Slums, subsidies, and working-class housing: The experience of Leeds, 1933--1936, and the influence of local initiative on *policy formulation in the British Labour Party, 1930--1951

Examines the evolution of state-subsidized local authority ("council") housing policy within the British Labour Party commencing in the early 1930s in the aftermath of the passage of the Housing Act, 1930. Analyzes the essential assumptions and features of inter-war housing legislation, and uses the experience of the slum clearance and re-housing drive in the West Yorkshire provincial city of Leeds in the period 1932--36 to illuminate the components of one alternative model of municipal housing policy developed by the City of Leeds Labour Party (CLLP). This represented arguably the most comprehensive and coherent approach to the related problems housing provision and rents attempted in Britain during the inter-war years. The CLLP's municipal housing activities ultimately engendered an electoral backlash caused by the resistance of disaffected municipal tenants and local building and property interests to aspects of the housing program. Nevertheless, the CLLP's program should be viewed as the first attempt by a local authority in Britain to operate its municipal housing as a comprehensive social service.;The analysis then examines the limited influence of Labour-controlled local authorities on the party's national housing policies, including a detailed account of the work of the Labour Party's Housing and Town Planning Sub-Committee (H&TPSC) in the years 1942--43. The H&TPSC's efforts to draft a distinctive postwar housing policy for the Labour Party ended in failure caused in large measure by a conflict between the advocates of "reconstruction" and the majority of the sub-committee's membership, including the Rev. Charles Jenkinson of Leeds, who argued for the primacy of the "decentralisation" and "dispersal" of industry and population in postwar reconstruction plans.;Finally, the postwar housing program of Attlee's Labour government undergoes examination. Labour's program did not represent a fresh approach to the provision of state-subsidized housing. Owing to the Labour Party's superficial attention to local authority experience during the interwar years and its inability to reach any internal consensus regarding postwar housing policy during the Second World War, the party's postwar program reproduced many of the same weaknesses of British local authority housing policy during the inter-war period.