Theme: Political Economy | Content Type: Journal article

Governments, Home Ownership and Low-Cost Home Ownership Initiatives

Peter Williams

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Mark Hamilton

| 1 min read

Widening the spectrum of households who can enter home ownership has been a long-established policy in the UK. This article explores low-cost home ownership initiatives from the late 1970s onwards and in the context of home ownership more generally. Over the decades, government support for home ownership has shifted from making tax concessions to households and providing building subsides for local authorities, to a centrally driven housing programme focussed around a myriad of part-rent part-own and equity sharing schemes alongside the Right to Buy. The Labour government now faces difficult decisions regarding housing priorities, not least given budget constraints. While its focus will understandably be on providing more social rented homes, there is still a need to assist meeting aspirations around home ownership which have been much eroded in recent years. Both need to be supported with a close eye on cost and impact.

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    Peter Williams

    Professor Peter Williams is a Departmental Fellow at the Department of Land Economy at the University of Cambridge.

    Articles by Peter Williams
Volume 96, Issue 2

Latest Journal Issue

Volume 96, Issue 2

This issue features a collection titled 'Governing from the Centre Left' edited by Deborah Mabbett and Peter Sloman. In this collection, authors including Claire Ainsley, Jörg Michael Dostal and Eunice Goes examine how centre-left governments in North America, Australasia, and Western Europe have dealt with recent global pressures, and consider what lessons the UK Labour government should learn from its overseas counterparts. Other articles include a commentary by Ben Jackson titled 'Poverty and the Labour Party'; John Connolly, Matthew Flinders and David Judge on 'How Not to Deliver Policies: Lessons in Undeliverability from the Conservative Governments of 2019–2024'; Stewart Lansley on 'Wealth Accumulation: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly'; and Coree Brown Swan, Paul Anderson, and Judith Sijstermans on 'Politics and the Pandemic: The UK Covid-19 Inquiry and Devolution'. A selection of book reviews feature Victoria Brittain's review of 'Palestinian Refugee Women from Syria to Jordan, Decolonizing the Geopolitics of Displacement' by Afaf Jabiri, and Anna Coote's review of 'The Care Dilemma: Caring Enough in the Age of Sex Equality', by David Goodhart.

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