How to make decent-quality housing affordable to people on low or fluctuating incomes has been one of the challenges facing policy makers for a century or more and is no nearer a satisfactory solution today than it was in the 19th century. As we have seen with homelessness, the problem was for a period side-stepped by those responsible for providing philanthropic or municipal housing by the convenient assumption that their mission was to provide for the industrious working classes – who in today’s political language would be called ‘hard working families’. The very poor and those who could not be expected to sustain regular rent payments were literally beyond the pale.

This framework was clearly not sustainable, particularly as the public sector housing programme expanded dramatically in the inter-war and post-Second World War era, with large-scale slum-clearance activity removing the bulk of the cheap and squalid housing in which the poorest had previously been living. William Beveridge wrestled with the challenge of finding an appropriate means to cover housing costs as part of his profoundly influential proposals for social security in postwar Britain. The problem was the variation in housing costs by locality and tenure, as well as by size of accommodation, which made it impossible to devise a flat-rate level of benefit based on subsistence needs, as for other basic requirements such as food and clothing. Beveridge concluded that only a notional element for rent should be incorporated into his national insurance scheme, which inevitably led to a requirement for a ‘top-up’ from National Assistance to enable those without a regular work-based income to meet their housing costs.

Whereas Beveridge had assumed that the need for such supplements would be limited in numbers, and would be required only to cover temporary income shortfall caused, for example, by unemployment, the reality proved very different and by the early 1980s (by which time National Assistance had been replaced by Supplementary Benefit) approaching three million households were in receipt of a housing supplement under this scheme.

In parallel, some local councils had begun to introduce local rent-rebate schemes, although the numbers receiving such benefits remained relatively small until the 1970s. This reflected two main trends. The first was the continuing focus on providing for working families.