ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an outline of those messages, and hints at some of the major shifts in thought which have accompanied the development of ‘social’ housing in England and Wales. In the early 1990s, at a time when people questioned the existence of the social, or talked of its crisis, the term began to be applied to rented housing provided by local councils and housing associations in a rapidly demunicipalizing not-for-profit rented sector. Michael Harloe, in a discussion paper tellingly entitled The Social Construction of Social Housing (1993), attempts a definition in a footnote: The term ‘social rented housing’, let alone ‘social housing’, has a variety of meanings. State housing policy from the end of the nineteenth century directed housing subsidy towards the ‘working classes’, but this was removed as an official definition by the Housing Act 1949.
