Walsall Home Ownership Drops – Smashing Thatcher’s Dream…

The housing data for Walsall has just been released from the 2021 Census and it makes interesting reading.?In 1975, Margaret Thatcher declared her conviction in a ‘property-owning democracy’.?Throughout the 1980s homeownership exploded and continued to grow for several decades thereafter.?What has happened to that dream nearly 50 years later?

Through prudence, saving and hard work, she believed that everyday British families should be able to purchase their own homes. Thus giving them security, self-esteem and independence and freeing them from the nanny state of local authority landlords.?

Although that idea was a Labour idea initially in the mid-1970s, Margaret Thatcher introduced?legislation?(Right-To-Buy)?in 1980 to allow local authority tenants to buy their own council homes at significant discounts.?In the 1980s, homeownership boomed, although it had been?on the increase?for the previous two decades, the country and economy was led by Mrs. Thatcher into the direction to which house buying became a national passion.?

Between 1981?and 1990,?home ownership went up from?11.88m?to?15.47m.

The other?lesser-known?fact of the Right-to-Buy legislation?in 1980?was it stopped local authorities from building new?council?houses.?

Fundamental to her idea was that central and local government, which had built between 30% and 45% of all homes in the 1950s,?60s and 70s, should stop providing homes and let the market provide them.

The proportion of homes owned rose from?55.4%?in 1980 to?65.7%?during Thatcher’s reign as PM.

A few days ago, the housing element of the 2021 Census was?released,?and it has shown the proportion of home ownership had fallen to its lowest level since 1985.?

The proportion of?households?owned?in the?country?fell from 64.1%?to 62.5%?between 2011 and 2021, the?lowest level?for?the past?37?years,?when the figure was 61.6%.

In the meantime, the proportion of privately rented households has surged to its highest since?the late 1960s,?with?20.4% of households?renting from a private?buy-to-let?landlord.?

This means the proportion of?British?households?in?private rented accommodation?has more than doubled in the past?two decades, from the?9.5%?recorded in the 2001 census. So,?let’s look at the?local stats?for the?Walsall?council area.

The?percentage?of households owned in?Walsall?has dropped from?62.4%?in 2011 to?59.3%?in 2021.

The percentage drop in terms of numbers looks like this…

The number of?owned?households in?Walsall?has dropped from?67,866?in 2011 to?67,146?in 2021,?a?decrease of 1.07%!

So, what explains the reducing homeownership levels, or better yet with the population increase, who is housing/ propping up the Walsall property market.?

One simple answer – the number of privately rented accommodation has grown even more!

The number of privately rented households in?Walsall?has grown from?12,569?in 2011 to?18,336?in 2021, a?rise?of?45.88%.

Over the coming weeks and months, I intend to drill down further into these stats nationally and locally.

Just some headlines to whet your appetite.

As I said above, 64.1% of householders in Britain owned their own home in 2021 – of which 30.8% owned their home outright and 33.3% with a mortgage).?

In 2021, of the 62.5% of homeowner households, those without a mortgage has increased to 32.8%, and those with a mortgage has dropped to 29.7%.

So,?has Thatcher’s dream been smashed?

Of course,?nationally,?home ownership is at the lowest level in many decades due to several factors, including the late 1980s and 2008 housing crash, negative equity, the credit crunch and increased mortgage regulation.?

Yet, at the same time, as every single?local?authority in Britain?has seen an increase in?the number and proportion?of private renters over the past?20 years, the entrepreneurial property-owning spirit has moved into the ownership of private buy-to-let property.?The market has undoubtedly filled the?housing?gap?that?the?councils and?local?authorities?left?in the 1980s.

These are interesting times, and I shall share more insights in the coming weeks and months.?

Let me know your thoughts on the information above.

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