Caroline Hunter

Policing the housing crisis

In this paper, we argue that the ‘crime control housing crisis’ which has engulfed social housing is qualitatively different from most previous and current understandings of housing crisis (which have been of a quantita tive nature, or been resolved to that). By contrast, the crime control housing crisis is a crisis precisely because it appears insoluble. All hous ing problems and policies now have to be legitimated by reference to this crime control housing crisis. The gaze of this crisis has been upon the ‘social’ sector, but that has also caused reflection on how to placate the crime control housing crisis in the private sector. It is this latter area that is the focus of the case study in the second part of this paper and starkly raises the central, deceptively simple, problematization for government: how to govern the ungovernable without being seen to govern. The case study concerns regulations promulgated by the Northern Ireland Housing Executive regarding the licensing of houses in multiple occupation. We argue that this regulation is symptomatic of a mutated ‘housing crisis’ in which the old questions of the adequacy of provision have been supplanted by new questions of responsibility for deviant behaviour.

Adjudicating the implementation of homelessness law: The promise of socio-legal studies

This paper offers a re-consideration of the contexts within which discretionary homelessness decision making takes place. Drawing on socio-legal studies, it is argued that one such context (which has regularly been ignored within the housing studies literature) is compliance with the law. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data of internal reviews of homelessness decision making, the paper considers how far (and under what conditions) initial decision making might be affected by its adjudication.

The Right to Buy: Examination of an exercise in allocating, shifting and re-branding risks

This paper examines the development of the Right to Buy, introduced by the Housing Act 1980, from the standpoint of governmentality, risk and responsibilization. Our focus is on the risks not only to the purchasers but also to local authorities and to those tenants who have not purchased their homes. We trace how these risks have been assessed, allocated and rebranded, by central government, by local authorities as landlords with wider responsibility for housing issues in their local area, and by the judiciary. Our analysis, for the first time, points out the sharp contrasts between these three arms of government. Central government has promoted the Right to Buy as an opportunity through technologies such as ideological policy documents, legislation and regulations, within a governing rationality which has succeeded in normalizing the tenure of owner-occupation. Local authorities recognized from the outset the risks associated with the Right to Buy both to individual purchasers and more widely. The courts have allocated risk on the basis of individual responsibility, implicitly supporting local authorities. Despite neoliberal policies and ideology emphasizing the free market, central government has reduced or re-allocated risks through interventions to protect purchasers and also the broader community.

Parent Abuse: Can Law Be the Answer?

This article reviews the different forms of legal interventions which may be available to address parent abuse. It seeks to examine the evidence as to which are actually used currently and the problems which are inherent in them. We do this both by examining the statutory basis of the existing potential legal remedies and reported cases relating to those provisions, and by drawing on evidence from a small-scale study of relevant professional workers in one city. We conclude that while recourse to the police, and hence potentially the criminal justice system, is most frequent in practice, the criminal justice system is not suited to tackling the issue. Other interventions, such as anti-social behaviour orders and injunctions, also reveal problems. Law struggles to find an effective response to such a complex problem. Notwithstanding the acknowledged limits of law in changing behaviour, we argue that law could be used more effectively to reduce the incidence and impact of parent abuse.

Managing vulnerability : homelessness law and the interplay of the social, the political and the technical

Martin Partington was at the forefront of a new generation of legal scholars who, in the 1970s, sought to democratise the discipline through the introduction of new subject areas more relevant to the concerns of ordinary people. His work, in housing law and homelessness in particular, provided user friendly and comprehensive tools to support housing activists who were keen both to ensure that their clients took full advantage of their statutory rights and to press government to extend those rights (Partington 1978, 1994, Arden and Partington, 1983). This paper – a revisiting of homelessness legislation via governmentality theory – would not have been possible without Martin’s work and it is dedicated to him in gratitude. The analytical opportunities, which are provided by Rose (1996) in particular, and, more generally, governmentality theory have been widely used and discussed (see Cowan and Marsh 2001). This work explores Rose’s suggestion, that we are witnessing,

Feminist judging and legal theory

The Feminist Judgments Project involved the writing of alternative feminist judgments in significant legal cases. This article describes how the project was used to introduce students in a legal philosophy module to the ideas sitting behind the project, i.e. that there could be a distinctively feminist approach to judgment writing and that such an approach could be legitimate. One of the aims of the module is to explore critical accounts of the law. Briefly outlining the content of the module, we then focus on two particular facets of this content: the role of judgments in the module, and the issue of where feminist judging sits within this. We then go on to consider a particular activity we have developed for use in the class, which involves students seeking to identify the gender of the judges involved, and the distinctions (if any) between judgments. Finally we reflect on how the students have used this activity within their own summatively assessed work for the module. As we proceed, we refer to our experience of bringing the Feminist Judgments Project into our work, and the extent to which we think it has been successful.

Solar Panels, Homeowners and Leases: The Lease as a Socio-Legal Object

This chapter1 is concerned with a rather dull and formal piece of paper: the lease. As a legal technical document it is (or was — the past looms large given the length of leases) created by conveyancers in a law office. We know little of its creation — something I shall return to later. But, as the quotes above show, the lease appears to be something of a contradiction — a flexible contract and an inflexible institution. Leases are usually studied as part of property law. It is generally accepted that ‘[p]roperty law tends to the regarded by students as both dull and difficult’ (Clarke and Kohler, 2005, p. xvii). Within this, leases may be seen as particularly so, to such an extent that many English law schools simply do not bother to teach anything but the most basic principles of the distinction between leases and licences and certainly would not stray into the statutory regulation of the relationships between leaseholders and freeholders, nor ask their students to read and interpret leases. If ‘[t]he machinery of law is often dismissed by critical legal scholars as “technical”, with the contents of the “technical” black box being left to black-letter law professors’ (Valverde, 2005, p. 427), here is a technical aspect that not even the black-letter law professors are very interested in.

Are Judicial Approaches to Adult Social Care at a Dead-End?

This article examines the limits of law to resolve or transform the contemporary dilemmas provoked by the provision of social care to adults in the UK. It juxtaposes the judgments in two cases, each of which interrogates the legal consequences of the mixed economy of care: the majority and minority opinions of the House of Lords in YL v Birmingham City Council (2007) and the Care Standards Tribunal decision in Alternative Futures v National Care Standards Commission (2002). We read the opinions/decisions as narratives that tell a variety of stories reconciling the different roles of law, the state, the family and the individual in the provision of care. Drawing upon David Scott’s concern with ‘the conceptual problem of political presents and with how reconstructed pasts and anticipated futures are thought out in relation to them’ (2004: 1), we seek to examine legal responses to the contractions and mutations of social welfare.

Disciplining women: gender, silence and anti-social behaviour

Abstract The policy and media concern with anti-social behaviour (ASB) is well-documented. There has also been a growing body of research into the use and effects of instruments to tackle ASB – notably the Anti-Social Behaviour Order (Squires, 2008). Within both the official and the academic discourses there has, however, generally been a failure to consider the importance and consequence of gender. In the first section of this article, we draw on empirical findings from a three year evaluation of six Family Intervention Projects (FIPs) which were pioneering a ‘new’ form of ASB intervention by providing families at risk of eviction with intensive support to help them address behavioural and other problems to explore how ASB is experienced by lone parent women at risk of losing their homes (Nixon et al., 2006; Nixon and Parr, 2008). By way of contrast in the second part of the article we focus on 14 Court of Appeal ASB judgements made between 2001 and 2007 highlighting the ways in which judges (almost alwa...

Anti-Social Behaviour in Britain. Victorian and Contemporary Perspectives

Review of Anti-social Behaviour in Britain. Victorian and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Sarah Pickard