A Large Scale Voluntary Transfer (LSVT) is a term used in the
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...
to refer to the transfer of council housing to a
housing association
In Ireland and the United Kingdom, housing associations are private, Non-profit organization, non-profit making organisations that provide low-cost "Public housing in the United Kingdom, social housing" for people in need of a home. Any budge ...
. For a Large Scale Voluntary Transfer to occur residents must be balloted. Supporters argue that transfer allows for greater investment to build more housing but critics argue that voluntary transfer amounts to back-door privatisation.
LSVT policies arose in the 1980s as part of the Conservative Government's programme of 'demunicipalisation', whereby the ownership, management, and repair of public housing was transferred from
local government
Local government is a generic term for the lowest tiers of public administration within a particular sovereign state. This particular usage of the word government refers specifically to a level of administration that is both geographically-l ...
(or
municipalities
A municipality is usually a single administrative division having corporate status and powers of self-government or jurisdiction as granted by national and regional laws to which it is subordinate.
The term ''municipality'' may also mean the go ...
) to private contractors and landlords. Tenants of various council-housing blocks and estates had opposed the Government's attempts to impose a number of estate privatisations and in 1988 the law was changed to ensure that council estates could not be sold without a 'yes' vote from tenants in a ballot. Subsequently, a number of Conservative-led rural authorities started to circumvent these restrictions by creating private
housing associations
In Ireland and the United Kingdom, housing associations are private, non-profit making organisations that provide low-cost "social housing" for people in need of a home. Any budget surplus is used to maintain existing housing and to help fin ...
, since they could more easily win the assent of tenants to sell estates to these than to more obviously profit-driven owners. This strategy became the basis for the national LSVT scheme, and by 1997 LSVT had seen the sale of over 300,000 publicly owned dwellings to housing associations.
[{{Cite book, last=Hodkinson, first=Stuart, title=Safe as Houses: Private Greed, Political Negligence and Housing Policy after Grenfell, publisher=Manchester University Press, year=2019, isbn=9781526141866, location=Manchester, pages=31]
References
Housing in the United Kingdom
Public housing in the United Kingdom