This article
In this issue
- Editorial Statement
by David Robinson and Peter Wells - What Future for Social Housing in England?
by Ian Cole - Continuing dilemmas for area based urban regeneration: evidence from the New Deal for Communities Programme in England
by Paul Lawless - New Labour and Evidence Based Policy Making: 1997-2007
by Peter Wells - Understanding the idea of ‘grant dependency’ in the voluntary and community sector
by Rob Macmillan - The Margins of Public Space – Muslims and Social Housing in England
by David Cheesman
What future for social housing in England?
Summary
This article summarises some of the different perspectives that have been brought to bear in recent academic and policy debate about the future of social housing in Britain. It identifies four main approaches, described as ‘market idealist’, revisionist’, ‘preservationist’ and ‘reformist’. It puts forward a critical assessment of each perspective on both normative and empirical grounds. The paper then considers the recent ‘Hills report’ on the future of social housing in England and Wales, developed from a reformist standpoint. In conclusion, the paper asks whether the analytical merits of the Hills report will provoke a considered policy response, which moves away from the narrow and rigid thinking about the social housing sector that has predominated over the past two or three decades.
