Dr Alan Edward Holmans , CBE 1935 - 2015
Seminar in Honour of Alan Holmans, CBE
On Monday December 7th 2015 Alan’s friends and colleagues held a seminar the London School of Economics to celebrate his life and work. Some fifty people, some of whom had known him for more than fifty years while others had only just come to know, and use, his work gathered at the LSE for a seminar which both discussed his many contributions to housing research and policy and carried forward some of his projections using new data that has come available since his death. The joseph Rowntree Foundation, with which he had been involved for many decades, generously supported the seminar and a short publication which will be published early next year. Here we include the agenda for the event and the slides presented at the seminar as well as a short note on his career.
Alan was particularly well known by both academics and practitioners as THE economic statistician who provided the projections of housing demand and need which support subsidy and land allocation decisions with respect to new housing supply. This was however only a small part of a very distinguished career - both in the civil service and as an academic - mainly in the context of housing policy.
Alan did both his first degree and his PhD at Oxford before going to the University of Glasgow as a lecturer in political economy. Soon however he joined the Treasury as an Economic Advisor and then moved on to the Ministry of Housing for a thirty year career in the civil service. He completed that career as Chief Housing Economist at the Department of Environment (now DCLG) advising on all aspects of housing policy and finance.
But when civil service rules meant that he had to leave on his 60th birthday in 1994 Alan was nowhere near ready to give up work. So he began a second twenty year career at the Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research at the University of Cambridge. He retired from the Centre at least twice but was actually still working with them a week before he died.
The strand of work for which Alan is best known is his regular projections of demand and need for housing especially in England (but also Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland), which have formed the basis for estimates of the total new housing requirement as well as of the land and finance needed to achieve these totals.
Alan published the first forecast in the very first issue of Social Trends in 1970 but his far more detailed analysis in the 1977 Housing Policy Review formed the basis for all future forecasts. These regular outputs - whenever new household projections were published - together with a great deal of related analysis on investment requirements, suitable subsidy regimes and implications for land use planning formed a core element of his work both at the Department of Environment and at CCHPR.
Another part of Alan’s work which is if anything is growing in importance is his contribution to the history of housing through Housing Policy in Britain published in 1987, his seminal compilation Abstract of Historical Statistics of British Housing published in 2005 and, in 2012, a History of Household Projections. These together with the Technical Volumes of the 1977 Housing Policy Review provide an immensely rich set of source documents evidencing the way that housing and housing policy have developed.
Detailing Alan’s work in this way perhaps misses out Alan’s gentle personality; his continued support for housing research and to those working in the field - especially younger colleagues; his dry sense of humour; his interests in cricket and racing; his love of single malts and all the other attributes which made him a joy to work with and a pleasure to have as a friend. We will miss him greatly but his work will stand as an everlasting memorial to him and the integrity he brought to everything throughout his life.
A more detailed obituary is available at Cambridge Centre for Housing & Planning Research's website.
You can click on the links below to download the agenda and PowerPoint slides presented at the event: