The 'fourth experiment'? The Ministry of Health, the Commissioner for Special Areas and the North Eastern Housing Association.

This paper is a study of policy making and central-local relations in the 1930s. The North Eastern Housing Association was a government sponsored body set up in 1935 to build and manage houses on behalf of local authorities in the Durham and Tyneside special area. The paper questions conventional explanations of the reasons for establishing the Association, and draws attention to a number of features which differentiated it from conventional non-profit housing providers at that time. The process of establishing the NEHA is shown to have taken place alongside the production of legislation which failed to give housing associations in general the kind of central role in housing policy being sought for them, and in the face of known opposition from local authorities in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]