Nigel Sprigings

Outlook for UK housing and the implications for policy: Are we reaping what we have sown?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a brief analytical summary of the current downturn in the UK housing sector. It then aims to ask whether the severity of the slowdown and its eventual consequences have been exacerbated by key aspects of housing and welfare policy.Design/methodology/approach – The paper examines: the promotion of property as an investment by successive UK governments since the Second World War; how the investment emphasis of policy enabled the promotion and growth of private rental partly funded through buy‐to‐let mortgages – a new financial product that allows individuals to take out a mortgage on a property for letting purposes; the expansion of cheap credit, due in part to the burgeoning securitised lending sector drawing heavily on housing equity (the decline of which is implicated in the current economic downturn); and reforms of the welfare system in the mid 1990s that have severely weakened the safety net for low‐income mortgage borrowers who are most vulnerable to ...

The Fictions of the “Fallacy” Paper: A Verifiable Response

Taylor and Francis SHOU_A_432829.sgm 10.1080/140 6090903326510 Housing, Theory and Society 403-6 96 (pri t)/1651-2278 (online) Original Article 2 9 & Francis 0 0002009 This brief response addresses important issues of academic rigour, scholarship and interpretation of evidence at stake in the arguments of the paper “The Fallacy of ‘Housing Studies’: Philosophical Problems of Knowledge and Understanding in Housing Research” Allen (2009b). Allen’s central argument that Housing Research/ Housing Studies claims “superior knowledge” is demonstrably a rhetorical “straw man”. Despite giving the appearance of quoting Housing Researchers, Allen presents no evidence to support this foundational claim. There are internal contradictions within the paper where Allen claims that evidence never informs concepts in social science then gives examples of this happening. The author adopts self contradictory positions on knowledge and his own frequent claims to expertise (MMU 2009, Qureshi 2009) contrast with assertions that the only real knowledge about housing is that “which exists in the heads of people that live in houses” (Allen 2009b:53). This response takes issue with five substantive points which are presented below. There are problems in responding in detail to the paper due to its own contradictory positions. For example, Allen seems ambivalent about evidence that has to be gathered by methods. At different times he damns Housing Researchers for using “’methods’ to gather data” (Allen 2009b:56) but then damns Cole for not having “any data to hand at all to support his argument on this point” (Allen 2009b:59). But having damned Cole for having no evidence, Allen has recently cited the very evidence he claims Cole didn’t have in a presentation of his own (Allen 2009a: citing Cole and Flint 2006 and Cole 2008, source details not given in the presentation). This arbitrary acceptance or rejection of evidence has no place in the rational project of research. If there is an argument for making research an irrational project it is not presented fully in Allen’s paper, it is merely illustrated.

Towards a Sustainable Private Rented Sector: The Lessons from Other Countries

Kath Scanlon & Ben Kochlan (Eds), London, LSE London 2011, 155 pp., un-priced (pbk), ISBN 978 0 8532 8466 6 This excellent book addresses the ‘sustainability’ of private renting and hopes to inform...