From need to choice, welfarism to advanced liberalism? Problematics of social housing allocation

From need to choice, welfarism to advanced liberalism? Problematics of social housing allocation

Dave Cowan and Alex Marsh* University of Bristol

Drawing on studies in governmentality, this paper considers the ways in which the selection and allocatioii of households fo r social housing have been conceptualised and treated as problematic. The paper urgues that the notion of ‘need’ emerged relatively slow~ly over the course of the twentieth century as the organising criterion of social housing. Yet ‘need’ became established as a powerjul tool used to place those seeking social housing in hierarchies, and around which considerable expertise developed. While the principle of allocation on the basis of need has come to occupy a hegemonic position, it has operated it1 continual tension with competing criteria based on notions of suitability. As a consequence, this paper identifies risk management as a recurrent theme of housing management practices. By the 1960s need-based allocation was proving problematic in terms of who W N S being prioritised; it was also unuble to resist the challenge ofdeviant behaviour by tenunts and the apparent unpopularity of the social rented sector. We argue that the tramition to advanced liberalism prefaced a shqt to new forms of letting accommodation bused on household choice, which have been portrayed as addressing core problems with the bureaucraticallydriven system. We conclude by reflecting on the tensions inherent in seeking to foster choice, bvhile continuing to adhere to the notion of need.

‘“Having a room of one’s own” is a desire, but also a control.”

INTRODUCTION: ‘SOCIAL HOUSING’

The history of the bureaucratic selection and allocation of households for social housing could be viewed as a story of recurrent failure.’ As Rose and Miller suggest, ‘government is a congenitally failing operation’:’

* The authors are grateful to Peter Malpass, Morag McDermont, John Flint, Tom Osborne, Tony Prosser and the anonymous referees who read and commented on earlier drafts of this paper. 1. G Deleuze ‘The rise of the social’ at p xvii, foreword to J Donzelot The Policing of Families (trans R Hurley) (London: Hutchinson, 1979). 2. Although governmentality studies are not evaluative, the identification of failure, linked to attempts to devise or propose programmes to govern better, is a central element in such analyses: P Miller and N Rose ‘Governing economic life’ (1989) Economy and Society I , 4. 3. N Rose and PMiller ‘Political power beyond the state: problematics of government’ ( 1992) 43 British Journal of Sociology 173, 190.

From need to choice, welfarism to advanced liberalism? 23

‘We do not live in a governed world so much as a world traversed by the “will to govern”, fuelled by the constant registration of “failure”, the discrepancy between ambition and outcome, and the constant injunction to do better next time.’4

A diagnosis of failure might point to an uncertainty in the mission of social housing - what is its purpose and who is it for? - an uncertainty in its status within the economy - who should pay for it? - and its dangerousness - how can we manage it? In summary, we might say that the failure is due to the problematic relationship between social housing, the social, and welfarism. Here, the important concept of ‘need’ provides a unifying theme; indeed, it is the problems caused by adherence to need as the principal basis for allocating property that lie at the centre of the current diagnosis of failure. The method of governing better is to supplement - if not supplant - need with the encouragement of activity on the part of the ‘home seeker’ through the exercise of choice.

The conjunction of the words ‘social’ and ‘housing’ represents a relatively recent, and perhaps paradoxical, truth-claim in the history of state involvement in the provision of housing in the UK.s In the 1990s, at a time when we questioned the existence of ‘the social’, or talked of its crisis,6 the term began to be applied to rented housing provided by local councils and housing associations in a rapidly demunicipalising not-for-profit rented sector. It was in an attempt to recover both a distinctiveness and commonality of purpose in the face of fragmentation that the term ‘social housing’ belatedly came into currency. In fact, throughout the twentieth century, the relationship between housing and the welfare state oscillated, sometimes strong and sometimes attenuated, as successive governments pursued different visions for council - and latterly social - housing.

In this paper we draw on the literature that amplifies Foucault’s suggestive line of enquiry concerning mentalities of rule, or ‘governmentality’ , to explore how the process of selection and allocation of households to council housing involves a kind of government of the self.7 We link the recent shift in emphasis from ‘need’ to ‘choice’ in the allocation processes with broader shifts to ‘advanced’ liberalism as a mentality of government.’ As elsewhere in the welfare state, in housing there has been a quasi-commodification of the social which seeks to employ the self-regulatory capacity of individuals by an alloy

4. (1992) 43 British Journal of Sociology 173, 191. 5. Cowan, for example, has posed the question, ‘what is social about social housing?’ - a question to which there it was suggested that there are no easy answers: D Cowan Housing Law and Policy (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1999) ch 6. For those working within Foucauldian understandings, the ‘social’ is denoted as a ‘terrain’ of government (Rose and Miller, above n 3) . 6. See N Rose Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: CUP, 1999) (hereafter ‘Rose’) ch 3 7. M Foucault ‘Governmentality’ in G Burchell, C Gordon and P Miller (eds) The Foucault EfSect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 199 1 ). 8. The term ‘advanced liberal’ appears in Rose, above n 6, ch 4, to reflect a ‘new diagram of the relation between government, expertise and subjectivity’ built around economic lines and dependent on ‘the universal human faculty of choice’ (at p 141).

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of autonomy and responsibility.’ In this way, individuals can become autonomous and responsible citizens, exercising freedom. While representing significant developments in the nature of governance, the transformations we identify are by no means complete nor without contestation.

In the first section, we outline the notion of governmentality, linking it to the development of housing policy. In the second section, we discuss the way in which ‘need’ became the organising criterion of this form of housing. We also examine the critique of need as it emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. We argue that need operated in continuing tension with other, older criteria - particularly those related to suitability - which continued to exercise significant influence over who accessed the tenure. The relationship between tenant selection and housing management as alternative strategies of risk management becomes evident. In the third section, we discuss the ways in which advanced liberalism prefaced the shift to new forms of letting accommodation based on household choice. In conclusion we reflect upon the tensions inherent in seeking to foster choice, while continuing to adhere to the notion of need.

GOVERNMENTALITY

Governmentality studies seek to understand the ways in which individuals are governed and govern themselves. Gordon suggests that government in this sense is ‘a form of activity aiming to shape, guide or affect the conduct of some person or persons’.’O Governmentality fundamentally is about the problematics of rule and its rationality. It is concerned with the analysis of developments in the art of government.

One aspect of these developments is the rise of statistics (‘the science of the state’). Crucial here is the ‘problem of population’, which Foucault states concisely:

‘Whereas statistics had previously worked within the administrative frame and thus in terms of the functioning of sovereignty, it now gradually reveals that population has its own regularities, its own rates of deaths and diseases, its cycles of scarcity etc.”’

This discovery changed the frame of government: the family became the instrument of government. This discovery also heralded a shift in the ultimate end of government towards the welfare of the population in all its possibilities. In this process, the concept of the ‘norm’ became important because i t is productive of rule: through emphasising both similarity and difference it works to create inequalities and it invites each of us to imagine ourselves as different from others. I 2

9. See eg G Burchell, ‘Liberal government and techniques of the self‘ (1993) 22 Economy and Society 267,214-216. 10. C Gordon ‘Governmental rationality: an introduction’ in G Burchell, C Gordon and P Miller (eds) The F o u c d r EfSect: Studies in Governrnenrulity, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I99 1 ) p 2. 11. Above n 7 , at p 99. 12. F Ewald ‘Norms, discipline and the law’ (1990) 30 Representations 138, 154.


This focus on statistics was particularly productive during the early to mid- nineteenth century when, as Hacking observes, there was an avalanche of statistics which enabled a certain knowledge of populations and their regularity.” Technologies of rule do not need to work within this frame, but the term governmentality is, at heart, about knowledge - or attempts to know - and ensuring the wealth, health and happiness of populations. l4

The avalanche of statistics in the nineteenth century led to a different, paradoxical problematisation of government that was characteristically liberal. Granted that government cannot know everything nor that it should interfere with the natural domain of civil society, how then can government rule? To frame this slightly differently, the paradox lies in the question of how to rule without ruling. Liberalism presupposed limits to political authority at the level of the individual - ‘a natural realm of freedoms and activities outside the legitimate sphere of politics’ .I5 This new problematic of government required a new technology of government, ‘action at a distance’, or government beyond the state. In place of direct control stands a variety of different programmes of government beyond the state in which the individual was made active in their self-government. This was made possible by the development of experts and expertise as well as, for example, mass education. The role of the state in this process was as ‘guarantor of both the freedom of the individual and the freedom of the capitalist enterprise’. l 6

Yet, equally, the development of statistics and the consequential recognition of regularities within the population led to a new understanding of government in the name of ‘the social’. Key in this development were the various crises of sanitation and epidemics of the nineteenth century.” Although these were cast in moral tones, there was also a recognition of the social as a ‘kind of anti- individualism: the need to conceive of human beings as citizens of a wider collectivity who did not merely confront one another as buyers and sellers on a competitive market’.’’ Thus, new spaces of government emerged which provided a shift in focus from quarantine and confinement to interventions which tackled society itse1f.l’

This coincided with the birth of housing policy, as the focus on external sanitation became linked with the dwellings of the poor.*O This was not just a

13. I Hacking ‘How should we do a history of statistics?’ in G Burchell, C Gordon and P Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 199 1 ). 14. Technologies of rule are the techniques of government, often mundane, through which governmental programmes are implemented- see Miller and Rose, above n 2, pp 183-1 84. 15. Miller and Rose, above n 2, p 179. 16. N Rose ‘Government, authority and expertise in advanced liberalism’ (1993) 22 Economy and Society 283,293. 17. See, for discussion, E Gauldie Cruel Habitations (London: Allen & Unwin, 1974) esp ch 8. 18. Rose at p 1 18; see also Walters’ analysis of the factory legislation as mutating from the moral to the social during the nineteenth century: Unemployment and Government (Cambridge: CUP, 2000) pp 15-17. 19. Walters, above n 18, p 5 1. 20. See eg T Osborne ‘Security and vitality: drains liberalism and power in the nineteenth century’ in A Bany, N Rose and T Osbome (4s ) Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government (London: UCL, 1996).

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question of the social but was linked inextricably with the moral regulation of the poor.?‘ As Bowley put it:

‘Interest in housing as a social problem was not an independent growth; it had sprung from [concerns with sanitation]. . . . The reformers would have swept the towns clean, if they could: they rampaged destructively through the congested centres of the industrial town tearing down the rookeries. . . . The forces of law and order and the churches were behind them. It had been noticed that, as well as disease, crime and vice accumulated in the labyrinths of the slums. The police and the priest were as unable to penetrate as the sunshine.’22

Overcrowding concerned and inflamed the passions of the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes.*’ However, the evidence given by Octavia Hill, a key philanthropist at the inception of housing policy, provides a link between the system that she put in place and the types of selection and allocation policies subsequently adopted by local authorities. Hill was the first person to develop expertise in housing management of the poor - and expertise is a key development in the social, in that it fragments one central problem into a series of discrete social problems which can then be She explicitly linked the social and moral in describing her ‘system’ of improving the living conditions of the poor. This system sought to harness the capacities of the poor for self-government through the provision of better quality housing. In describing her system in relation to drunkards, she put the following position:

‘I do not say that I will not have drunkards [in my properties], I have quantities of drunkards; but everything depends upon whether I think the drunkard will be better for being sent away or not. It is a tremendous despotism, but it is exercised with a view of bringing out the powers of the people, and treating them as responsible for themselves within certain limits ... you cannot get the individual action in any other way that I know of.’?s

Hill’s system was intensely moral and Christian, seeking the reform of the ‘destructive classes’. The distinction was between poverty, on the one hand, and pauperisation, on the other; the aim was to save the poor from pauperisation. As Procacci notes, pauperism ‘consists in indicating a series of different forms ofconduct, namely those which are not amenable to the project of socialization which is being elaborated’.I6

21. See T Osborne and N Rose, ‘Governing cities: notes on the spatialisation of virtue’ (1999) 17 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 737,745. The various publications on the state and condition of housing are key factors - ‘a long succession of works whose literary merit and statistical accuracy may have varied, but whose cumulative influence was considerable’: EGauldie, above n 17, at p 147. 22. M Bowley, Housing mid the State: 19/9-1945 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1945) p 2. 23. See the dialogue between police inspectors responsible for lodging houses and the Commissioners: The Royal Cotninission on the Housing oj‘ the Working Clusses, Vol 11: Minutes of Evidence, C-4402-1 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1885) pp 135-142. 24. Rose p 123. 25. Above n 23, p 297. 26. G Procacci, ‘Social economy and the government of poverty’ in G Burchell, C Gordon and P Miller (eds) The Foitcuult Efiect: Studies in Governmriitalit~v (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I99 I ) p 160.


Central features of Hill’s practice - expertise, moral improvement and responsibility - were recurrent, albeit mutated, themes in welfarism as it developed during the twentieth century.*’ It was at the level of political rationality and problematisation that these mutations began. At the level of political rationality, the social concerned ‘the wish to encourage national growth and well being through the promotion of social responsibility and the mutuality of social risk’.2X This became framed in relation to a range of problematisations about birthrates, anti-social behaviour, problem families, health and community. Experts became interrelated with the state in that the calculations of rulers concerning health and wealth were ‘more or less directly transcribed from the views of experts into the machinery of rule’.29 And the state took a key responsibility because it had the relevant knowledge and resources to deal with the structural problems presented.

Nevertheless, the state continued to act through the freedom of the subject. So, for example, Walters’ consideration of the various social laws enacted at the turn of the twentieth century is that they offered hope and, as a result, ‘social insurance was to activate the springs of self-reliance’ .30 Similarly, Beveridge linked his attack on the ‘five giants on the road of reconstruction’ with the principle of co-operation between the state and the individual such that the state ‘does not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility’.3’ The notion of governing through freedom came clearly from the emphasis on thrift and household management - as he put it, ‘management of one’s income is an essential element of a citizen’s freedom’.j*

‘NEED’ AS A TECHNOLOGY OF HOUSING ADMINISTRATION

‘Councils became landlords without commitment, plan or forethought.’j3

Our purpose in this section is to consider a core dimension of the relationship between housing and the social in England over the course of the twentieth century. Our concern with selection and allocation of households allows us to focus on the concept of ‘need’. Walters’ perspective on need is, we think, valuable in this regard. Need is regarded as constructing a ‘manageable domain,

27. The relationship between social housing and the welfare state is not symmetrical, and the histories differ significantly at different points. There is insufficient space in this article to discuss this (contested) relationship: see P Malpass ‘The wobbly pillar? Housing and the British postwar welfare state’ (2003) 32 JSP 589; P Malpass, ‘Fifty years of British housing policy: leaving or leading the welfare state?’, (2004) 4 European Journal of Housing Policy 209; cf I Cole and R Furbey The Eclipse of Council Housing (London: Routledge, 1994). 28. Rose and Miller, op cit n 3, at p 192. 29. N Rose, ‘Government, authority and expertise in advanced liberalism’ (1993) 22 Economy and Society 283,295. 30. Above n 18, at 67. 31. W Beveridge, Social Insurunce and Allied Services (London: HMSO, 1944) pp 6 7 . 32. Above n 31, at p 12. 33. A Power Propert?, before People: The Management of Twentieth Century Council Housing (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987) p 66.

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and the basis for a political relationship between the individual and the state’.34 Using normative need, which is bureaucratically constructed, as the selection criterion gives the state an apparently objective basis for resource a l l ~ c a t i o n . ~ ~ Yet, although it appears a neutral concept in output, the inputs are anything but neutral. Need has acted as a key rationing device, but the parameters of ‘legitimate’ need, and hence the scope of the domain to be managed, are open to renegotiation as the state’s vision for council housing shifts.

It is around need that ‘social housing’ came to be organised. Indeed, the idea of housing need has occupied a hegemonic position - with ‘meeting housing need’ a mantra - within the social housing profession.’6 It identifies an objective without being overly specific. It is ambiguous enough to sustain different interpretations. Yet, it is this rationality of the practice of ‘social housing’ which enabled the association between housing and welfarism.

While it has come to occupy a central position in the rationale of social housing, the idea of need first appeared in official discourse on housing comparatively late - in the early 1930s during the Great Depression - and its operationalisation remains spatially varied.” As for legislation, the word ‘need’ as a basis for allocation is nowhere to be found - rather, since 1924, local authorities have been exhorted to give ‘reasonable preference’ to particular groups of persons, reflecting policy priorities as well as the history of central- local relations in the housing system.38 However, in government publications by experts the concept of need became prominent during the 1930s; as we shall see, this was because of a new set of moral and ethical problems.

From the inception of council housing, statistics have played a central role: the social survey was to be used by local authorities in the service of ‘need’. Local authorities were required under the Addison Act 1919 to survey their areas and provide evidence of their need for additional units of housing. Yet, to whom the properties were to be let was not closely specified. Ministry of Health Guidance in 1920 referred to:

‘(1) The careful selection of tenants; (2) The elimination of unsatisfactory tenants; (3) Constant supervision of the property and its occupants by officials

directly employed and paid by the owners; (4) Systematic and punctual collection of rents.’39

This statement appears to create a norm in terms of tenant type - the ‘satisfactory’ tenant - combined with the use of discipline through ‘constant supervision’. Kemp and Williams have argued that during this period ‘if there

34. Above n 18, p 76. 35. We take the term normative need from the influential discussion in J Bradshaw ‘The concept of social need’ (1972) 30 New Society 640. Bradshaw identifies four types of need: normative, felt, expressed and comparative. 36. See D Cowan, R Gilroy and C Pantazis ‘Risking housing need’ (1999) 26 JLS 403. 37. Cf P Spicker ‘Concepts of need in housing allocation’ (1987) 15 Policy and Politics 17. 38. See E Laurie The Enduring Appeal of Reasonable Preference (Unpublished Phd thesis, University of Southampton, 2002). 39. Ministry of Health Housing (London: HMSO, 1920) p 2.


was to be anything social about management by local authorities it was left unstated’.@ However, using the Foucauldian-inspired notion of the social, one can also identify the creation of a certain type of expertise, a division of the subjects of government implied in this careful selection of tenants along biopolitical lines, combined with disciplinary power.

The guidance was silent on the ‘need’ of those selected for this accommodation, because need was not the main consideration. The post- 19 18 campaign was headlined ‘Homes fit for heroes’. This implied the construction of fit properties for returning soldiers - that is, not necessarily for those deemed to be in the greatest need nor necessarily low-cost accommodation. These homes were to be a step up from those constructed for the working classes in the late nineteenth century. The limited extent of state subsidy to underpin development meant that some of the cost had to be borne by the occupiers through rent:

‘There is really no doubt about how rent policy worked out in practice. The market for local authority houses was largely confined to a limited range of income groups, that is, in practice, the better-off families, the small clerks, the artisans, the better-off semi-skilled workers with small families and fairly safe job^.'^'

Neither was this a mistake. The objective, perhaps unstated in this period but prevalent in the late nineteenth century, was in part to enable ‘filtering down’. Once these households had moved to this new accommodation, their old accommodation would be free for those on lower incomes. The failure of this policy was partly a result of state controls on the private rented sector and partly because of the increase in new households in this period.42

It was the failure of this policy that the concept of need was designed to address. However, selection on the basis of need was also introduced as part of an alternative answer to the question of who council housing was for. The welfare role of council housing was given increased prominence. In a succession of Ministry of Health annual reports, beginning in 1929-30, the problem of administration of council housing came to be seen as a problem of need, requiring the development of new techniques of management. It was said that the purpose of local authority housing was to provide for those ‘who are least eligible in the eyes of the private owner’ and made reference to the statutory ‘reasonable preference’ to be given to those with larger families. Although this was said to cause difficulties of rent collection, the Ministry advised on the use of differential rents.J3

40. P Kemp and P Williams, ‘Housing management: an historical perspective’ in D Hughes and S Lowe (eds), A New Cenfury forMunicipa1 Housing (Leicester: University of Leicester Press, 1991) p 128. 41. Kemp and Williams, above n 40, p 129; see also J Burnett A Social History of Housing 1915-1985 (London: Methuen, 1986) p 2 3 8 , who refers to social surveys of London County Council tenants which categorised tenants across their employment status and standing; A Holmans Housing Policy in Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1987) pp 175 et seq contains evidence about family incomes of these council tenants. This ‘disastrous and inequitable consequence’ was doubly so because ‘they got them . . . with the assistance of a subvention from the other members of the community’: Bowley, above n 22, p 130. 42. Burnett, above n 41, p 42. 43. Ministry of Health 11th Annual Report 1929-30Cmd 3667 (London: HMSO, 1930). A differential rents scheme required better off households to pay more to subsidise those less well off.

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In the subsequent year’s report, the question of rent was linked with need - there were those tenants who could afford private sector rents ‘and whose continued occupation of the houses at subsidised rents means the exclusion of those whose need is unquestionably greater’.‘‘ Thus, in identifying need as the organising principle, the Ministry of Health were also identifying the role of council housing: it was the provision of property at a subsidised rent for the short term until the household could afford to exit the tenure for private renting.

The Committee on Local Expenditure gave just two paragraphs to the ‘management and allocation of accommodation’ and echoed the Ministry’s view on targeted assistance: ‘subsidies should not be wasted by being given to those who do not need them’. The Committee thought that tenants who could afford them should pay higher rents ‘to increase the revenue obtainable to reduce the loss arising from housing estates’;‘‘ or vacate their properties, which could then be sold on the open market or let to poorer households.” Thus, in this period the notion of need mutated into an organising criterion not only of who should get council housing, but also for how long they should have access to it. Indeed, in 1933, the London County Council wrote to 300 tenants suggesting that they vacate their properties in the interests of those persons whose need was greater - half apparently did vacate their properties.**

The emphasis on need as the selection criterion was seen as necessary because the focus of council housing had shifted away from new building for the better-off working class to slum clearance and the rehousing of slum dweller^.*^ This refocusing was also accompanied by a discursive shift towards ‘management’:

‘It is probable that, as the slum clearance campaign proceeds and local authorities find themselves confronted with the problem of housing a number of tenants who have hitherto lived under extremely bad conditions and a proportion of whom may present special difficulty, the need for skilled management will become more widely recognised.’so

Slum clearance devalued the tenure in the popular consciousness: slum clearance estates were ‘stigmatized as “rough” and their occupiers sometimes shunned’.>’ Some local authorities were also concerned at the slum dwellers’

44. Ministry of Health 12thAnriunl Report 1930-31 Cmd 3937 (London: HMSO, 1931)

45. Report of the Committee on Locul Expenditure (England and Wules), Cmd 4200 (London: HMSO, 1932). 46. Few local authorities had conducted surveys of their tenants’ incomes by 1933 - those who had found that ‘a very small number of tenants were in a position to pay a higher rent’: Ministry of Health 14th Aiiriud report 1932-1933, Cmd 4372 (London: HMSO, 1933. 47. At para 95. 48. Ministry of Health, 15th Annual Report 1933-1934 Cmd 4664 (London: HMSO, 1934) p 160. 49. Effected by alterations to the subsidy system introduced in the Housing Act 1930 and the Housing (Financial Provisions) Act 1933. 50. Ministry of Health, above n 48, p 161. 51. Holmans, above n 41, p 178.

p 97.


‘bad influence on other council tenants’.s2 Thus, councils experimented with methods of dealing with this pauperised population, of discipline and normalisation by cutting them off ‘in special blocks under close supervision until they proved themselves capable’.s’

It was at this time that experts became integrated into the process of governing households. Hitherto, the role of experts had been in the planning, design and construction of proper tie^.'^ In the Housing Act 1935,ss the government created the Central Housing Advisory Committee, a group of the great and the good who employed sub-committees of experts. In their first report, this committee of experts considered the question of expertise in relation to housing management. The required housing management was ‘in effect a form of social education and aims at teaching a new and inexperienced community to be “housing minded”’.s6 The training could best be done by educating the housewife, ‘the real manager of the home’,s7 and by peer group (‘the bad tenant will learn more readily by eye than by ear; example is better than precept’”).

This report, then, signals another key moment. First, it sought to define a role for expertise, both for the committee itself and for housing management. Second, while having a strong moral dimension, the notion of housing management, probably from this point on, was constructed with a certain neutrality in official texts - ‘the surface image fostered by local government that management activities are orderly, fair, neutral and apolitical and that “each receives according to need’ . . . ’ .59 The centrality of the notion of need - implying a neutral set of assessment criteria - assisted this process. Third, management was regarded as ‘the concern of the local authority for protecting and preserving what is seen as a piece of public investment rather than someone’s home’;” hence, there is a justification for ongoing supervision of tenants. Fourth, it marked a shift in the techniques of government away from the carceral towards governing through freedom. The techniques it proposed were that of governing through the family and through community. It explicitly employed a nineteenth century technique of ‘familialization’ through the woman ‘and added a number of tools and allies for her to use’, the main instrument of which was “‘social” housing’.61

52. S Schifferes ‘Council tenants and housing policy in the 1930s: the contradictions of’ state intervention’ in M Edwards, F Gray, S Merrett and J Swann (eds) Housing and Class in Britain (London: Russell Press, 1976) p 66. 53. Kemp and Williams, at p 130. 54. See eg the Tudor Walters Report, Cd 919 1 (London: HMSO, 19 18). 55. Section 24. 56. Ministry of Health The Management of Municipal Housing Estates Report of the House Management and Housing Associations Sub-committee of the Central Housing Advisory Committee (London: HMSO, 1938) p 10 (emphasis added). 57. Ibid, p 19, in the context of whether women should be employed by councils as housing managers as advocated by Hill. 58. Ibid, p 20. 59. F Gray ‘The management of local authority housing’, in M Edwards, F Gray, S Merrett and J Swann (eds) Housing and Class in Britain (London: Russell Press, 1976)p 84. 60. C Bedale ‘Property relations and housing policy: Oldham in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ in J Melling, Housing, Social Policy and the State (London: Croom Helm, 1980) p 67. 61. Donzelot, above n 1 , p 40.

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It was this technique of government which fostered and supported a growing practice of pre-allocation visits by a local authority officer to ‘ascertain their circumstances ... and the domestic standard and financial resources of its members’.62 The forms used by housing visitors tended to translate Victorian labels into everyday life. Damer draws on the forms used in Glasgow which required the visitor to differentiate from ‘very good’ to ‘unsuitable’ the type of person, cleanliness, and Such judgments were largely based on the ‘detective work’ of these employees who were specifically employed because of their experience as middle-aged married women.64 This was constructed as a practice of expertise.65 The apparently neutral notion of need was thus anything but neutral. Although it had become technicised and institutionalised through the forms, which created their own form of knowledge, designation as being ‘in need’ was conditional upon being seen as conforming to a barely articulated norm.

After the Second World War, the discourse of need became further grounded in technicality, which only served to enhance the claim to neutrality and expertise. So, for example, in their 1949 report, a CHAC sub-committee considered that properties should be let to those ‘in the greatest housing need’. This implied allocation on the basis of comparative need; a hierarchy of housing needs was subsequently specified (overcrowding, ill-health, lack of a separate home, condition of dwelling, exceptional cases, and other factors).66 The committee deprecated the general use of other factors to override the technical housing need criteria (although regarded such factors as reasonable when distinguishing between households with equal housing need).67 Hence, it would appear that, at the level of policy discourse, the dominance of housing need over other factors such as behavioural or housekeeping standards was complete: allocation should be on the basis of ‘objective’ criteria alone.

The technicisation of need by this stage can be illustrated by the CHAC discussion of the methods of selection used by local authorities. There were points schemes, under which households would be given points related to their level of housing need, and, in some areas, other factors such as war service and length of time on the waiting list.68 There were priority schemes, under which households would be placed in broad groups of priority on the basis of their housing need (the equivalent of today’s banding schemes). These were regarded as requiring further analysis within the groups to determine relative housing need.69 Then there were other atechnical schemes (allocation on date order or

62. Above n 56, p 19 63. S Darner ‘A note on housing allocation’ in M Edwards, F Gray, S Merrett and J Swann (eds) Housing and Class in Britain (London: Russell Press, 1976) p 73. 64. S Darner and R Madigan ‘The housing investigator’ (1974) New Society, 25 July, D 226. 65. J Macey and C Baker Housing Managernenf (London: Estates Gazette, 1965) p 215, cited in Power, above n 33, p 97. 66. Third Report of the Housing Management Sub-committee of the Central Housing Advisory Committee, Selection of Tenants and Transfers and Exchanges (London: HMSO, 1949) paras 7 and 15-24. 67. Ibid, para 32. 68. Ibid, paras 30-35. 69. Ibid, para 36.


by ballot) which were deprecated for not taking account of housing need.70 Yet, as Holmans points out, the more technical schemes were still favouring the same type of tenant as in the 1930s.”

In 1949, legislative reference to council housing being for the ‘working classes’ was removed. The post-war vision for council housing was of a mass tenure, drawing from all sectors of society. The 1930s emphasis on the welfare role of council housing and its concomitant targeting on those who could not afford the private sector were modified. Housing need, thus, became the sole criterion, a matter which a subsequent CHAC sub-committee regarded as important in defining the proper role of management:

‘. . . tenants today are much more representative of the community as a whole and are, for the most part, independent, reliable citizens who no longer required the support and guidance which was often thought to be necessary in the past. Local authorities must recognise that this is a major social change which is likely to become more marked in the years ahead: and that this recognition must be given positive effect in their management practice.’72

Not only did this redefine the task of housing management - away from its social services ‘aftercare’ role - it also suggested a certain hegemony of the technical.

This hegemony was reflected in the 1969 CHAC sub-committee report, conventionally referred to as the Cullingworth Committee. This report played an important part in demystifying the role of the housing visitor, suggesting that the emphasis of housing management should be on what households want rather than what a housing department itself thought was ~uitable.’~ In so doing, the expertise of housing management was subjected to the expertise of the individual household. However, the notion of housing need itself was not questioned - indeed, the proper role of housing management was regarded as selecting those in the greatest housing need. Yet, with the broader political agenda starting to move against the ‘indiscriminate’ subsidisation of council tenants, the proposition that the assessment of housing need should be conditional reasserted itself. The committee regarded an expanded role for need, to take account of economic and social needs, to be essential; thus, housing managers were once again required to be experts of the social: ‘It is good financial policy as well as good social policy to ensure that priority in the allocation of council houses is given to the most socially needy groups.’74 This time, the Committee did not regard any particular allocation scheme as more appropriate than another; but more complex schemes that combined factors were the only method which escaped direct criticism.

70. Third Report, above n 66, paras 38-39. 71. Holmans, above n 41, p 181. 72. Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Councils and their Houses: Management ofEstates, Eighth report of the Housing Management Sub-committee of the Central Housing Advisory Committee (London: HMSO, 1959) para 7 (original emphasis). 73. Central Housing Advisory Committee, Council Housing: Purposes, Procedures, Priorities (London: HMSO, 1969) para 91. 74. Ibid, para 6 1 .

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By this stage, a number of factors had altered the terrain. First, a major slum clearance campaign had created a new demand from older households; second, the steady rise of owner-occupation meant that more households with stable incomes were opting for that tenure. Holmans remarks on a striking change in the population of council housing between 1960 and 1976:

‘As a result of the selection process . . . and allocation according to need, 80% of the increase in [households of pensionable age or in receipt of supplementary benefits] were local authority tenants.’7s

Thus, even before the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act 1977 placed further emphasis upon the housing of those in most extreme housing need and the advent of the Right to Buy in 1980 started to reshape the social housing landscape, ‘social housing’ was catering for the poorest households, 47% of whom were in the lowest three income deciles by 1979.7h

THE CRITIQUE OF EXPERTISE

We have so far demonstrated that from the 1930s through to the 1960s housing need came to dominate the allocation of council housing. It was presented as a neutral basis for allocation and became the subject of expertise. Yet, not far below the surface of this apparent objectivity lay an ethos which sought to divide the population on the basis of a moralising ideology. During much of the period, to have its housing need recognised, a household could not deviate too far from an implicit norm related to behaviour and housekeeping. While this moral filter was gradually removed from policy pronouncements at national level, a central government desire to move council housing towards a more clearly welfare role introduced criteria other than ‘objective’ housing need into the selection process.

In addition, from the 1960s the operationalisation of housing need was subjected to sustained critique. Undoubtedly, the Cullingworth committee report formed part of that critique, not only in seeking to generate criteria concerned with social need but also on more specific grounds, such as the practice of imposing residential qualifications on applicants and the treatment of black and minority ethnic household^.^^ The critique was not of the principle of allocation on the basis of housing need, but that, regardless of what might be set out in policy about needs-based allocation, the wrong households were being prioritised because of local systems or policy failures.

The first part of the critique concerned the use of discretion. The open-ended obligation prescribed by legislation - that ‘reasonable preference’ should be accorded to certain types of households - provided a discretion which was too broad:

‘. . . discretion was depicted as the bug in the system - a source of deviance which allowed short-term management goals to compromise the principle of social justice. It was the smokescreen behind which housing departments

75. Central Housing Advisory Committee, above n 73, p 196. 76. See A Murie ‘The social rented sector, housing and the welfare state in the UK’ ( 1 997) 12 Housing Studies 437,449 for discussion. 77. See eg ch 9.


infused an agreed hierarchy of needs with a range of other, more dubious, allocative principle^."^ The solution, on this view, was to provide closer attention to rules, the

supposed binary opposite of dis~retion.~’ A further problem with discretion was opened up by a more discrete research enquiry into the role of selection and allocation systems in the systematic direct and indirect processes of discrimination against black and ethnic minority households.s0 Smith summarised the impact of this discrimination in the following terms:

‘Even if black people prefer segregation, it is hard to understand why they should pursue this in the more run-down segments of the housing stock, rather than in areas where they could secure the symbolic and economic benefits associated with suburban life.”’

Yet, more formally bounded rules did not alter these effects because of the impact of broader socio-economic disadvantage.82 Indeed, what emerged from the abundant research into council house allocation was the way in which the operationalisation of need depended on a system of ‘political influence, by possessing a bargaining counter, or by articulacy and social acceptability’.83 Political influence was not just a question of individual households being assisted, but also of the more systematic way priority was given to households wishing to transfer within the sector.84 This could be justified in a number of ways - as rewarding long-standing tenants, as opening out the accommodation they were leaving for new tenants, as being a rational use of available accommodation. Broadly, however, its effect was that those who could ‘afford’ to wait longest were rewarded with the best properties. One might say, then, that despite the discourse of social housing management emphasising the role of need, it relied for its efficacy upon bargaining instincts similar to those in the private sector, and that leads inevitably to inequity.

Second, schemes had become incredibly complex. This was a direct result of the solutions emerging from the rule/discretion debate. However, it was also made possible by the development of technology:

‘Allocations systems seemingly have become ever more complex, designed to reflect the range of nuance of housing need, a trend made

78. S Smith and S Mallinson, ‘The problem with social housing: discretion, accountability and the welfare ideal’, (1996) 24 Policy and Politics 339,341. 79. Cf R Sainsbury ‘Administrative justice: Discretion and procedure in social security decision-making’ in K Hawkins (ed) The Uses ofDiscretion (Oxford: OUP, 1989). 80. See the classic J Henderson and V Karn Race, Class and State Housing: fnequaliv und the Allocation of Public Housing in Britain (Aldershot: Cower, 1987). 81. S Smith The Politics of ‘Race’ and Residence (Cambridge: Polity, 1989) p 36. 82. S Jeffers and P Hoggett ‘Like counting deckchairs on the Titanic: a study of institutional racism and housing allocations in Haringey and Lambeth’ (1995) 10 Housing Studies 325. 83. M Jones ‘Utopia and reality: the utopia of public housing and its reality at Broadwater Farm’ in N Teymur, T Markus and T Woolley (eds) Rehumanizing Housing (London: Butterworths, 1988) p 98. 84. See, in particular, D Clapham and K Kintrea, ‘Rationing, choice and constraint: the allocation of public housing in Glasgow’ (1986) 15 Journal of Social Policy 51.

36 Legal Studies

possible by the development of the first computerised allocation administration in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Computerisation is now universal, except amongst the smallest housing association^.'^^

A by-product of this sophistication was an increasing reliance on risk as a housing management tool, although it was not named as such until the late 1 9 9 0 ~ ~ ~ To some degree this represents a return to themes prominent in the 1920s. It is possible to think of housing management in terms of risk management and minimisation, with one option being to screen high risk households out of the sector through the selection and allocation process. Fred Gray summarised the rationale for the concern with attracting the ‘good tenant’:

‘This preoccupation may influence the local authority’s views on who should be offered a council house, and what sort of dwelling it should be. Rather than being based solely on the “need” of households (however this is defined) selection and allocation may reflect, in part at least, the desire of the local authority to minimise management

As this type of risk management became more prominent - or at least more widely recognised - it is plausible to portray need not as the organising criterion but largely as window-dressing: the overriding factor was that new tenants should not be a burden on housing management - what Cowan has referred to as ‘tenantability’.88

The selection process provided one method of insuring against that potential burden. Even the homelessness legislation - supposedly the apotheosis of need -could be analysed as an exercise in risk management.n9 In this, there is a neat inversion of the welfare relationship: the notion of insurance is at the heart of that relationship, whether or not it is named ‘social’, and the relevant concept is insurance of the self. However, in the context of housing selection and allocation, the insurance is of the bureaucracy. This insurance scheme divided its populations into good risks and bad risks, filtered out some of the bad risks (for example through the notion of ‘intentional homelessness’) and subsequent management practices ‘engage in “close watching and masterful inactivity” to weed out the bad who slipped through and the good who succumbed to the insurance temptati~n’.~’ To complete the insurance analogy, in contrast, the quote from the 1959 CHAC report presented above can be construed as indicating that in a mass tenure risks are manageable because they are effectively diluted by being pooled across a more diverse tenant population.

85. H Pawson and K Kintrea ‘Part of the problem or part of the solution? Social housing allocation policies and social exclusion in Britain’ (2002) 3 1 Journal of Social Policy 643, 648. 86. Although, see J Cullingworth Problems ofan Urban Sociery, Vol2: the Content of Planning (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973) p 5 1 : ‘Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that local authorities, like sound business enterprises, tend to reject “poor risk’ applicants: and, incredibly, social work departments often acquiesce in this.’ 87. F Gray, ‘Consumption: council house management’ in S Merrett State Housing in Britain (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979) p 207. 88. D Cowan, Homelessness: The (In-)Appropriate Applicant (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1997). 89. See D Cowan, R Gilroy and C Pantazis, ‘Risking housing need’ (1999) 26 JLS 403. 90. T Baker ‘Insuring morality’ (2000) 29 Economy and Society 559,570.

From need to choice. welfarism to advanced liberalism? 37

Third, an increasingly important critique of needs-based allocation concerned the ‘discovery’ of unpopular estates and their links with allocation schemes. The creation of such ‘problem estates’ (as they were labelled in policy terms) was related to the stigma slum dwellers carried with them to their new properties and to complex, localised sets of circumstance^.^' Certainly, labelling an estate in this way could create a self-fulfilling prophecy in that properties on such estates were often matched with the more desperate.y2 These areas then became the focus of a series of criminological studies, and were constructed as criminological problems: Bottoms and Wiles, for example, referred to ‘residential community crime career^'.^' Some academics and policy-makers tended to see one dimensional causes and solutions - the architecture, the management - to these multi-dimensional issues.94 Thus, for example, during the 1980s, the Priority Estates Project employed a decentralisation approach to housing management to cure the ills of the worst estates, to less than emphatic evaluation^.'^ This was, then, linked to a notion of a more active citizenhenant of housing, who would participate in their housing management - as Johnston and Shearing put it, ‘governance is now everybody’s

CHOICE AND ‘ADVANCED LIBERALISM’

To govern better, the state must govern less; to optimise the economy, one must govern through the entrepreneurship of autonomous actors - individuals and families, firms and corporations. Once responsibilised and entrepreneurialised, they would govern themselves within a state secured framework of law and order.97

ADVANCED LIBERALISM

Advanced liberalism refers to a new way of ‘understanding and acting upon human beings as subjects of freedom’.98 It implies a new relation between expertise and politics, a shift to reliance on techniques of audit and the market, particularly contracts, targets, and performance indicators. There is a

91. The classic study is S Damer ‘Wine Alley: the sociology of a dreadful enclosure’ ( 1974) 22 Sociological Review 22 1 . 92. See generally, A Bottoms and P Wiles, ‘Environmental criminology’, in R Morgan and R Reiner (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Oxford: OUP, 1997). 93. A Bottoms and P Wiles, ‘Housing tenure and residential community crime careers in Britain’ in A Reiss and M TONY (eds) Crime and Justice: A Review of Research - Communities and Crime (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) p 103. 94. Eg A Coleman Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing (London: Hilary Shipman, 1985). 95. See the discussion in I Cole and R Furbey The Eclipse of Council Housing (London: Routledge, 1994) pp 213-215. 96. L Johnston and C Shearing, Governing Security: Explorations in Policing and Justice (London: Routledge, 2003) p 70. 97. Rose p 139. 98. Rose p 84.

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transformation in ethos at the heart of expertise, ‘from one dictated by the logics of the system to one dictated by the logics of the market and the demands of customers’.99 At the same time, subjects are encouraged through a combination of fears and anxieties to seek out their own solutions in the market place (private pensions, and the diverse other types of private insurance products available). loo Citizens become consumers with ethical and moral obligations in this new relationship both with themselves as regards their own self-government and with their communities.

Yet, there are those who are unwilling to act as consumers. And for these people, there has been a show of sovereign, punitive force which, at first sight, appears out of keeping with the mentality of governing through freedom.lOl It is in this sense that the despotism at the heart of liberalism is equally apparent in advanced liberalism.Io2 It is certainly the case that government beyond the centre has become allied more closely with punitive forms of sovereignty, ‘emphasising the role of politics, governance, and choice’ . I o 3 This conjunction of discipline with sovereignty resonates with shifts in the rationalities of housing management.

ADVANCED LIBERALISM AND HOUSING MANAGEMENT

Some academic attention has been given to the lack of professional identity for housing management. While there is agreement about the property-related tasks involved in housing management, there is less agreement about the tenancy management aspects - ‘the people end of the service’.’” We argue that, despite this lack of clear role definition, a number of factors have combined to propel housing managers to the head of a certain governmental rationality, which links neo-liberal and neo-conservative ethics. Io5

One might trace this to the ‘crisis’ during the 1980s over the effectiveness of (particularly council) housing management which meant that, for the first time, housing management came to be systematically measured.lo6 In that

99. Rose p 150. 100. The shift, in other words, is from ‘socialized actuarialism to privatised actuarialism’, a new prudentialism - see P O’Malley ‘Risk, power and crime prevention’ (1992) 21 Economy and Sociev 252,257. 101. See D Garland ‘The limits of the sovereign state: strategies of crime control in contemporary society’ (1996) 36 BJC 445. 102. For discussion, see M Valverde “‘Despotism” and ethical liberal governance’ (1996) 25 Economy and Society 357; M Dean ‘Liberal government and authoritarianism’ (2002) 3 1 Economy and Society 37. 103. K Stenson ‘Crime control, governmentality and sovereignty’ in R Smandych (ed) Governable Places: Reudings on Governmentality and Crime Control (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1999). 104. B Franklin and D Clapham ‘The social construction of housing management’ (1997) 12 Housing Studies 7, 15. 105. See P O’Malley ‘Violent and contradictory punishment’ (1999) 3 Theoretical Criminology 175 106. See Audit Commission Managing the Crisis in Council Housing (London: HMSO, 1986); Centre for Housing Research The Nature and Effectiveness of Housing Management in England (London: HMSO, 1989); W Bines, P Kemp, N Pleace and C Radley Managing Social Housing (London: HMSO, 1993).


measurement, and possibly not until that point, a certain way of thinking about the tasks of housing management was born. The focus shifted to a more competitive, measurable, efficient system which sought to respond to the needs of households. Performance measurement was used internally and externally to demonstrate the quality of service being provided but equally significantly it enhances control over housing management.’O’ It was during this period that the tasks of housing management began to be specified as part of the process of compulsory competitive tendering (CCT). Although CCT did not take root in the housing management field, it engrained in local government the need to pay close attention to the values of economy, efficiency and effectiveness. lo*

Concomitantly the subject of the government of housing management has been re-specified. No longer do we think of ‘clients’ but ‘consumers’ or ‘customers’ of a social housing ‘product’.l@ This shift is more than rhetorical. As O’Malley and Palmer suggest, ‘conceptions of expertise still remain very much in place, but the rhetorical question of who is understood to be “on top” becomes more open as the consumer/customer, contractual imagery is extended’.”O The notion of a consumer or customer challenges the expertise of housing management, but it is a challenge which has effectively been confined to certain domains. The various customers’ charters in social housing challenge certain bureaucratic practices, but leave judgment intact elsewhere - for example, the determination of need is still a management domain.

CCT prefaced the New Labour regime of controls on housing management through Best Value, particularly manifested in the fixation with performance indicators. Dean refers to a ‘swarming ... of technologies of performance [which] penetrate the enclosures of expertise fostered under the welfare state and [. . .] subsume the substantive domains of expertise’.”’ One might say that since the 1990s a demand for expertise in generic, rather than housing, management has been created. While this is true, it is important not to neglect the re-emergence, in more sophisticated form, of key housing management concerns. Indeed, the two are interconnected at a fundamental level.

The softer forms of government under Best Value, which govern through freedom, have been combined with stricter financial controls. For at least 20 years, housing management has been squeezed in the name of efficiency. With performance measured, compared and individual organisations held up to scrutiny, the pressure to perform is considerable. Overlaid upon this is the

107. See M Power, The Audit Society: Rituals qf Verification (Oxford: OUP, 1997). 108. See E Ferlie, L Ashburner, L Fitzgerald and A Pettigrew, The New Public Management in Action (Oxford: OUP, 1996) and its translation in the housing context in R Walker ‘New public management and housing associations: from comfort to competition’ ( 1998) 26 Policy and Politics 71; R Walker ‘The changing management of social housing: The impact of externalisation and managerialisation’ (2000) I5 Housing Studies 281. 109. The notion of a social housing product was first mooted in DOE, More Choice in the Social Rented Sector (London: DOE, 1995); although used subsequently, the term was only partially adopted. 110. P O’Malley and D Palmer, ‘Post-Keynesian policing’, (1996) 25 Economy and Society 137, 141. 111. M Dean Governmentality Powers of Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999) p 169.

40 Legal Studies

transformation of social housing from a general needs tenure to the tenure of last resort as a consequence of rising real incomes, the normalisation of home ownership and the various exit policies engineered by governments since 1980. Social housing faces a poorer and more marginalised tenant population and, in many parts of the midlands and the north, a reduction in the overall level of demand to the point where swathes of the stock are perceived to face low demand or be hard to let. In this context the task of management and the delivery of continuously improving performance expected by government becomes more problematic. At the extreme, the intersection of the ‘business’ imperatives placed upon landlords and the problems facing housing management have rendered the continuing existence of social housing in particular localities uncertain.

One response to the problems of managing spatially concentrated, marginalised populations is the current policy concern with the development of ‘sustainable communities’ through ‘sensitive’ or ‘flexible’ lettings which ‘operate alongside or in place of a consideration of housing need and take into account the tenant’s contribution to that community in which the vacancy has occurred’.”2 This focus on community aligns housing with the ‘novel mentalities and strategies of government’ which are part and parcel of advanced liberalism.”’ And the notion of sustainable communities which has become technical - there is now an array of experts who can advise on the design of accommodation, the right social mix, the appropriate child density, the type of housing management techniques, the design of community participation.’ l 4

It might be suggested now that community has become more salient than the social in the political imagination of state housing. With this understanding of how to create communities, a transformation has occurred regarding the selection of households and the allocation of state subsidised accommodation to them. The new problematisation is one which, to a degree, harks back to the era of council housing as a general needs tenure in which the risks to housing management were diluted. This understanding is also one which is fundamentally ethical - how can welfare dependants become active in their self-government? I I s

The need to demonstrate satisfactory management performance in the face of a more marginalised population has exacerbated the tendencies noted earlier towards risk management and exclusion. In the name of social housing, the anti-social have been excluded and segregated. At no time since the advent of

112. M Griffiths, J Parker, R Smith, T Stirling and T Trott Communirv Lettings: Local Allocations Policies in Practice (York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1996) p 1. 113. N Rose, ‘Government and control’, (2000) 40 BJC 321,331. 114. These types of expertise are the direct result of the work of academics and social scientists - eg A Power Property before People (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987); D Page Building for Communiries (York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1993); A Coleman Utopia on Trial: Vision und Reality in Planned Housing (London: Hilary Shipman, 1985). Cf A Murie ‘The social rented sector, housing and the welfare state in the UK’ (1997) 22 Housing Studies 437, who argues (at 438) that these accounts ‘fail[] to identify and order other contingent and contextual factors and, because of this, to address which factors have been most significant’. 115. See W Walters Unemployment and governmenr: Genealogies of the Social (Cambridge: CUP, 2000) ch 6.


social housing has more effort been put into dividing the anti-social from those who conform to the norm. The anti-social are in some cases divided off from the population in new therapeutic communities such as that pioneered in Dundee.Il6 Housing managers have been given (at their request) a battery of measures which has increased year on year since the government issued a rushed Consultation Paper on anti-social behaviour in 1995.”’ That document linked anti-social behaviour with council housing, and, at the same time, with notions of probation. The Social Landlords Crime and Nuisance Group have achieved a similar status within the heart of central government as the various policing interests. There are therapeutic strategies for the anti-social, and there is the possibility of redemption held out for them;”’ but at the same time there is a show of sovereign force through the eviction process and intensive disciplinary techniques, such as demotion of tenancy status.Il9

Housing management now recognises that there are some anti-consumers who are just too costly, in terms of supervisory and disciplinary interventions and the households’ negative impact upon the communities which housing managers aspire to create for their estates. New teams have been set up by housing providers to deal specifically with the problem of anti-social behaviour and these teams exercise considerable purchase on the rehousing process.120 Housing management is referred to as adopting a ‘zero tolerance’ approach, linking with other agencies so that they can ‘collectively deliver their services from coterminous locations developing common practices of information collection, collation, processing, management, and exchange in the process of so doing’.12’ Risk communications are the stuff of everyday housing selection and allocation, as housing officers engage in regular cross-disciplinary dialogues with other social agencies about individuals they perceive as risky, in the sense of their tenantability. This exclusionary impulse in housing management is in the name of the community - indeed, often it is something which the community wants. There is also a suggestion that it reinforces the family ethic - single parents and other ‘deviant’ households were particularly targeted by one housing provider’s focus on anti-social behaviour.’** More clearly, there are certain households to whom housing providers accept no obligation, as a result of their failure to conform to the appropriate norm. Hence, under advanced liberalism the notion of the state as the citizens’ housing provider of last resort no longer holds.

116. See M Hill, J Dillane, J Bannister and S Scott, ‘Everybody needs good neighbours: an evaluation of an intensive project for families facing eviction’ (2002) 7 Child and Family Social Work 79. 117. DOE Anti-Social Behaviour on Council Estates: A Consultation Paper on Probationaty Tenancies (London: DOE, 1995. 118. Discussed in D Cowan and A Marsh ‘New Labour, same old Tory housing policy’ (2001) 64 MLR 260. 119. See generally the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003. 120. See D Cowan and S Halliday with C Hunter, P Maginn and L Naylor The Appeal of Internal Review (Oxford: Hart, 2003) ch 3. 121. Johnston and Shearing, above n 96, p 108 (original emphasis). 122. C Hunter and J Nixon ‘Taking the blame and losing the home: women and anti- social behaviour’ (2001) 23 Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law 395.

42 Legal Studies

With the increased emphasis upon consumerisation and the problem of a deficiency of demand for available properties, policy has recently addressed the possibility of a market for social housing. Bureaucratic allocation on the basis of need may have been an appropriate tool to ration access and discriminate between households in times when demand outstripped supply, but with an increasing number of areas exhibiting an apparent oversupply of housing stock rationing is irrelevant and alternatives have been sought. The pressure to maximise performance on indicators such as rent lost through vacancies gives management an incentive to seek households who are willing to become tenants, even if they have very little ‘housing need’ in any conventional sense. Different methods have been adopted by housing management to address the problem: decentralisation of housing management, opening high street shop fronts advertising properties like estate agencies, and marketing on paper and through other media. These techniques have been combined with an intensification of risk management techniques, closer relationships with crime control agencies, more employees specifically dealing with nuisance-type behaviour, and a return to grading household standards in an attempt to create environments in which more people would choose to live.

CHOICE: AN EXEMPLAR OF ADVANCED LIBERALISM

It is hardly surprising that in the current context the privileged position occupied by the notion of ‘need’ should be subject to challenge, nor that ‘choice’, with its undertones of a particular type of freedom, should be the vehicle of challenge. Choice-based lettings (CBL) is the highly publicised solution to some of the major problems facing social housing proposed by the New Labour government in their 2000 housing Green Paper, drawing on experiences in the Netherlands.I2’ The details of CBL schemes differ, but they typically involve applicants bidding using an artificial currency (based on waiting time or housing need points or banding) for properties advertised in newspapers or on the internet. Bidders for each property are ranked, and the property is offered to the bidder with the highest level of currency. If two households with the same level of currency bid for a property then they are ranked on a supplementary criterion, such as length of time registered. Between 2001 and 2003 the government ran 27 CBL pilots to test the approach and has stated as a policy objective that all local authorities should be running some form of CBL by 2010.’24

These systems provide a prime example of the advanced liberal method of governing through freedom. As Rose suggests, ‘. . . modem individuals are not merely “free to choose”, but obliged to be free’.’25 Choice makes the subject of housing management active in their own housing ‘solutions’ - it fits neatly

123. See DETR/DSS Qualiiy and Choice: A Decent Home for All - The housing green paper (London: DETWDSS, 2000); cf J Kullberg, ‘Consumers’ responses to choice- based letting mechanisms’ (2002) 17 Housing Studies 549. 124. See A Marsh, D Cowan, A Cameron, M Jones, C Kiddle and C Whitehead Piloting Choice Bused Letrings: An Evaluation (London: ODPM, 2004). 125. Rose p 87.


with the re-discovery of the ethical, self-aware citizen, and it works broadly on a market principle of desire, advertising, and bidding for property. Choice also works to enhance communities, particularly their stability, because only those who want to be housed on an estate - in that property - will bid for it. The claims for choice, and the rationalities which are made transparent in those claims, are significant:

‘Even in the private sector, people cannot always live exactly where they would like. They must make choices. Choice implies a trade-off between people’s needs and aspirations on the one hand, and the availability of housing they can afford on the other. Those who cannot afford housing in one area may have to look elsewhere, and are free to do so. But the more opportunity people have to decide these things for themselves, the more likely they are to feel ownership of the decision and to be satisfied with the outcome. And the more information they have on which to base their decisions, the better those decisions are likely to be.’’26

Choice is constructed as an empowering process which responsibilised applicants to manage themselves through flows of information. CBL also embodies a further new specification of the subject of choice: although the language of consumer and customer retains importance, under CBL we now also think of ‘home seekers’. The services run by the CBL pilots were labelled using variations on the theme of ‘home’ and ‘search’, ‘choice; ‘finder’ or ‘hunter’: the expectation of activity on the part of the household is clear.

Importantly, the search for the home is not related to any particular tenure - although CBL systems enable social housing allocation, the information provided to home seekers can also encompass low-cost home ownership and available properties in the private rented sector. Nor is it related to any particular area - home seekers are encouraged to look to other areas for their housing solution, emphasising the need for mobility in the search for a home. In those areas where there is still a shortage of social housing, disseminating information is designed to emphasise the paucity of available accommodation so that the home-seekers are able to appreciate the true housing situation in the area and hence make informed decisions about their housing options: including concluding that they are not going to access social housing in their area any time soon.

‘Vulnerable’ home seekers in this process are those unable to access the different sources of media advertising or are unable to bid. These home seekers remain the subject of intervention by the provider, but the intervention reflects the activity implied in the search - rather than bureaucratic direction of the process, it more typically focuses on providing information in a manageable form or a discussion of whether to bid for a property. Housing-related vulnerability is typically embodied in the amount of currency allocated to a household, rather than shaping the process of allocation. The exception is vulnerability which links with the capacity to search for housing (eg. mental impairment).

126. DETRDSS, above n 123, para 9.6. In the subsequent White Paper, these claims were modified to the belief that choice will ‘help to create sustainable communities’ and would enable ‘better use of the national housing stock’: DETR Qua& and Choice: A Decent H o m e for All, The Way Forward for Housing (London: DETR, 2001) para 6.4.

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At first sight CBL schemes appear to represent a major reconfiguration of the way social housing is allocated. Yet, they exhibit considerable continuity with the recent past. First, housing need remains paramount. The Green Paper, together with all the bidding guidance and news releases, emphasised that ‘meeting need remains the priority for lettings and transfers policies’. 12’ Indeed, since New Labour has taken office both the ‘reasonable preference’ categories and the definition of statutory homelessness have been broadened.”* Thus, need retains its hegemony and is carried through to CBL in the construction of the currency.

Second, CBL apparently shifts the location of expertise. The Green Paper suggested that:

‘Under a lettings service that puts decision-making in the hands of customers, the role of housing professionals becomes less one of gate-keeper and more one of advisor and advocate.’’29

Not only is there a new specification of the subject, there is also a new specification of expertise. The expertise of the housing manager appears to be subservient to that of the consumer. There is a degree of continuity here -the turn to notions of customerskonsumers had already effected a shift in the nature of expertise - but the advent of CBL is taken to indicate a more decisive change:

‘. . . the active (rather than passive) role that Delft-style approaches involve for applicants will fundamentally alter the remote, paternalistic and arguably disabling nature of the allocations process. This underlines the significance of the DETR’s terminological switch from the dirigiste language of ‘allocations’ to the more neutral “lettings”.’ I3O

Yet, the undermining of expertise and the removal of housing management from its dominance in shaping the allocations process is arguably less substantial than it first appears. First, under most implementations of CBL, expertise in relation to assessment still remains: households must still have their housing need assessed, although the criteria used are perhaps less de rigiste. The role of gate-keeper thus remains important. It retains this importance because ultimately (like other systems of government in advanced liberalism) households must be able to be controlled as necessary. This is particularly true in higher demand areas. The particular innovation in choice, in this respect, lies in the home seekers ability to choose a particular property. Yet, this is not a particularly big step away from what went before. Applicants for housing have always been able to choose the areas where they want to live - indeed, such choices were encouraged.I3l Whether a household’s choices translate into

127. Above n 123, at para 9.16. 128. See the Homelessness Act 2002 and the Code of Guidance, ODPM, Allocation of Accommodation: Code of Guidance for Locul Housing Authorities (London: ODPM, 2002). 129. Above n 123, para 9.33. 130. Pawson and Kintrea, above n 85, p 661. 131. See eg J Cullingworth Problems of an Urban Society, Vol2: the Content of Planning (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973) p 54, referring to LAC 41/67 in which the Ministry of Housing and Local Government suggested that tenants should ‘so far as possible be offered a choice of accommodation at varying rent levels’.


securing a property - ‘winning’ a bidding round - will depend upon to a large extent upon the amount of currency it has been allocated, compared with that of other households bidding. How the various components of need are weighted within a currency, or indeed whether some factors are included at all, is determined by local policy and practice.

Equally home seekers’ choices are constrained by the provider’s labelling of properties. Previously, providers had sought to meet the challenges of estates which had ‘tipped’ into problem areas or had issues around anti-social behaviour by developing ‘local lettings policies’. These policies used the lettings system to achieve ends such as a reduction in child density on particular estates or the encouragement of particular social groupings (key workers, the employed, etc) to live in them.I3* Such policies represent both a departure from allocation on the basis of housing need alone and a claim to ‘expertise’ in social engineering, which is manifested in the process of selecting suitable tenants. CBL schemes cater for the diversity of management aims in relation to particular properties and estates by the simple expedient of advertising properties as available only to home-seekers of a particular type or with a particular level of assessed need.I3’ Hence, the framing of the advert represents the key mechanism by which housing management shapes outcomes. The extent to which landlords are likely to feel it necessary, or be able, to pursue such policies is likely to be constrained by the local housing market context and the level of demand from statutory homeless or other households entitled to reasonable preference. Hence, the initial impression that CBL places the consumer in charge is misleading: available choice is typically heavily constrained and shaped by the traditional expertise of housing management.

While there are aspects of CBL that are not quite as substantial a departure from previous allocation mechanisms as they first appear, there is one dimension that is of considerable broader significance. Formal law has been largely absent from our discussion so far, other than by reference to subsidy or the early development of reasonable preference. This is because historically law has largely been absent from housing management.134 Yet, at times, law does become the centre of a particular problematisati~n”~ - indeed, under advanced liberalism, law can become the problematisation. As regards selection and allocation of households, the law has developed broad standards of regulation which are discretion-laden. However, in R (A) v Lambeth LBC; R (Lindsay) v Lumbeth LBC the Court of Appeal held a lettings-style system to be unlawful.136 Lambeth argued that the interaction between housing need and choice, as

132. D Page, above n 114; cf I Cole, G Gidley, C Ritchie, D Simpson and B Wishart, Creating Communities or Welfare Housing? A Study of New Housing Association Developments in Yorkshire and Humberside (Coventry: CIH, 1996). 133. The Green Paper, above n 123, para 9.29, acknowledged this interaction: ‘Labels could therefore be used to impose restrictions on access to a property under a local lettings policy, for example in order to correct a significant social imbalance such as an excessive child density on certain estates.’ 134. I Loveland, ‘Square pegs, round holes: the “right” to council housing in the postwar era’ (1992) 19 JLS 339,345-347. 135. P Fitzpatrick, ‘Governmentality and the force of law’ [2000] European Yearbook in rhe Sociology of Lclw 3, p 17. 136. [2002] HLR (57) 998.

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operationalised by their scheme, rectified any apparent conflict with their duties under allocations law. The scheme - in common with the typical CBL scheme - was based on individuals’felt need and such need was reflected in how long, in the light of information provided on the likely waiting time for different types of property, they chose to wait for a property. This logic seems to accord with the government’s interpretation of the desirable characteristics of choice. More broadly, the government’s view would appear to be that the logic of choice is not incompatible with the existing body of allocations law. The logic of the Lambeth scheme was, however, rejected by the court. Pill LJ made the following observation:

‘I fail to see how permitting an applicant to assess his need so highly that he accepts inferior accommodation amounts to conferring a preference on

Hence the court appears to have placed in question the government’s attempt to alter the basis of allocation from normativekomparative need to felt need. In doing so, the discourse betrays anxieties at the heart of the law over the shift to advanced liberalism and the court, perhaps counter intuitively, reasserts principles at the core of welfarism. The challenge goes to the core of advanced liberalism and as such would appear to have placed the court in the unlikely role of a site of resistance.’38

An innovation of the choice agenda, which is perhaps less immediately evident than CBL, is in providing a label for a range of policies and practices which were already becoming prominent in government policy. Choice could plausibly be portrayed as an organising theme for a series of unconnected developments already under way. The ‘choice’ label .appears to bring these developments together into a coherent strategy. Better housing advice, which seeks to govern the housing ‘solutions’ of ‘home seekers’ through the provision of information about the availability of housing across the range of housing tenures and areas; working with the private sector to ensure that range becomes available to all; transparency in selection and allocation; better marketing of the stock; a service which is more responsive to anti-social behaviour. Yet, while it has provided an organising theme for these developments, the choice label has allowed a certain creative space; there have undoubtedly been innovations in the governance of allocations and the processes of accessing housing.

him,’ 137

CONCLUSION

In this article, we have drawn on the work of Foucault and his followers to illustrate how the notion of housing need became a technology of government. We have argued that need was a relatively late entrant into social housing policy and procedures but came to act as a symbol for the sector; a kind of unifying purpose. In the process it became a powerful tool, through which those seeking social housing could be placed in hierarchies and around which considerable expertise developed.

137. [2002] HLR (57) 998, para 38. 138. D Cowan and A Marsh ‘From need to choice’ (2004) 67 MLR 478.


Yet, at the level of national policy, need only gradually came to supplant factors relating to the suitability of households as the principal basis for selection and allocation. In addition, the contested nature of the concept ‘need’ is apparent: the redrawing of its boundaries - particularly whether i t is exclusively a housing issue or should encompass questions of social and economic disadvantage - emerges from our consideration of successive policy documents. Broader debates over the purpose of social housing were reflected in the repeated reconfiguration of need and its role in allocations.

Need proved problematic at an operational level. Research repeatedly demonstrated that the ideal of allocation on the basis of objective, comparative need was elusive. In practice, when demand outstripped supply, allocation systems operated with an implicit moral order which acted both as a rationing device and a means of managing the risks to housing management. The dominant position of needs-based allocation was also unable to withstand the challenge of deviant behaviour, which it was portrayed as exacerbating, or the apparent unpopularity of parts of the social housing sector. Some new principle was required to fill the gaps in purpose, and choice appears to do that.

Choice meshes with broader shifts in government towards advanced liberalism. There are some familiar concerns - about the anti-social and vulnerability - which have been repackaged as part of this paradigmatic shift. The shift in process hinges on values of choice, marketing and media which have been imported from the private sector. The perceived need for such innovations flows from the conjunction of the unpopularity of the sector in some parts of the country and the pressure to deliver the results from an increasingly demanding performance and consumer-oriented culture.

Lettings systems have recently come to prominence in England. We have argued that they may not place the expertise of the consumer in quite such a dominant position as first appears, but they undoubtedly alter the logic of allocations processes. No longer is allocation founded upon hierarchies of normative and comparative need: choice systems also embody a role for households’ felt need at the core of the process. Where households perceive that they will have to wait a long time for social housing, and are unwilling or unable to wait, they are encouraged to seek other solutions to their housing problems. Hence, the ‘choice’ label seems to obscure the constraints under which households are forced to make their choices - in many high demand areas there is a real shortage of options from which to choose. Indeed, the choice rhetoric can obscure the fact that in many areas the housing to be chosen would not be chosen by any household with sufficient purchasing power: the prospect was characterised by an officer involved in one CBL scheme as ‘like choosing between something you don’t like and something you like less than that’.’39 Yet, at the same time, managing this very shortage of options is at the core of the logic of choice. Equally significantly, the policy debate has tended to treat choice as compatible with the principles of welfarism embodied in the established system. In contrast, we would suggest that there is a tension between welfarism and choice at a fundamental level.

As with the broader current toward advanced liberalism, the move to choice in social housing represents a significant reconfiguration of the relationship between the state and citizen. Advocates would argue that systems which

139. Marsh et al, above n 124, para 15.33.

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advertise the properties available, and thereby alert some households to the fact that they are unlikely to be rehoused without a long wait, are simply being transparent about the existing situation. Yet, this would seem to ignore the point that, while recognising that they were often operationalised imperfectly, existing allocation systems based on normative or comparative need were based on the commitment by the state to house those with recognised housing needs: if all could not be housed that was because of regrettable resource constraints, While under these systems some of those with housing need - who had been recognised by the state as being entitled to assistance - might find other solutions to their problems, this was not integral to the logic of the system. The consequence of choice is that those who have the greatest felt need -who may also be in relatively high normative and comparative need - may feel compelled to seek alternative solutions. The state then houses those who are able and prepared to wait and play the bidding game. Under choice this would appear to constitute a success for transparency and market information, rather than a failure of the state to provide assistance to those most in need. It is this change which led to disquiet in the Court of Appeal; to the court emerging as a surprising site of resistance. One reading of the court’s decision is that it wished to reaffirm the emphasis placed upon normative and comparative need in allocating social housing. This arguably reasserts the expertise of housing management and represents a validation of the sfuatus quo ante. Taken in this light it represents a restatement of the essence of welfarism and a challenge to the logic of advanced liberalism.

From need to choice, welfarism to advanced liberalism? Problematics of social housing allocation

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