1980s Council House

A council house, corporation house or council flat is a form of British public housing built by local authorities. A council estate is a building complex containing a number of council houses and other amenities like schools and shops. From the start, there were limitations on local authorities' use of monies from the council house sales as most of it had to be given to central government in London, meaning only 390,560 new council houses were built between 1980 and 1989.

From 1980 the Conservative government's twin policies of capping local government borrowing, and allowing sitting tenants the right to buy their homes, marked the end of a century of deeply committed council housing. By the late 1990s, 1.7 million council homes had been lost to the right to buy scheme. Early council housing was generally aimed at the 'better off working class', with the poorest left in slum housing, Boughton shows.

During the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, there was massive council house building, a result of the wartime destruction and political radicalisation of the working class after the huge sacrifices of the conflict. Since 1980, 1.9m council homes in England have been sold to tenants at an average discount of 44% of market value through the Right to Buy policy. Right to Buy (RTB) was arguably the most prominent housing policy of the Conservative government of the 1980s.

Property A 1980s ex-council house Size Two bedrooms and one bathroom Architect Bogdan Rusu of Vatraa Photos by Jim Stephenson Faced with a tight budget and a tired old building, it was obvious to the owner from the outset that this house was going to need an injection of clever and creative solutions to make it function successfully. A running story for the 1980s was the transfer of council housing to housing associations, as repair bills racked up. Often these stock transfers were controversial, as Eileen Tant, a tenant of Dover's St Radigunds Estate, expressed in 1988.

Council housing emerged as a major site of neoliberal intervention, but the ground had been prepared earlier. The first use of the term 'sink estate' occurred in a New Society article in November 1976. While council housing had once represented aspirational housing for most, owner.

The Housing Act came into force on 3 October 1980. Many council tenants exercised their right-to-buy. By November 1982 the government said more than 400,000 people had bought their council homes.

The right. Since 1991, RTB and LSVT have resulted in a marked fall of 2.2 million council homes with around 1.5 million of these built in the 1945-1980 era when the largest council house building programmes occurred, Figure 8.