Ann Stewart

Rethinking housing law : a contribution to the debate on tenure

Over the last 15 years, law has played a central role in British housing policy. There has been a vast body of new legislation affecting all aspects of housing provision. This article contends that the law is not simply a technical mechanism through which housing policy is delivered, rather it contributes to the construction of power relationships. It explores the shifting relationships within various residential groupings and offers a new approach to the legal concept of tenure.

Choosing Care: Dilemmas of a Social Market

The Department of Healths Green Paper, Independence, Well‐being and Choice (2005) is subtitled ‘our vision for the future of social care for adults in England’. This article will use the lens of a personal experience of caring to reflect upon its proposals. It does so within the wider context of recent debates on the potential for a human rights culture within community care. The article begins with an outline of the Green Paper itself and then moves on to the case study. Thereafter, the discussion considers the wider issues which are raised by this example of community care for vulnerable adults. The concept of independence, expressed as user choice in a social market of care, is central to the Green Paper. Market provision involves contractual relations, yet the Green Paper is not framed within an explicit discourse of rights. Instead, the vision of market‐based independence is to be achieved through improved policies and practices by social care providers and through the development of appropriate public regulatory mechanisms. In line with recent feminist critiques of present welfare provision, critiques that are based on an ethic of care, I conclude that the starting point for policy and legal development should be the necessary interdependence of individuals.

From family to personal responsibility: the challenges for care of the elderly in England

The paper discusses recent legal and policy developments in relation to the provision of adult social care in England, in particular the Law Commissions 2011 proposals now reflected in 2012 Care and Support Bill and the recommendations from the Dilnot Enquiry in 2011. It reflects on the ways in which responsibilities in relation to caring among and for older citizens are understood and distributed within the present system of social care in order to draw out the implications for these proposals. It highlights the challenges raised by demographic changes that result from an increasingly ageing society and the enduring assumptions that women will continue to undertake unpaid care although they are now substantially engaged in paid labour markets. It considers more broadly the extent to which the impact of caring particularly for the elderly is recognised within family, labour and social welfare law. It reviews the growing pollcy assumption that individuals are expected to plan for their own care in later life and that their needs will be met through the exercise of individual choice in a care market. It concludes by suggesting an alternative basis for policy development.

Abuse, Danger, and Security in Transnational Marriages: Polity and Community in India and the United Kingdom

The aim of this article is to show the way in which concepts of abuse, danger, and security have informed recent U.K. legal and policy developments relating to the protection of women in transnational marriages from violence within families and communities. It also demonstrates the way in which the same concepts inform debates on violence against women in families in India to provide a greater understanding of the interaction between “polity” and “community” in transnational marriages.