URL originale : https://books.openedition.org/psn/7536

Access, Choice and Exit: Reconfiguring the Role of Social Housing in an Increasingly Marketized Society
p. 189-207
Texte intégral
1Social housing in Britain is undergoing an extended period of change and experimentation. The pace of change has arguably increased over the last four or five years. Some of the well-established characteristics of the social housing system are being challenged. The contention underlying this chapter is that, in part as a consequence of the progressive embedding of consumerism across society, we are witnessing the role of social housing in Britain – and more specifically England – being fundamentally reconfigured. This argument is developed with respect to recent change in three aspects of the social housing system – access, choice and exit. I suggest that, taken together, these changes herald an important transformation. The aim of the chapter is to stand back a little from the detail of policy change and comment on the future trajectory for social housing. In this respect, it is a further contribution to a debate that is already under way in Britain (Malpass, 2005; Murie, 2006; Fitzpatrick and Pawson, 2007)
2Before considering these three areas of change in social housing the chapter sets the context. It briefly considers socio-political change and changes in the broader housing system. It then outlines some established characteristics of social housing against which to contrast recent developments. The focus will be on England. The systems in Scotland and Wales are slightly different and, perhaps more importantly for our purposes, the devolved administrations have embraced the changes discussed below more recently and less fully. As a consequence, the trajectory of social housing is even less clear.
The changing context
3In the wake of the First World War, the British government committed the State to taking a more directly interventionist role in the housing market and acting as a provider of permanent housing on a significant scale. From 1919 until the end of the 1970s the number of rented properties managed by local authorities expanded continuously: in 1981 they accommodated 30% of British households in 6.4 million dwellings. From the 1960s the government also directed significant resources towards not-for-profit housing associations so that they could expand their role in accommodating low income households. Housing provided by these two types of landlord comprises what is now often referred to as the ‘social housing’ sector. During the post-Second World War period, to the late 1970s, Britain could be seen as operating in accord with a ‘mass housing’ approach to state intervention: social housing as a decommodified mainstream tenure (Harloe, 1995).
4The precise origins of the demise of this model are still being debated. However, it has been clear since the 1980s that the role of social housing in Britain has been transformed. A process of residualization has occurred: more than 2 million dwellings have been sold to local authority sitting tenants under the Right to Buy legislation introduced by the Thatcher government’s Housing Act 1980. Sales were selective: the early history of the Right to Buy was of purchase by higher income households in better quality properties in the better neighbourhoods and less urban areas (Forrest and Murie, 1991). The policy subsequently penetrated less desirable parts of the stock and households in more marginal economic circumstances (see Jones and Murie, 2006, for a recent comprehensive discussion and evaluation).
5Access to social housing has – especially since the advent in the mid-1970s of substantial legal obligations to assist homeless households – been informed by requirements to give preferential access to certain types of household, designated as being in particular need. A shrinking social housing stock meant that an increasing proportion of the available lettings during the 1980s and 1990s went to households in need. The net effect of this was to transform substantially the profile of the social housing population. Social housing became increasingly stigmatized as the tenure of last resort, for those who were unable to provide themselves with housing through the market. From the late 1990s to the mid-2000s there was policy and academic concern for low or ‘changing’ demand for social housing: areas of social housing that experienced a lack of interest from potential residents, properties standing empty for extended periods of time or being demolished (Bramley and Pawson, 2002; Murie et al., 1998). This phenomenon could co-exist in some localities with strong overall demand for housing, suggesting that in part it could be attributed to problems associated with social housing. In an inversion of the earlier hierarchy of tenure preferences, there was evidence of households eligible for social housing choosing to enter the less obviously stigmatized private rented sector (Kemp and Keoghan, 2001).
6Ownership in the social housing sector has also been restructured, with the transformation being furthest advanced in England. As a result of a programme of stock transfer initiated in 1988, many local authorities have transferred part or all of their housing stock to housing associations, with the intention that the local authority then focuses on strategy rather than provision (see, most recently, Pawson, 2006). This means that the British system of rented housing for low-income households has arguably become increasingly similar to that of other western European countries.
7The genesis of the stock transfer programme was in local resistance to increasing central government constraint. Yet, it was soon incorporated into central government strategies for the reconfiguration and retrenchment of state provision. Central government saw it as a means of reducing the role of the local state and creating a mixed economy of providers, in line with the prescriptions of the New Public Management. The UK government was an early convert to many of the tenets of New Public Management and by the late 1980s, the desirability of the marketization of the public sector was firmly embedded in policy thinking. Having already privatised a wide range of public utilities and nationalised industries, the Thatcher government in its third term of office switched attention to the introduction of market-like mechanisms and incentives into the provision of welfare services. The health, education and social care sectors bore the brunt of the quasimarket experiments of the late 1980s and early 1990s (see Le Grand and Bartlett, 1993; Bartlett et al., 1998). Social housing was not immune: the initial focus was on creating greater provider diversity, and moves in the early 1990s to introduce contracting-out for previously public sector professional services encompassed local authority housing management (see Bramley, 1993; Baker et al., 1992).
8Underpinning many of these reforms was a concept of public sector providers and consumers that has a strong affinity with models of rational self-interested behaviour developed in mainstream economics. This represented a radical departure from the assumptions that were seen as characterising the ‘old’ public administration (eg. Le Grand, 2003). The implications of this reconceptualisation are far-reaching. It challenges traditional understandings of the relationship between the state and the citizen. It became fashionable to talk in terms of the power of consumer ‘exit’ to an alternative supplier as a key mechanism to discipline providers into providing better welfare services, rather than relying on well-established, though rather ill-specified, ‘voice’ mechanisms for citizens to make their views about service inadequacies known through local political processes.1
A social transformation
9Changes in the way users of welfare services are conceptualised can, and should, be understood in the context of broader social change. Since the early 1980s privatization, including the Right to Buy, has meant that British households have become increasingly reliant upon market provision to access goods and services. Services that when nationalised were seen as subject to social policy priorities, and in some sense existing at least in part to promote the public interest, have been rethought as commodities subject to the logic of market relations. At a discursive level there has been recurrent – indeed, incessant – validation of the role of the consumer and the act of consumption. In the background, mainstream economics provides the intellectual technology to underpin claims that increased marketisation and consumerisation will deliver higher levels of social welfare. From a sociological perspective these processes have been framed in terms of the neo-liberalisation of society and the elevation of the market to the status of preeminent mode of social organisation. Consumption has been elevated to the key social activity, with the exercise of choice in the market a defining characteristic of social participation. Critics see this as nothing short of the triumph for market fundamentalism, with severe consequences for the progressive politics (eg. Leys, 2001). It has been argued to have profound implications for individual self-identity and for the nature of social interaction (eg. Bauman, 2007).
10In the housing sphere, tenure restructuring means that owner occupation increased from 60% to 70% of the housing stock over the period 1981–2005. For a variety of reasons, including reform of tenancy laws, the long-term and apparently inexorable decline of the private rented sector also went into reverse in the late 1980s. The proportion of dwellings in the sector has shown a small but significant increase (from 9.8% in 1991 to 11.3% in 2005–an increase of more than 0.5 million dwellings). Alongside this numerical growth, the private rented sector has seen its extremely tarnished reputation somewhat rehabilitated. Hence, whereas 71% of dwellings in England were allocated via market mechanisms in 1981, by 2005 the figure had increased to 82%.
11At the same time that social housing has been through a process of residualisation, home ownership has been normalised (Gurney, 1999). The aspiration to be an owner occupier is almost universal. Rental housing of all types is seen as less desirable and those who reside in rental accommodation are ‘flawed’ consumers (Flint, 2004). Yet, in a context where it is the norm and the aspirational tenure, owner occupation has become increasingly out of the reach of many households.
12Rising and polarising real incomes, financial liberalisation and innovation, and sluggish housing supply mean that since the mid-1990s, in many parts of the country house prices have risen rapidly. Affordability, judged in terms of crude indicators such as price-to-income ratios, has worsened sharply. The costs of home ownership are such that average age of entry to the sector is increasing and households are turning to renting, at least temporarily.
The Blair governments and the users of welfare services
13While in some policy areas the post-1997 Labour government has sought to distance itself from ideas associated with the previous Conservative administrations, it has continued to pursue consumer-based concepts of citizenship. Yet, the discourse of consumerism has become less strident. In its place emerged an emphasis upon ‘choice’. ‘Choice in Public Services’ became a central preoccupation in the reform agenda of the new millennium (see, for example, PASC, 2005). Central to the choice agenda is a challenge to established modes of welfare service provision. There is a concern that one of the failings of existing models of welfare is that the service offered is standardised and inflexible: service users lack a range of options, which is what they would expect when purchasing goods or services in a market context. This is seen by government as being a source of dissatisfaction for service users. Welfare services are often also either free at the point of delivery or not priced in a way that encourages service users to trade off quality and price. A third concern is that established modes of welfare service delivery place service users in a passive, dependent position. They rely upon public officials to decide on the service they receive. This type of dependency is seen as being undesirable in itself and as having broader negative impacts upon service users’ social skills and social participation. The choice agenda is therefore intimately about ‘responsibilizing’ service users into taking a more active role in the consumption of welfare.
14While the thinking behind the choice agenda arguably has strong continuities with previous consumerist approaches, discursively it is perceived as less threatening. An explicit move to rethink the users of welfare services as consumers attracted criticism as being privatisation in disguise, and led to fears in some quarters that it threatened closely-guarded and cherished social values and institutions, such as the National Health Service. Adopting a rhetoric of ‘choice’, by contrast, is strategically acute because it offers much less purchase for critique. For who could be against giving people more choice? In a society increasingly defined by the sovereignty of the consumer surely only those who would unreasonably seek to deny users of welfare services their most fundamental of rights – to maintain their ‘flawed’ status – could take a stand against offering greater choice.
15A concern about the negative impacts of residualisation, stigmatization and low demand for social housing led the Blair governments to place considerable emphasis upon creating ‘sustainable’ communities (especially in ODPM, 2003). Social housing has come to be seen as a tenure associated with poor living environments, widespread worklessness and social exclusion. While the essence of a sustainable community is rather elusive, the perception is that moving from a single tenure social housing estate to a mixed tenure, mixed income neighbourhood will lead to the rehabilitation of an area and its image, and to increased social and labour market participation among its residents. The consequence is a neighbourhood that is seen as having a greater likelihood of viability in the long-term. The debates around mixing tenure and sustainable communities continues (eg. Atkinson and Kintrea, 2000, Tunstall, 2003; Allen et al., 2005). Within the social housing sector attempts to create a more mixed tenant profile have also been pursued through the implementation of new means of allocating properties to people, considered further below.
Established characteristics of the social housing system in England
16The history of access to social housing is a complex mix of allocation on the basis of suitability and allocation on the basis of need (see eg. Cowan and Marsh, 2005; Damer, 2000; Fitzpatrick and Pawson, 2007). Ability to pay played little formal role. Since the mid-1960s, systems based upon formal assessments of need have become more widespread. Such systems technicize the allocations process and were seen as good practice because they offer the prospect of more ‘objective’ comparison of the merits of different applicants. Whether this prospect was realised is an important, but separate, debate (eg. Cowan, 2001; Somerville, 2001).
17In the local authority sector, needs assessment was conducted by housing officers with reference to a local allocations policy. This policy should have been framed in the light of a complex body of legislation and case law regarding an authority’s obligations to accord to certain categories of household ‘reasonable preference’. The categories of household covered by the legislation have changed somewhat over time but broadly speaking, it includes families with dependent children and pregnant women, people in temporary or insecure accommodation, people with particular welfare or medical needs, those whose economic situation make it difficult to secure accommodation, and statutorily homeless households (see Laurie, 2004, for a recent discussion). Since it was initially established in legislation in 1977, the scope of the category ‘statutorily homeless households’ has been an area of political contestation. Similarly, the obligations of the state towards those households deemed to be statutorily homeless have been contested. Until the mid-1990s, acceptance as statutorily homeless placed the local authority under an obligation to find the household permanent accommodation: effectively accommodation in the social rented sector on a long-term (secure or assured) tenancy rather than short fixed-term tenancy. In the mid-1990s the Conservative government sought to circumscribe the assistance the state was required to provide and restrict the obligation to providing settled accommodation for a fixed, but renewable period of two years. The offer of a fixed term tenancy, including one in the private rented sector, was to be seen as potentially sufficient to discharge duty to homeless households. The incoming Labour government of 1997 took steps to reverse this change.
18Housing associations are not bound by allocations law to quite the same extent. But much of their property is subject to nominations agreements under which the local authority in which the property is located had the right to nominate a tenant when a housing association vacancy became available. These tenants would in turn be prioritized in line with local authority policy. The scope for housing associations to turn down a nominated tenant varied, depending on a variety of factors, but could be tightly monitored and controlled to ensure that the housing association was fulfilling its obligations under the nominations agreement and the requirement of the regulatory code under which it operated.
19Under this system, it was the role of housing officers to match available properties to the characteristics and needs of the households identified as requiring accommodation, in line with the system of prioritization embedded in the allocation policy. In this respect, once a household made an application for accommodation and this was accepted there was little required of them other than to sit and wait to be contacted with an offer of accommodation. They typically played no active role in the process. If a household was assessed as having relatively low needs and/or needs for accommodation that was in short supply – which in many areas was all types of accommodation – then the wait would be measured in several years rather than months. As the available stock decreased as a result of the Right to Buy, the proportion of lettings going to those assessed as having high needs increased. Indeed in areas of particularly high demand, by the end of the 1990s the bulk of lettings were to statutorily homeless households. Those without the highest level of priority were, in practice, unlikely ever to receive an offer of accommodation. Pressure on the housing stock, coupled with increasing emphasis upon the measurement of lettings performance, led landlords to adopt ‘single offer’ policies, under which a household would receive one offer and if they did not accept it, then they could effectively be sent to the back of the queue (Mullins and Pawson, 2005).
20One consequence of the way allocations policies developed in the context of supply constraints was a concern that social housing was becoming reserved largely for those with complex social needs and no other choice. In this sense, policy was reinforcing stigmatization and there was a danger of increased spatial polarization.
21For much of their history as landlords, local authorities had considerable latitude over how they set the rents for their properties. There was a requirement to see that the average rent set generated sufficient income to deliver a coherent budget, after taking account of subsidies received from central government. Local authorities were allowed to pool the rents on their properties to break the link between the costs of constructing particular housing schemes and the rents set for the properties in it. There was limited direction or guidance regarding how the rents for individual properties should be set. After 1980, average rents rose as a result of the withdrawal of central government subsidy, but the question of the rents for individual properties remained one to be answered at the local authorities’ discretion.
22Housing associations have traditionally operated within a separate financial framework, which differed in important details, but again the landlord retained a degree of discretion over the rents to be set for individual properties. A key point is that social housing rents were set primarily with regard to internal concerns such as delivering a balanced budget rather than with direct reference to external factors such as competitors’ rents or market conditions. The fact that a large proportion of social housing tenants were in receipt of personal subsidy through the Housing Benefit system meant that rent levels were not necessarily central to their housing consumption decisions. Valuable discussions of the development of systems of social housing finance up to 2000 are provided by Malpass, 1990; Hills, 1991; Garnett, 2000.
Reconfiguring the role of social housing
Accessing social housing
23Decisions to recognise households’ claims to the status of being statutorily homeless, and therefore eligible for assistance, have generated a substantial body of case law. It was a major cause of judicial review actions under public law, until the initial review of homelessness decisions was taken outside the judicial review system. One reason decisions were often contested was that acceptance of a homelessness claim could rest upon accepting that a household was ‘unintentionally’ homeless. That is, broadly speaking, the actions of the household had not contributed, in a way that could have been foreseen, to them losing their home. One way for local authorities to manage the claims on their resources was to decide wherever possible that while a household may be homeless this status was intentional: in this situation the obligations to assist were much more limited (see Cowan, 1999, for a discussion). Such a decision could be, and often would be, contested. The search for intentionality could not be very explicitly enshrined in local policy without running the risk of the policy being found to be unlawful. Hence it had a less transparent existence in the tacit knowledge, organisational culture, and local standard operating procedures of street-level bureaucrats (as discussed by Lipsky, 1980).
24A key driver to minimise the number of unintentional homeless households was the constraint on resources: there were not enough properties available to house all those seeking assistance. Alternative, more explicit strategies to address this issue have also been adopted. For example, local authorities could fund tenancy relations officers to mediate between private landlords and tenants in a bid to prevent the landlord evicting their tenant and, as a consequence, the tenant making a claim to be recognised as homeless and eligible for assistance.
25This type of scheme has become more clearly embedded during the last decade as the shortage of appropriate social housing in many areas has been acknowledged and become more acute. It has become more clearly recognised in the development of local authority provided or funded ‘housing options’ services, which are now seen as good practice. We might characterise housing options services as a means of seeking to divert demand away from social housing. Households who approach a local authority with a view to seeking social housing are invited to discuss the range of possible solutions to their housing problems, including seeking accommodation in the private rented sector or the shared ownership (part own/part buy) sector. Discussion of the likely length of the wait for permanent social rented housing and the quality and location of the accommodation that is likely to be available can make other housing solutions seem more attractive. Clearly, every household that finds a solution to their housing problem outside the social rented sector means the pressure on the social rented sector itself is reduced slightly.
26The Labour government has recently placed considerable emphasis upon more focused strategies of homelessness prevention. These are seen as a way of dealing with the housing problems facing individuals who are both not likely to qualify as statutorily homeless and those who potentially are statutorily homeless. Through the use of mechanisms such as tenancy deposit guarantees it is possible to deliver acceptable housing solutions outside social housing. From 2003 there was a substantial fall in the number of households being accepted as homeless by local authorities and this has been attributed in part to more widespread engagement in homelessness prevention activities.
27While understandably not explicitly framed as such, this type of initiative has the potential to result in households with legitimate claims to assistance from the state failing to make those claims because alternative solutions appear more attractive. I would not wish to suggest that this necessarily results in less appropriate or desirable housing solutions, but it is noteworthy that these initiatives are seeking to reshape our understanding of the state’s role in assisting households and build strategies explicitly, rather than tacitly, in the light of resource constraints.
Choice in social housing
28The housing green paper of 2000 (DETR/DSS, 2000) was the first green paper on housing policy for a generation. It ranged widely and proposed significant change to the social housing sector. The restructuring of social housing provision, begun under the Conservatives, was not only to continue but accelerate (see Murie and Nevin, 2001). A programme of reform with three interlinked strands aimed to revolutionise the way in which social housing landlords related to their tenants. This was to be achieved through the fostering of choice and the provision of greater incentives for tenants to pay attention to their level of housing consumption.
29The three elements of the reform agenda were:
- Changing the way that social housing rents were set, through the introduction of a ‘rent restructuring’ mechanism.
- Altering the way in which households accessed social housing, through the introduction of systems modelled on the Delft model for allocations that had been adopted across much of the Netherlands in the 1990s (Kullberg, 1997, 2002).
- Changing the structure of the Housing Benefit system to give tenants a financial incentive to pay greater attention to the level of their rent and to any rent increases.
30In 2000, these three strands of reform were portrayed by government as complementary (although this has been questioned: Marsh, 2004) and all were seen as necessary to deliver the vision for a consumerised social housing sector. It is interesting, therefore, that the government subsequently declared that it was not pursuing the reform of Housing Benefit in the social housing sector at this time: by the middle of the decade it had come to be seen as too difficult politically. Whether this leaves a coherent reform agenda is debatable. But there is no denying that the two continuing elements of the reform agenda have made a significant impact upon the operation of the sector.
31The rent restructuring mechanism specifies, at a national level, a formula for setting the rent of each individual dwelling in the social housing sector. Landlords were then given an extended implementation period, following the introduction of rent restructuring in 2003, to bring the actual rents they set in line with the ‘target’ rents under the rent restructuring formula. The mechanism had several objectives, but one was to generate a more ‘rational’ pattern of rents across types of dwelling and between different landlords. Tenants will then face a more coherent pattern of incentives so they are given stronger signals regarding the relative prices of properties of different types and in different locations. The reform of Housing Benefit was then seen as giving tenants a stronger incentive to pay attention to these price signals. Without this reform it is unclear whether reform of the rent alone will have much of an impact (see Walker et al., 2002).
32It was felt that the product of allowing landlords to exercise discretion over rent setting for an extended period had been unacceptably confusing, with rent differentials that were seen as neither rational nor defensible. The rent restructuring mechanism largely removes rent setting discretion from social landlords and requires them to conform to requirements specified centrally. The formula is based upon capital values and the level of local earnings. Rent differentials could therefore be seen as being more market-like than those that were obtained previously. This is a very different basis for setting rents from that hitherto used by many landlords. The rent setting formula can therefore have a significant impact upon the rents set for individual properties (Walker and Marsh, 2003).
33Choice in access to social housing has been promoted through the introduction of choice-based lettings (CBL) schemes. CBL schemes work on the basis of advertised vacancies and an artificial currency. All those who register an interest in accessing social housing are given an amount of artificial currency. The amount of currency a household is given typically depends upon their assessed level of need – so that those with higher need receive more of the artificial currency. Vacant properties are then advertised at regular intervals and households are invited to bid for the properties in which they are interested. When bidding closes, bids are sorted by currency level and the bidding household with the highest amount of currency will typically be offered the property. This system is intended to cut down on the number of offers that are refused, reduce the time properties are vacant, and determine whether there is demand for properties that had proved difficult to let under the previous bureaucratic allocation scheme. Evaluations suggest that most, though not all, of the local authorities adopting CBL have realised benefits of this type (Marsh et al., 2004; Pawson et al., 2006).
34CBL schemes typically encompass housing association properties as well as those owned by the local authority and government has sought to encourage the development of sub-regional schemes involving several local authorities. Government would also like to see CBL schemes encompass lettings in the private rented sector and low-cost home ownership options. Through this centralisation of information CBL is seen as offering prospective tenants greater choice. Under most schemes, households are not penalised for unsuccessful bids and nor are they penalised for turning down a property if they bid successfully. The ethos of this approach is radically different from the ‘one-offer’ policies operated under the previous system.
35The adoption of CBL transforms the relationship between landlord and (prospective) tenant. To secure accommodation, households will have to be active, rather than passive as they were under the previous system. They are being responsibilized into playing the role of a quasi-consumer. CBL is intended to mimic market mechanisms, including the idea that publishing information on successful bids will help those looking for property to see the ‘price’ at which it is selling and perhaps adapt their behaviour accordingly.
36As with all market-like mechanisms there is concern that certain households will be disadvantaged because they do not have the skills to fulfil the role of consumer upon which the system is based. While early adopters of CBL did not give a great deal of attention to ensuring that the most vulnerable households were not disadvantaged (Marsh et al., 2004), the concrete evidence that they are being disadvantaged is limited (see Pawson et al., 2006).
Exit from social housing
37The Right to Buy provided local authority tenants with an exit route from social housing into home ownership. While this transition had long been possible, the promotion of RTB opened up the possibility to many more people. The RTB was a very popular policy, which throughout the 1980s and 1990s was seen as largely untouchable (see Goodlad and Atkinson, 2004, for a discussion of the politics of the RTB in the Scottish context).
38It can be argued that the widespread take up of the option to purchase challenged the idea that social housing was a tenure for life: the idea that once one accessed social housing one was likely to stay in the sector, moving to better quality properties within the sector as one established a track record as a ‘good’ tenant.
39However, from the outset the RTB has been criticised (see Jones and Murie, 2006). It is seen as prioritizing the welfare of the individual tenants who benefit from purchase to the detriment of the collective and those who would have come after them in need of low cost rental accommodation. An early move by the Labour government of 1997 was to restrict the discounts available under the Right to Buy, which would act as a disincentive to purchase without denying the right entirely. The generosity of the scheme was subsequently constrained further. In contrast, the Conservative party in opposition was advocating the extension of the scheme to include housing associations.
40Restraining the level of RTB discounts will reduce its attractiveness to tenants. Given house prices relative to incomes and savings, and the quality of the stock that remains in the local authority sector, there is in any case likely to be a natural limit to the take up of the scheme (Murie, 2006). So over the last few years the government has been developing alternative mechanisms, in particular ‘social homebuy’, for households looking to exit the social rented sector and enter forms of owner occupation. Social homebuy offers tenants discounts for partial purchase – moving from renting to shared ownership. The government has also, through the Housing Corporation, increasingly required housing associations to build mixed tenure schemes and involve themselves in shared ownership schemes. So instead of a model under which assistance from a social housing provider takes the form of a rental property, which after a period could be bought at a discount, a number of other options are available – only some of which would be seen by government, providers and residents as ‘social housing’, as conventionally understood.
Current issues and challenges
41The current reform agenda for social housing in England throws up some important tensions. In particular, one has to question the extent to which the logic of systems such as CBL, which are designed to promote choice and are largely based upon households’ ‘felt’ need, are compatible with existing policies, which are founded on assumptions such as that social housing exists to meet need judged upon a comparative basis.
42Not only is an emphasis upon choice potentially in tension with the concept of need but both need and choice pose questions for the sustainable communities agenda. Can sustainable communities be created within a system that uses needs-based allocation? The implication of current policy is that they can’t: a community requires a greater diversity in its social mix in order to be sustainable. If the law requires needs-based allocation then mixed communities – and reduced stigmatization for social housing – will prove elusive (Fitzpatrick and Pawson, 2007). But the idea that sustainable communities are mixed income communities in itself presupposes that people with choice have a preference for social mix. Yet, some of the most well-established, and by implication ‘sustainable’, communities are relatively homogenous. That many people have a preference for living with people like themselves should hardly be a revelation. It could also be argued that the aspirations of some social mix policies are predicated upon the ability of policy to engage in social engineering in a way that is not plausible in the context of a system that increasingly revolves around quasi-consumer choice. It may be possible to engineer a social mix when a community is established but without significant on-going steering by policy makers, which runs counter to notions of genuine consumer sovereignty, the future social trajectory of a community cannot be assured.
43Much of the debate about social mix and creating sustainable communities flows from a quite understandable concern regarding the residualisation and stigmatization of social housing. Policy is increasingly facilitating choice, creating new ways of exiting the sector, and setting social housing in the context of other options. By doing so, policymakers seek to demonstrate that welfare services do not have to be some form of out-moded, standardised and inflexible Fordist product, but an arena in which the sovereignty of the consumer can be honoured. Yet, in the context of a normalised home ownership, it would be valuable to reflect upon whether it is possible to reorient thinking about social housing – and retrieve a positive image for it – using mechanisms that rely upon promoting alternatives which are more in accord with prevailing social norms. There must be some risk of further devaluing social housing and perpetuating its stigmatization.
44We are only at the start of the journey towards a more market-like social housing sector in England. It will take time for the incentives established by the new rent and letting policies fully to work their way through the system. Reflexive economists do not dispute that market mechanisms will generate inequalities when consumers have different endowments, of income or skill for example. It is a reasonable starting assumption that greater emphasis upon market-like mechanisms in the social housing sector will generate similar inequalities, unless there is some countervailing intervention.
45As noted above, there is limited evidence that vulnerable households have yet suffered in a system that increasingly relies upon the welfare service user fulfilling the role of active consumer. However, we know from research on the earlier waves of quasi-market reform in other policy fields that, when placed in the role of consumers, households are differentially successful in accessing services (see, for example, Wistow et al., 1996). The postwar welfare state was criticised because the middle-classes were able to negotiate the system more effectively and hence access services more successfully than poorer households (Goodin and Le Grand, 1987). It is no less likely that market-like systems which rely upon the active and responsible consumer are going to favour households skilled in working the system. That isn’t to say that the same people will be disadvantaged under the new systems as were disadvantaged under the old.
46Although subject to contestation, the basic parameters of the social housing system – in terms of who is entitled to what – have been reasonably well-established and stable for the last thirty years. However, moves toward increased consumerization of social housing are in tension with some of these basic parameters. This is most evident in relation to CBL and creating social mix. On the one hand, to create a different social mix to that which needs-based allocation would deliver it is necessary to allocate properties to those who would be deemed to have relatively low levels of need. Yet, existing allocations and homelessness legislation make this very difficult. If a local authority attempts to go too far down this route it can find the lawfulness of its policies being challenged in the courts. On the other hand, CBL relies on felt need. It can lead to households feeling that their needs are so acute that they will accept property inferior to that to which they are entitled, but which is not currently available. This runs counter to a system that is based upon comparative assessment of need. Local authorities that focus upon establishing a system driven by quasi-consumer choice can again come into conflict with existing legislation and the courts (Cowan and Marsh, 2005).
47These are very real tensions facing the system at the service delivery level at the moment. Although it has not yet quite happened, these tensions are likely to raise the question of to what, precisely, it is that ‘reasonable preference’ under the law entitles a household. An increasingly consumerised system is likely to throw into question assumptions about the quality of accommodation to which households are entitled. If a household is willing to accept poor quality housing because they perceive it as a quick solution to their problems should the law prevent that from happening on the basis that it is less than an unobtainable ideal? Does the assistance provided have to be in the social housing sector if that is not what the household wants?
48The debate over the appropriate length of tenancy for social housing has also been revitalised. Economists have long criticised security of tenure as being a significant problem in the social housing sector because it impedes mobility and means that many households continue to receive help from the state even once household circumstances have changed and they would in principle be able to secure accommodation for themselves in the market. Security of tenure is currently perceived to be reasonably well insulated from change. But I believe that these debates are only just getting started. As the more economistic way of thinking about welfare services becomes more firmly engrained in policy, features such as security of tenure will appear increasingly illogical and undesirable and hence increasingly vulnerable to change.
49The social rented housing sector in England has been going through a period of rapid change. This is most apparent at the level of high profile policy initiatives, of which those relating to access, choice and exit have been prominent. Yet, lying behind these initiatives the role of social housing in the housing system is being progressively reconfigured in a way that is strongly inflected with economistic notions of self-interested rational consumers. The critical engagement with this reorientation in thinking has not been as extensive as might have been desirable: it poses fundamental challenges to some of the key established characteristics of social housing in England. Housing rights that are the product of significant past political battles can be thrown into question.
50Current policy, however, seeks to have it both ways. The government remains committed to the principle that social housing should be for those in the most urgent need, while at the same time seeking to return it to the position of tenure of choice rather than last resort. As Fitzpatrick and Pawson (2007) note, the coherence of the position that emerges from these competing commitments can be questioned.
51Embedded in current policy is a tension between principles associated with the postwar liberal welfare state and principles drawn from a very different model in which the wishes of the consumer drive the system. It is important to set this discussion in the context of the broader social change towards a consumer society. The accumulated force behind consumerisation suggests to me that this tension at the level of principle will be resolved in favour of the choice agenda. When the customer is king the values of the postwar liberal welfare state will come to be seen as increasingly anachronistic. If they present an obstacle to the further development of consumer sovereignty and the exercise of choice then they are expendable. As a consequence, housing rights will be unravelled and reconfigured. It is therefore an opportune time to reflect upon the question recently posed by David Cowan: What is social about social housing? (Cowan and McDermont, 2006).
Bibliographie
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Notes de bas de page
1 The ‘exit’ and ‘voice’ terminology is drawn from Hirschman (1970). It has been very influential in debates about local public services in Britain. It has been one of the peculiarities of these debates that the third limb of Hirschman’s argument – the importance of consumer ‘loyalty’ in facilitating service improvements – has been almost entirely neglected.
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