ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses key dimensions of housing policy and goes on to consider its connections to social inequality. Social policy researchers have attempted to impose order upon the considerable cross-national variation in the size, shape, character, goals and impact of national welfare states by grouping the ones that share some key features and orientations into policy clusters or models. In the Beveridge Report and other social policy documents, the noted British economist and social reformer William Beveridge outlined his highly influential blueprint for the welfare state, identifying housing as a principal social policy pillar. Welfare states comprise three distinct but closely interrelated networks or pillars of social support: income support programmes; social services; and social legislation. Each of these three support systems is typically employed across a range of social policy domains, such as healthcare, family policy, old age policy, education, labour market policy and housing policy, and each embraces a multiplicity of different policy instruments.
