In Search of Voice — Putting the ‘Social’ Back into ‘Social Housing’

Abstract

It is unclear what criteria turn housing into social housing. If government subsidy is the essential element, then all housing would have to be regarded as social — indeed, government support for home ownership being what it was, that tenure would presumably have a greater right to call itself social than (say) council housing. Housing Benefit provides a buoy for a number of private landlords enabling them to charge market rents. If the essential element is low-cost (either to build or to occupy), then those RSLs which charge more than private landlords would surely be excluded; indeed, that portion of the private rented sector provided by companies for their employees would be included. If the essential element was that it was not to make a profit, then those councils that supplement (or have supplemented) accounts other than their Housing Revenue Account, and some RSLs which guard their surpluses gained from rents, and pay large salaries and bonuses to their respective executives, would be hard-pressed to justify inclusion in the category of social housing (cf Priemus, 1997, p. 555: ‘This may be considered to be the crucial test: rented housing is defined as social rented housing when the landlord puts any surplus back into its property’). If the criterion was allocation according to need, the evidence suggests that ‘need’ is rarely as important as comparative bargaining power (see Clapham & Kintrea, 1991) or who is the most deserving (Cowan, 1997).