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 3

Latest Journal Issue

Volume 96, Issue 3

This issue features a collection titled 'The Intellectual and Political Legacy of David Marquand', who died in April 2024, edited by Colin Crouch, Ben Jackson and Peter Sloman. In this collection, authors including Jean Seaton, Will Hutton and Hilary Wainwright consider Marquand's legacy as a great progressive thinker, his biography of Ramsay MacDonald, Labour's first prime minister, and the role of socialism for Marquand. Other articles include a commentary by Deborah Mabbett titled 'Welfare reform by numbers'; Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams on 'The Vices of Values: Matthew Goodwin and the Politics of Motivation'; Helen McCarthy on 'Why the WASPI has no Sting: Gender, Generation and Pension Inequalities'; and Sam Taylor Hill, Tariq Modood and John Denham on 'Multicultural Nationalism: Saving the White Working Class from Blue Labour?' A selection of book reviews feature Edmund Fawcett's review of 'Nationalism: A World History' by Eric Storm and Samuel Cohn's review of 'Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to Covid' by Sheilagh Ogilvie.

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