Local government
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100 years on from the Addison Act
Under the Housing and Town Planning Act 1919, local authorities had to develop 'new housing and rented accommodation where it was needed by working people’.¹
About the author:
Dr Darren Baxter works at the
Joseph Rowntree Foundation,
and Dr Jed Meers is a lecturer
at the University of York.The history of social housing is defined by waves of legislative interventions. As with most common law countries, these take the form of broad-ranging statutes self-styled as ‘Housing Acts’ – each with its own political ethos passporting packages of reform. However, the Housing, Town Planning, &c. Act 1919 – known as the ‘Addison Act’ after its proponent, Dr Christopher Addison, the then Minister of Health – is among the most influential. In placing an obligation on local authorities to build housing in response to local needs and providing a national subsidy to support it, the Addison Act catalysed the shakier origins of England and Welsh social housing, formalising it in law and bringing subsidy to the national level.
Much has changed in the past century, but this article reflects on two key interrelated shifts: legislation's movement away from need and towards individual rights; and the related change from subsiding bricks and mortar to subsidising people.
From needs to rights
What defined the Addison Act was a focus on addressing housing needs, ie, an emphasis on the bricks-and-mortar delivery of housing by local government to address local demand. Its very first provision, section 1(1) of Part I, required local authorities to consider ‘the needs of their area with respect to the provision of houses for the working classes’. This was not a toothless provision.
Speaking in support of the bill in the House of Commons, Dr Addison underscored his intent to ‘compel authorities to act in accordance with the housing needs of the district’, which was reflected in the Act itself in section 2.²
The focus on addressing housing need mirrors housing rights discourse in the early 20th century. Formative international obligations under the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights framed the ‘right to housing’ as a means for securing an adequate standard of living. Housing is about health and well-being, and laws should secure not just ex-ante allowances, but a literal roof over you and your family’s head.
The approach became more individualistic throughout the late 1970s and culminated in the HA 1980. This landmark piece of legislation introduced two new legal interventions to social housing, both focused on the housing rights of the individual: ‘security of tenure’ and the ‘right to buy’. The former cemented clear legal rights for social tenants in legislation, ie, if they kept to the terms of their tenancy, they could stay in their home indefinitely, with their spouse or family having rights of succession. The latter also focused on a new statutory right, ie, social tenants could buy their homes after three years with a 33% (or higher) discount.
More than one million tenants availed themselves of the opportunity in the 10 years to follow as the programme was extended under HA 1984 and HA 1988. Debate has since oscillated between extension and retraction of these individual rights. Current housing reforms show the divergence: the Localism Act 2011 sought to fragment security of tenure by introducing fixed-term ‘flexible tenancies’, and the Housing and Planning Act 2016 put this on new footing, seeking effectively to phase out lifetime tenancies as we knew them under sections 118, 119 and Schedule 7 and, instead, requiring the grant of a fixed-term tenancy for a period of between two and 10 years for new tenants. In the wake of the green paper ‘A new deal for social housing’, the government decided against implementing these provisions ‘at this time’.³ On right to buy, Scotland and Wales have both abolished the policy (in July 2016 and in January 2019 respectively), while Westminster has sought to extend it to housing association tenants. ›