The rise and fall of the property-owning democracy

Flip Chart Fairy Tales:

Sometime in the late 1980s, a friend who was on the libertarian right of the Conservative Party explained the idea of the property-owning democracy to me. The point, he said, was to detach the respectable working class from their poorer neighbours, encourage them to identify with the middle-class and thereby turn them into Tories.

It worked for a while. Middle earners had been doing relatively well since the 1970s and home ownership was within the reach of many once mortgages became more readily available. Helped along by cheap council house sales, home ownership rose. In recent years, though, things have started shifting back the other way. The property-owning democracy is now looking like a one-off event rather than the ongoing process it was meant to be.

Property analyst Neal Hudson pointed out that, as a proportion of all tenure, home ownership peaked in 2003 but mortgage ownership peaked in 1996. As older property owners paid off their housing debts, they were not being replaced at the same rate by new  mortgagors.

The rise in home ownership exacerbated the rise in inequality. Until the 1990s, the cost of housing only made a slight difference to the inequality figures but from the 1990s, housing tenure became a significant factor in the make up of people’s disposable income and the divide between owners and renters widened.