Timeline: May 1979 to 1983
In May 1979, Margaret Thatcher won the general election on an explicit ideological platform: shrink the state, slash bureaucratic "red tape," cut public spending, and shift financial accountability from public funds to private markets.
In November 1979, the newly appointed Secretary of State for the Environment, Michael Heseltine, launched a sweeping review of the UK's building regulation framework. The stated intention in Parliament was to simplify the complex rules, make building control entirely self-financing through fee structures, and reduce the burden of state oversight on private developers.
The 1979 policy shift marked the exact moment the government set out to dismantle the old 1936 regulatory model. By reducing the complexity of state inspections and forcing building control to operate like a commercial transaction, the government laid the intellectual and legislative groundwork to strip away the liability that the courts had tried to impose in the Anns case.