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Social Housing in the United Kingdom

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The Future of Public Housing

Abstract

Social rented housing has played an important role in the United Kingdom for almost a century. From the introduction of central government subsidies in 1919 to the new Affordable Homes Programme, governments and landlords have faced trade-offs between the depth of subsidy and the scale of the new build programme; between rent levels and the quality and location of social housing; and between targeting housing on the poor and creating poverty neighbourhoods. These dilemmas are encountered in any country, but are played out through different institutional structures and within the wider context that includes demography, the labour market and wider economy, social security system and social attitudes.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    ‘Social housing’ is the term applied to housing that is let at below-market rents and allocated administratively according to need. It covers both public housing, which in the UK almost always takes the form of local authority housing, and housing provided by registered housing associations, which are private bodies, but operate on a not-for-profit basis.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of the Built Environment, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

    Mark Stephens (Professor)

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  1. Mark Stephens
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Correspondence to Mark Stephens .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Public Economics and Administration, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, People's Republic of China

    Jie Chen

  2. School of the Built Environment, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

    Mark Stephens

  3. College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, People's Republic of China

    Yanyun Man

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Stephens, M. (2013). Social Housing in the United Kingdom. In: Chen, J., Stephens, M., Man, Y. (eds) The Future of Public Housing. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41622-4_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41622-4_12

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