NINO STAFFA housing in relation to income is very high, so that prior saving to accumulate the purchase money would be impossible for most people, and would definitely be an impossibility for anyone at an early stage in their working careers. The capitai cost of housing has therefore had to be financed in other ways. One way in which this was done was for someone with the capitai available (a landlord) to buy the property and then rent the accommodation to somebody without the capitai. However, the decline of the private rented sector has shown that other methods have been found which have proved much more successful. A highly develoP.ed financial system was required, therefore, to loan money out to a would-be occupier and ways had to be determined of assessing the creditwo~- thiness of individuals. The continuous growth of owner-occupation has been rendered possible b,v the growth of a complicated web of institutions which collaborate together to expand the owner-occupied sector and to allow access to that sector only to certain types of people. This «web» involves the State, the building societies, the insurance companies, the banks, the estate agents, property developers and the more peripheral « finance houses ». The various insects to be found in this « web » are a curious mixture of state employees, managers of large financial corporations, directors of cornpanies, small capitalists, professionals of various types and usurers. The ideologies of these spiders, beetles, waps and creepy crawlies range frorn professional/ rn,magerial corporativism to vaguel-conceived 18th century liberal concepts. Racialisrn, chauvinisrn and prejudice against certain types of blue-collar workers, play an irnportant role in their decisions concerning who should or should not be allowed access to finance and even the possibility of purchasing. Such unanimity of purpose can only be brought about by wholesale bureaucratisation of the important sectors involved in housing finance/purchase. Floating around the important institutions are various species of parasites who live off the locai authorities. The estate agents, mortgage brokers, « finance houses » and so on provide peripheral service which whilst not essential to the whole process take advantage of the gaps left unattended to by the main institutions. The parasites know the policies of the building societies and the state (often through persona! involvement) and comply with their rules so as to continue earning their livelihood. Bureaucratisation of the parasites would, at the present time, be inefficient and unnecessary (although various professional bodies do try to 36
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