Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [371]
I had to concede that these critics had a stronger case than I would have liked. It made me concerned that many distinguished academics thought that Thatcherism in education meant a philistine subordination of scholarship to the immediate requirements of vocational training. That was certainly no part of my kind of Thatcherism.* That was why before I left office Brian Griffiths, with my encouragement, had started working on a scheme to give the leading universities much more independence. The idea was to allow them to opt out of Treasury financial rules and raise and keep capital, owning their assets as a trust. It would have represented a radical decentralization of the whole system.
IMPLEMENTING THE HOUSING REFORMS
Of the three major social services — Education, the Health Service and Housing — it was, in my view, over the last of these that the most significant question mark hung. By the mid-1980s everything in housing pointed to the need to roll back the existing activities of government. Although the country’s housing stock needed refurbishment and adaptation, there was no pressing need now — as arguably there had been after the war — for massive new house building by the state. Furthermore, rising incomes and capital ownership were placing more and more people in the position to buy their homes with a mortgage.
State intervention to control rents and give tenants security of tenure in the private rented sector had been disastrous in reducing the supply of rented properties. The state in the form of local authorities had frequently proved an insensitive, incompetent and corrupt landlord. And insofar as there were shortages in specific categories of housing, these were in the private rented sector where rent control and security of tenure had reduced the supply. Moreover, new forms of housing had emerged. Housing Associations and the Housing Corporation which financed them — though they could be all too wasteful and bureaucratic on occasion — offered alternative ways of providing ‘social housing’ without the state as landlord. Similarly, tenant involvement in the form of co-operatives and the different kinds of trusts being pioneered in the United States offered new ways of pulling government out of housing management. I believed that the state must continue to provide mortgage tax relief in order to encourage home ownership, which was socially desirable. (Far better and cheaper to help people to help themselves than to provide housing for them.) The state also had to provide assistance for poorer people with housing costs through housing benefit. But as regards the traditional post-war role of government in housing — that is building, ownership, management, and regulation — the state should be withdrawn from these areas just as far and as fast as possible.
This was the philosophical starting point for the housing reforms on which Nick Ridley was working from the autumn of 1986, which he submitted for collective discussion at the end of January 1987, and which after several meetings under my chairmanship were included in the 1987 general election manifesto.* The beauty of the package which Nick devised was that it combined a judicious mixture of central government intervention, local authority financial discipline, deregulation and wider choice for tenants. In so doing it achieved a major shift away from the ossified system which had grown up under socialism.
Central government would play a role through Housing Action Trusts (HATs) in redeveloping badly run down council estates and passing them on to other forms of ownership and management — including home ownership, ownership by housing associations and transfer to a private landlord — with no loss of tenant rights. Second, the new ‘ring-fenced’ framework for local authority housing accounts would force councils to raise rents to levels which provided money for repairs. It would also increase the pressure on councils for the disposal of part or all of their housing stock to housing associations, other landlords or indeed home ownership. Third, deregulation of