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This chapter begins by highlighting the circumstances and conditions of participants’ lives preceding the introduction of the Bedroom Tax policy. This serves as a starting point for the chapter, illustrating that the policy was introduced into lives that were already characterised by income insecurity, employment precarity, and ill-health. It charts the ways in which participants responded to the implementation of the policy and the impact it had in informing decisions about moving or absorbing the extra rental expenditure. This chapter is concerned with the impact at the household level documenting how life became more difficult as the extra financial outlay placed a strain on participants financially, socially, and psychologically. In the final section, the focus turns to how the policy worked to transmit insecurity into the lives of participants’ children, furthering the inter-generational transmission of inequality through the introduction of a precarious housing situation which had not been there previously.

In this chapter, the focus turns to explore how the policy impacted on participants’ perceptions of fairness and justice in social housing allocation. This is set within the context of existing debates about the racialisation of social housing, a result of struggles over who should have preference to access this declining resource. While those tensions are played out at the local level, the rhetoric around social housing has increasingly linked this form of tenure with ‘welfare dependency’. The chapter begins by exploring how participants evaluate austerity politics in terms of their own economic position. It then turns to focus on their status and social positioning and how the policy raises questions of worth and value. What we see here are not just struggles over material resources such as housing, but also over less tangible psychosocial and symbolic resources that afford people a sense of worth and value.

This chapter raises questions about the concept of ‘community’ and place attachment in the midst of neoliberal restructuring and ideas around the ‘big society’ by reflecting on the experiences of participants who feel threatened with displacement. It explores how a perception of forced displacement creates a feeling that community is being deliberately undermined by outside forces. Tenants who must re-join social housing waiting lists in order to downsize face the reality of the current crisis in social housing. At the local level, the re-allocation of homes is highly visible leading to resentment and tension about who belongs and who has the right to belong. When home and community are threatened nativism will manifest and claims to entitlements staked. This chapter follows chapter 5 in highlighting the ruptures in and between the working class over access to housing.