Social Rented Housing in the (DIS)United Kingdom: Can Different Social Housing Regime Types Exist within the Same Nation State?

Abstract

Welfare and housing regime literature has treated nation states as being uniform regime types. However, there is growing interest in the possible development of distinct regimes below the level of nation states. This paper applies regime theory though a robust analytical framework to the devolution of social housing policy to the Scottish Parliament and Welsh and Northern Ireland Assemblies within the UK. We establish that prior to devolution the UK's social housing regime was firmly located within a residual model, but one that operated as a "safety net". Particularly since the adoption of austerity by the UK Government in 2010 and divergence in political outlook between UK and devolved administrations, England's social housing regime is beginning to morph into an "ambulance service", whilst the "safety net" model is being maintained in Northern Ireland and Wales, and strengthened in Scotland. However, with few powers with which to influence the "wider welfare regime", high levels of poverty mean that the "boundaries of possibilities" for the devolved administrations to create more than this distinctive regime sub-typeand so to move to a "social market" performing a "wider affordability" role -are limited. The theoretical and analytical framework developed in this article is capable of being applied to sub-nation state jurisdictions in other countries, and so enrichen comparative analysis.

The affordability of “affordable” housing in England: conditionality and exclusion in a context of welfare reform

“…The implementation of reforms to security of tenure and social assistance enhance the 'ambulance service' function of the sector (Stephens, 2019). This is largely in-line with the residualized nature of the Australian social housing system (Parsell et al, 2019;Pawson & Hulse, 2011).…”

“…The social rented sector in the UK is one of the oldest in Europe (Ravetz, 2001) and at its height in the 1970s housed a third of households (Stephens, 2019). At this time, tenants had varying backgrounds and income levels (Forest & Murie, 1988), but by the early 1990s the policies of successive Conservative governments resulted in significantly less social housing units being built, and the sale of 2.5 million UK social housing homes under the Right-to-Buy scheme 1980-2013 (Adam et al, 2015).…”

“…This transformed social housing into 'a "residual" sector performing a "safety net" function' (Stephens, 2019, p. 46). The broad purpose of the social rented sector in the UK is to provide sub-market rental housing and low-cost home-ownership to households whose needs are not met by the market (Stephens, 2019). This article focuses specifically on the English housing association context because it is here that social housing provision is being reimagined to a much greater extent than in the devolved territories of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.…”

Divergent approaches to affordable housing supply in a devolved policy system: Scotland and England after 2010

“…Housing policy was not completely unified across the two countries prior to devolution; rather, there were nuanced differences, and distinctive governance arrangements (Gibb, Maclennan, & O'Sullivan, 2017). Since the re-establishing of the Scottish Parliament, however, there has been significant primary and secondary legislation and other local policy innovations in each country (Gibb, 2012;Stephens, 2019). This has been particularly true of homelessness, private renting, and assistance to the home ownership sector (e.g.…”

“…The contribution that the paper makes is two-fold. First, while there is a small literature contrasting housing policy in a devolved UK (Gibb, 2012(Gibb, , 2015McKee, Muir, & Moore, 2017;Stephens, 2019), this is the first attempt to assess the outcomes of policy divergence and try to explain why major spending programmes took the form they did and had specific outcomes. Second, the paper adopts an approach to its evaluation of the programmes based primarily around two approaches to policy success and failure (King & Crewe, 2013;Schuck, 2014).…”