On becoming UK prime minister in 1997, Tony Blair inherited two fundamental ideological assumptions that had driven government policy on housing from the Thatcher/Major period: that homeownership was the essential basis of citizenship and should be promoted; and that the market could be relied upon not just to deliver market housing, but also to enable the provision of affordable housing. The reason for New Labour adopting such basic Thatcherite neoliberal ideological presumptions still remains difficult to understand, and historians can no doubt ponder the extent to which these established principles, though relatively newly established, were adopted by default or by intention. New Labour recognised that Thatcher's introduction of council house sales was a popular policy in winning over the votes of middle-income and ‘aspirational’ working-class voters and that any proposal to repeal would be an electoral mistake. They accepted the simplistic view that as most poorer households lived in council housing, it was their housing status that conditioned them to dependency and that homeownership would somehow liberate them from this constraint. The government argued that they were responding to consumer choice; if surveys showed that 90% of households wanted to be homeowners, then that proved that homeownership was a good thing, and that in promoting it, the government was doing what the people wanted. Few of the surveys actually asked households whether they could afford to buy a home and whether they thought that they might be able to do so in the foreseeable future.

The Blair, Brown and successive governments have all focused their policies on encouraging more households to become homeowners, creating a range of routes to homeownership, including a succession of schemes targeted at professional middle-income households providing public services, who were defined as ‘key workers’. This used up increasing amounts of government investment resources to the extent that by 2006/07, the government, through the Housing Corporation, was funding nearly as many households to buy homes as new rented homes to be available in perpetuity for lower-income households.

The Brown government also encouraged – or at least did not use the Bank of England or the Financial Services Authority to in any way discourage – the availability of mortgages to prospective purchasers on terms that were not sustainable for the borrower or for the lender.