Rent allowances—six years on

Abstract

The lynch-pin of the Conservative Government's now notorious Housing Finance Act, and the White Paper, Fair Deal for Housing, upon which it was based, was the system of housing allowances aimed at subsidising people rather than housebuilding. All rents, in both public and private sectors, were to be brought onto a common “fair”² basis and the subsidies to dwellings were to be reduced by cutting back on direct subsidies to local authority building programmes and by permitting rent increases in the private sector, thus reducing the indirect subsidies to private tenants. Although the scheme was intended as a housing policy measure it was also “an important new weapon against family poverty.”³ The Family Income Supplement, another scheme launched in 1970, was aimed at helping those whose incomes were low in relation to their family responsibilities, “but people with low incomes and high rents need more help than those with low incomes and low rents.”⁴ This was exactly the difficulty to be met by the new housing allowance.