Divisive social policy: the competition for physical and symbolic resources

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.

Community and belonging

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.

Housing precarity and advanced marginality in the UK

This chapter presents concluding remarks about the impacts of the Bedroom Tax. It reflects on the processes through which housing insecurity is generated and how this is playing a central role in increasing urban marginality. It does so by drawing on studies about rising housing precarity and homelessness to consider how both the social and private housing sectors have been responding to reductions in housing benefit. This chapter argues that we need to re-consider how and in what ways the struggles over housing are being played out at the local level and how this can generate divisions in and between different groups. Particularly when people are re-negotiating a welfare state that is undergoing deep systematic reorganisation. It considers the relationship between austerity policies and their role in creating political dissatisfaction with the state of UK politics. Especially in areas where the full impact of austerity measures have been felt.

Living in a state of insecurity

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.

Life without state‑supported housing

Chapter 2 looks back on the history and development of council housing and the reasons why the state intervened in the housing market. Looking at key moments in its development, it highlights the historical tensions and divisions that inadequate housing gave rise to. It also draws attention to the development of the welfare state and the housing benefit scheme in order to provide background context to the changes that are unfolding in present day Britain relating to housing insecurity. This chapter explores the relationship between politics and the housing system, highlighting how different political parties and political ideologies impacted on the UKs public housing sector. It charts the rise of neoliberalisation in the UK, engaging with theories of neoliberalism and Loic Wacquant’s work on processes of advanced urban marginality. This chapter ends with outlining the case study fieldwork site and the methods employed in this study.

Introduction: the repositioning of social housing and welfare provision

This chapter sets out the background and context to the UK’s implementation of austerity measures following the financial crash of 2007/08. It examines the principles underlying the enactment of the Bedroom Tax policy before outlining the new regulations on room restrictions that have been imposed on those claiming housing benefit in the social rented sector. It discusses the controversy surrounding its implementation as well as the ways in which it has impacted different regions of the UK. This chapter also reflects on changes to housing benefit more widely and suggests that we are seeing the return of the ‘housing question’ in post-industrial Britain as austerity policies undermine housing affordability. The final part of this chapter outlines the structure of the book.

Social housing insecurity as policy and ideology

This chapter focuses on the effects of deepening housing insecurity and the relationship between structure and agency as those who could not keep up with rent payments attempted to downsize within a declining social housing sector. Building on the work of Wacquant and employing Foucauldian conceptualisations, this chapter adopts a more theoretical analytic framework to question how and in what ways the retrenchment of welfare abets the ‘reengineering of the state’. The Bedroom Tax policy provides a lens through which to view this process. This chapter examines how increased housing vulnerability impacts on participants, acting to responsibilise them and make them accountable for their own housing provision.