The Law Society recently held its third annual housing conference.

It was the best attended yet and reflected the growing involvement of legal aid practitioners in housing work.

Twenty years or so after law centres pioneered the field, it is interesting to examine the state of housing work as it has developed since the 1970s.Then, as now, housing was one of the pressure points of a society in rapid change and, in consequence, played its part in the development of legal services - though in a different way.

The boom of the early 1970s was causing structural change to the housing market.

A major shift in housing tenure was taking place within the inner city areas from private rented accommodation to owner occupation.The consequences were the harassment, winkling out and eviction of tenants.

Lawyers in private practice, as organised at that time, were not geared up to help.

The majority of their income still came from conveyancing and probate.

In the mid-1970s, the Royal Commission on Legal Services reported that legal aid was, in total, probably no more than around 6% of solicitors' total income.

As an indication of how much legal aid work is now being done, the latest proportion given in the Law Society's annual statistics is just under 12%, almost exactly double.In consequence of the lack of assistance from private practitioners, the legal response to the need for help with landlord and tenant law was initially developed elsewhere - first, by using students and newly qualified lawyers to help in advice centres of one kind or another and then by law centres.

By the mid-1970s, these were established throughout many of the inner London boroughs and had begun to expand into the provinces.

The Legal Action Group originated as an information resource backing up such developments.Housing work was, thus, initially oriented to the needs of private tenants and funded in large measure by local authorities for whom the retention of their indigenous working class residents was an important political priority.

Recognition of the initial possibility of help with protection from eviction and from excessive rents was followed rapidly by exploration of the possibilities of doing something about the chronic disrepair of properties let in both the private and - it was soon recognised - the public sectors.

This led law centres to the invidious position of taking action against their own funders.

This may partly account for their stunted growth in this country as compared with other jurisdictions, such as Ontario or Australia, where funding was available from central and not local government.Housing remains at the cutting edge of social change.

One of the current social movements is the widening divisions of society.

This is striking enough even in the government's own statistics produced in its annual social trends.

Between 1979 and 1989, the poorest 20% of the population of this country saw their relative household income drop by a quarter after they had paid their housing costs.

The richest 20% saw their income grow by a fifth.

The treatment of housing costs for the poor has played its part in achieving such a result.

Council rents have risen dramatically: housing benefit has proved no adequate compensation for the poorest.Housing trends operate as clearly as litmus paper to record changing economic and social circumstances.

The economic boom of the 1980s, fuelled largely by North Sea oil supplemented by massive public and private debt, stoked in its turn the well-documented surge in owner-occupation.

The government encouraged the sale of 1.5 million local authority or new town homes to their occupants during the 1980s.The pattern of overall home tenure continues dramatically to change even though council house sales are petering out.

A recent parliamentary answer revealed that only 41,000 council homes were sold in 1992/93, even with maximum discounts on price of 70%.

Local authorities have become a declining source of accommodation because restrictions on their provision of new houses to replace those sold has led to an all-time low rate of 19,000 completions a year in the late 1980s as against 111,000 in the 1970s.

The removal of protection from rented accommodation seems, at least temporarily, to have halted its relative slide in importance but has created a growing sector with little long term security, the problems of which may become more apparent if the housing market for owner occupation picks up again.

Rented accommodation still provides about a third of all the residential dwellings in the country.Chronic disrepair of that tenanted property remains a continuing problem.

The civil justice review in 1987 noted that the latest government survey of housing conditions revealed that around 2.8 million tenanted properties were in need of repair costing more than £1000.

There is little evidence that this has since changed very much.It is legislation, litigation and, consequently, lawyers that have, in many cases, become the only levers for the poor and powerless to obtain accommod ation of a reasonable quality if they do not occupy it already.

Homelessness, in the sense of people - particularly the young - sleeping on the streets in the inner cities, is now more evident than at any time since the institution of the welfare state.

The estimate of Shelter, the housing pressure group, for the number of 'unofficial homeless' is 1.7 million.For many, the only hope of obtaining secure accommodation lies in the homelessness legislation, seen through in the late 1970s by a consortium of pressure groups concerned with housing and poverty.

160,000 households achieved housing in this way in 1991.

This has its legal consequences.

Around 20% of all judicial review applications now relate to homelessness, a proportion that was only 17% in 1991, as people turned to lawyers to obtain housing.In consequence, judicial review has now become part of the routine armoury of the fully equipped housing lawyer.

Local authorities have been left with the role of providing accommodation as the last resort in the face of major pressures on their funding.

This has led them even more forcefully into the arena as the unfortunate defendants in housing cases rather than, as they saw themselves in the early 1970s, as the defenders of private tenants.We can, therefore, begin to identify very crudely the maximum levels of potential demand for legal services in some of the main areas of housing law.-- There are the 2.8 million dwellings which may be in sufficient disrepair to merit court action.-- There are around 160,000 households found to be homeless and priority need, though many such decisions will be uncontroversial.-- There were 260,000 applications in the county court for the possession of land in 1992, 116,000 of them relating to tenanted property, though many of these will not be defended.This makes, on these three issues alone, an absolute maximum of around 3 million potential housing cases on which solicitors might advise or litigate.

Of course, not all tenants involved in such problems will be legally aidable.

What is more, the number eligible will be dropping all the time as the cuts to eligibility bite harder.Nevertheless, there seems some scope for improvement.

Only 19,138 civil legal aid certificates were issued in housing matters in 1992/93.

There were 112,000 green forms billed in the same period.

These numbers are, however, rising proportionately quickly.

The year before the comparable figures were 15,415 and 94,415 respectively.

We are, however, still looking at under-provision.

Or, to put it another way, there remains a market out there.Notwithstanding the extent of the remaining need and their late arrival, private practitioners have moved decisively into the field of housing law.

The percentage of green forms devoted to housing cases has doubled from around 4% when the scheme was introduced to around 8% now, reflecting an enormous growth in numbers from around 5000 to just under 100,000 - a 20-fold rise.

What is more, an increasing number of these are coming from private practitioners and not the law centres which, despite their small numbers, have hitherto dominated in this area of work.Law centres, having opened up the area, now have a declining influence.

Partly due to the vigorous support of the Law Society, housing law is now seen as part of mainstream legal aid practice in a way that has not previously been the case.Such a success brings about consequences, as Lord Mackay reacts to the consequent rise in cost.

There are four initiatives which should be of particular concern to housing lawyers.Fi rst, Lord Mackay has ripped the heart out of the green form legal advice scheme by reducing eligibility to levels below the minimum acceptable.Secondly, the restriction in hourly rate payments for much civil work threatens to tear the heart out of many practitioners.Thirdly, legal aid practitioners as a whole are approaching the introduction of contracts governing their work.

Franchising represents the first major reform of the delivery of legal aid since 1949.

The effects are not yet clear.

On the one hand, this could be, and is openly designed by the Legal Aid Board to be, a measure to bring down costs.

In doing so, it might bear down heavily on small, non-routine areas of work like housing.

On the other hand, franchising could lead to a raising of standards and consolidation of landlord and tenant work as within the expected remit of a general legal aid practice.

A creditable 55% of the solicitors in the first wave of franchise applications asked to be considered for a housing franchise.Finally, a number of other potential government measures may threaten the role of lawyers in housing cases.

Housing actions may be extended and, modelled on small claims procedures, will exclude tenants' lawyers through the lack of legal aid.

Cuts to green form then bite disproportionately higher.

In a separate measure, the Legal Aid Board is set to explore the use of non-lawyer advice agencies within the franchising arrangements.

Housing might well be one of the areas in which it experiments with lay provision.These elements leave housing practitioners with no escape.

They face the old Chinese curse of living in interesting times.

They should hang on to the indications of hope.

Need remains as strong as ever for services.

What is more, their economic self-interest reinforces their role as the protectors of vital social and economic rights for their clients.

That is what makes their work in this field so vital.

There can be no doubt that tenants have benefited from the advances made by their lawyers over the last two decades.