A/HRC/25/54/Add.2 of income or other status. This notion has been translated over time into a combination of housing, land and planning policies designed to provide adequate housing and to address backlogs or poor quality of existing housing stock, and a welfare system that included housing benefits. Early housing policy can be traced back as far as the nineteenth century. In 1909, the first national Housing and Town Planning Act introduced subsidies to build new homes and gave local authorities the power to draw up development plans to implement them. During and after the First World War, housing policy remained high on the agenda. The rent strikes in Glasgow in 1915, for example, led to the first recognition of the Government’s role in ensuring affordability via the Rent Restrictions Acts; while the Tudor Walters report of 1918 advocated for lasting standards of construction and a social mix of residents. Remarkably, in the interwar period approximately 4 million homes were built.13 12. 13. The post-Second World War period was marked by massive house building to address bomb damage and pre-existing slum conditions. There was consensus around planned public investment in higher quality housing and the allocation of public land for this purpose. As one author points out, “there was a widespread belief that Government had a responsibility for ensuring that the limited resources available in this period of austerity were fairly shared”.14 Other measures included the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, requiring councils to publish their development plans and to allocate land for residential uses, and linking developments to infrastructure, transportation and access to employment in Great Britain. 14. The Town and Country Planning Act also regulated the provision of compensation and infrastructure through “betterment” or “planning gain” by private developers. The Act was amended on various occasions, including in 1990, with the introduction of specific planning obligations, commonly known as section 106 agreements or planning gain. These agreements have contributed ever since to the United Kingdom provision of affordable housing. The section 106 mechanism seeks to ensure that development meets the requirements of local planning policy, by making it acceptable in planning terms.15 15. Housing was also a pillar of the post-war welfare State. In 1942, the Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services included a series of measures to tackle “squalor”. The report argued for State provision of adequate housing to the sick, unemployed, retired or widowed. It gave rise to the National Assistance Act of 1948, setting the basis for a social safety net, including adequate housing. Local councils were ordered to provide suitable accommodation to those who could not provide for themselves. More than one million new homes were built in the five years after the war (50 per cent of them council dwellings) and similar output was maintained for the next two decades, with peaks in the early 1950s and the late 1960s of over 300,000 units per year.16 Enlarging the social housing stock was a priority, even in times of economic constraints. 16. Between the mid-1940s and the late 1970s, council housing was the main source of affordable homes for low- and middle-income households and remained a central feature of overall housing and planning policy. In some areas, council housing served as a social equalizer, with mixed neighbourhoods even in “high value” inner-urban areas. The use of 13 14 15 16 Duncan Bowie, “The politics of housing development in an age of austerity” (Chartist, 2011), p. 19. Ibid., p. 26. See Town and Country Planning Act 1990, Part III, sect. 106. Matt Griffith and Pete Jefferys, Solutions for the Housing Shortage (London, Shelter, 2013), figure 3, p. 13. 5