These days one wonders how they managed to keep track of all the requirements in pre-computer database days. Respect is due to all those human search engines & filing clerks
The other startling thing about this is that apparently there was no need to allow for inflation in the amounts specified in the original Act of 1899, so that ‘for the words “one halfpenny”, in both places where they occur, there shall be substituted the words “0·3p”’
The SDA was one of the earliest interventions in the housing market by a government keen to help the respectable working classes to get a foot on the property ladder. This was the government led by the Conservative Marquess of Salisbury, who had a lifelong interest in this subject
The act allowed local councils to advance money to “a resident in any house … for the purpose of enabling him to acquire the ownership of the house” (I wonder if the male embraced the female in this instance? No reason why not – women could & did own property). The advance could be of up to 80% on a market value of no more than £400. The house must be in good sanitary condition & repair, & must not be used for the sale of intoxicating liquor
An original TOP SECRET Cabinet document from October 1945, now released on the National Archives website (HTML version) , contains a proposal by the minister of health to increase the value of a house which could be financed under the SDA from the £800 set in 1936 to £1200 – this was the Aneurin Bevan who had said that no encouragement would be given to the speculative builders, who built for sale, and that the responsibility would fall on the municipalities since building for rent was the overwhelming priority
So the limits on the amount that a local council was allowed to lend to the purchaser had been increased to reflect rising property prices since 1899. The sums which had to be amended when decimalisation came in related to the councils own finances – they could not spend more than the proceeds of a half-penny rate on the scheme. The amount raised would have risen automatically as the rateable values rose generally in line with increases in property prices, & also in real terms as the area grew & the number of properties on the rates list grew too
Back in 1985 when the SDA was finally repealed I had a brief moment in the sun when it seemed that I was the only person who had ever actually heard of it
This was not down to professionalism. It had cropped up in the legal documents relating to 2 places where we had lived, which had both at one point in the past been financed with an SDA loan
The second had been given an exemption from the condition which proscribed the sale of liquor – beer & porter could be sold, for consumption off the premises, through a specified window in the side wall
The first SDA house we lived in had been bought either during, or soon after, WWII & had sitting tenants as well as providing a home to the family of the working class landlord
That house, originally built during the boom of the 1850s, whose developer went bust when the banks failed, is in what is now one of the most desirable Crescents of trendy Notting Hill. Much improved, modernised & titivated, shorn of its raggle-taggle band of sitting tenants it would, even in these straitened times, be on the market for a sum well in to 7 figures – at least 2000 times the figure Bevan had in mind
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