The housing-welfare state relationship: Still wobbly after all these years?

This paper is concerned with the problem of how to characterize the housing-welfare state relationship. The image of housing as the wobbly pillar under the welfare state was first used in 1987 by Torgersen and endorsed in 1995 by Harloe, whose comparative survey of social rented housing in Europe and the United States led him to the conclusion that housing had ‘an ambiguous and shifting status on the margins of the welfare state’. This view was taken up by housing scholars, especially in Britain, where eighteen years of Conservative government was seen to have privatized much of the public housing stock, reducing the remainder to a poor quality sector for the least well off, thereby undermining claims that adequate and affordable housing for all was still a credible policy objective. Now, however, twenty five years after Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory, it is possible to argue that in certain respects housing is emerging as a model for the wider restructuring of the public services. The paper begins with a review of academic depictions of the housing-welfare state relationship, before moving on to a brief discussion of the need to take a view about how to approach the concept of the welfare state; this concludes that, especially when thinking about housing, where income from employment is the main determinant of material wellbeing, it is helpful to adopt a broadly based approach (as distinct from a narrow, public service based approach). The paper then presents a review of the evidence on housing and welfare state trends in Britain, employing the idea that the welfare state can be understood in terms of three distinct ‘settlements’ (political/economic, social and organizational), which have been re-negotiated in recent years.