ABSTRACT
Ideally, one aim of any book with the title ‘Housing and Social Policy’ should be to consider, explicate and evaluate the ways in which housing interventions by governments help to achieve social policy objectives. This task would include elucidation of alternative policies that government may have rejected but the broad remit would be the housing aspects of the full range of social policy. Obviously, the scope of such a book would be encyclopedic. This may be one of the reasons why previous books on the subject have tended to concentrate primarily on the nuts and bolts of housing service delivery in the public sector, often linking housing needs issues with other welfare services. Clapham et al. open their book ‘Housing and Social Policy’ with the statement that their
book focuses on two key relationships: that between housing policy and social policy, and that between the provision of housing and the provision of other welfare services such as the health service, the education system, the personal social services and the social security system
(Clapham et al. 1990: ix)
This places housing policy squarely amongst the welfare services with an emphasis on public provision in its various forms. The definition of social policy they use covers ‘the areas of consumption in which the state plays a central role’ and they recognise that this is ‘not uncontroversial’. But the emphasis is on consideration of the way welfare services ‘interact’ to achieve social objectives. This leads to considerations of community care and homelessness policies and practices in some detail. Such an approach meets a particular need for students and practitioners wanting to understand recent social policy and the changes this imposes on, or requires of, their organisations.
