ambitious programme of public stock transfer to the housing association sector. The Conservatives transformed the possibility of local councils releasing stock for private ownership – instigated in the 1950s – into an obligation to extend a ‘right’ to sitting tenants. In the countryside, this policy rapidly depleted an already dwindling supply of rented accommodation.

But Thatcher was adamant in her view that ownership was the aspiration of the vast majority of UK households, and that government should do everything in its power to make this aspiration a reality.