Square Pegs, Round Holes: The 'Right' to Council Housing in the Post-War Era

Abstract

Along with the poll tax and Euro-sceptism, the sale of council houses will be remembered as among the foremost of political innovations of the 1980s. The 'right to buy' might plausibly be presented as exemplifying a pervasive trend towards the 'consumerization' of government, wherein public sector bureaucracies are exposed to the efficiency-inducing discipline of market forces. This paper suggests that the Thatcher administrations' housing policies represented a very bastardized variant on the pro-competitive theme, insofar as both the intention and effect of government action may plausibly be construed as limiting citizens' freedom of political choice rather than enhancing their economic liberty. That the policy nevertheless enjoyed such evident 'success' was made possible by successive post-war governments' repeated failure to accept that council tenants possessed justiciable 'rights' in the management of their homes. This failure was itself explained by contextual factors, in both the constitutional and organizational senses, that fostered a pervasive popular and administrative culture in which the council tenant's home was never perceived as her castle.