The Struggle Against the Housing Finance Act

Abstract

Apart from the Industrial Relations Act no legislation of the Heath government of 1970-74 provoked such widespread and organised opposition within the labour movement as the Housing Finance Act (HFA). Literally thousands of marches, demonstrations, pickets and meetings were held in which hundreds of thousands of people took part. Millions of leaflets were distributed all over the country and large numbers of organisations were set up to coordinate the opposition. Hundreds of Labour councillors, by initially refusing to implement the Act, laid themselves open to surcharges and disqualification from public office. Even when all but a very few Labour councils capitulated to one or other of the battery of central government threats, up to one hundred thousand local authority tenants continued the struggle against the Act by refusing at one time or another to pay the increases imposed under it. In a few places, tenants went on total rent strike. The opposition continued throughout the whole life of the Housing Finance Act, and there can be no doubt that it was almost totally rejected by the labour movement in England and Wales, and in Scotland which had its own similar but not identical Finance Act.