Abstract
ABSTRACT Within the UK, Scotland and England operate largely devolved housing policy systems (this paper does not discuss Welsh housing policy, even though much of the same analysis can and should examine the relative divergence of policy between Wales and England, and convergence with Scotland – but that would need to be another paper). Since the 2010 advent of fiscal austerity, housing policy has diverged significantly with respect to affordable and social housing supply programmes. Scotland has returned to council house building and retained a significant grant-funded programme aimed at delivering supply targets intended to tackle unmet housing need. In England, in contrast, following the Coalition Government’s Affordable Homes Programme, the response has been to greatly diminish social housing programmes and to replace them with less generous ‘affordable’ supply programmes for ownership and rent. This experience masks fundamentally different policy settings and assumptions about the housing problem in each country. This paper will first set out the context and mechanisms of housing policy prior to the switch to deficit reduction and austerity, before briefly outlining the policy instruments and strategies adopted in both countries, contrasting their impacts and outcomes. Second, it will investigate the relative effectiveness of these policies, drawing on a synthesis of critical policy science and public policy literatures. The final section discusses the findings in a forward-looking way and also reflects on possible lessons from housing policy divergence and the analytical tools deployed in this paper. Highlights Scotland and England deliver housing policy to support those seeking to live in affordable housing under significantly local policy discretion within the devolved UK. Both countries have pursued increasingly divergent approaches to expanding affordable housing supply. This paper contrasts and explores the two approaches, broadly since the economic crisis of 2008. Adopting a framework drawing on the ideas of policy failure and organized around the structure of a realistic evaluation, we find that Scotland’s programme with higher grant per unit has delivered more social housing and met more of its underlying housing need than was the case in England, which was more focused on lower subsidy and higher rent ‘affordable’ housing. There are wider political and contextual reasons that help explain this divergence in outcome and policy but also uncertainty about how affordable supply will develop in the future.
Highlights
Comparing affordable housebuilding in Scotland with what is occurring in England, the authors of a recent study of the Scottish programme concluded:A programme of this scale could potentially raise the social housing stock from just under 595,000 in 2017 to between 618-620,000 by 2021, a net rise of up to 25,000 once demolitions, conversions and other attrition is allowed for
In England, in particular, associations shifted from reliance on the mixed funding model to a more pro-cyclical use of internal cross-subsidy of surpluses from sales of new build properties into home ownership, as well as shifting to low-cost home ownership, affordable renting and in particular benefiting from planning gain rules that allowed local authorities to demand proportions of larger new private sector developments were given over for housing associations to provide affordable and social housing
The comparison of the affordable supply programmes in Scotland and England suggests that context and path dependency are important as are the politics of how housing policy is made and implemented
Summary
Comparing affordable housebuilding in Scotland with what is occurring in England, the authors of a recent study of the Scottish programme concluded:. Since the re-establishing of the Scottish Parliament, there has been significant primary and secondary legislation and other local policy innovations in each country (Gibb, 2012; Stephens, 2019) This has been true of homelessness, private renting, and assistance to the home ownership sector (e.g. the Help to Buy scheme). This paper is concerned with divergent affordable supply programmes in a quasifederal UK, contrasting Scotland and England since 2010. As a critical policy analysis of Government-funded programmes, the paper is less about the meaning or interpretation of affordability, though it is concerned with how affordable the outcomes of the programme are (which is one aspect of policy effectiveness) It is clearly important how affordability is defined for practical operational reasons (e.g. for subsidy definition and programme parameters and eligibility). The paper reflects on the challenges of contemporary comparative policy analysis, the value of the framework adopted and the changing scope to learn and share policy evidence across a border within the same nation-state
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
