Urban Housing Rehabilitation: An Encouraging British Example

Abstract

The rehabilitation of Britain’s older housing became an increasingly important activity throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The British rehabilitation programme, broadly defined, now contains a range of activities and instruments, including improvement and repair grants for private sector use, environmental improvement grants, direct local authority investment, and housing association programmes. By 1983 this broad set of activities had come to comprise more than a third of public spending on housing capital formation, indeed almost 50% in Scotland. Whilst public spending on housing capital has quartered since 1976, the budget of the Housing Corporation increased in the 1970s and has been only marginally reduced in 1983 and 1984. Grant aid to rehabilitation, via local authorities, boomed from 1982 to 1984 but now appears set to reduce progressively over the next four years. At the present time local authorities in Britain, and the various sub-national offices of central government, are interested in the extent to which housing programmes may contribute to neighbourhood, urban and indeed national economic development. However perusal of the available academic literature will do little to convince government to sustain or expand rehabilitation programmes, and the improvement grant programme is now being reduced and restructured.