…housing was easily the top issue throughout the 1945 Parliament and at the 1950 general election. A quarter of Britain’s dwellings did not have their own lavatory, nearly half lacked a fixed bath. The shortage of homes was estimated at somewhere between 700,000 and double that figure. In Glasgow, nearly half the population were thought to need rehousing. And the progress made under Labour was impressive. By 1951, a million new homes had been built, four-fifths of them for local authorities. When Harold Macmillan went on to set and meet a target of 300,000 homes a year, the majority too were council-owned. The trend continued under later Tory and Labour administrations, so that by the 1970s a third of the total housing stock was owned by the council.
From a TLS review of Austerity Britain.
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