Thatcherite ideology, housing tenure, and crime: the socio-spatial consequences of the right to buy for domestic property crime

Abstract

Our aim in this article is to explore the degree to which the changes produced in the provision of housing in England and Wales produced changes in the socio-spatial distribution of economic need and social deprivation, which in turn changed the distribution of crime. It is our contention that the changes in the distribution of crime were, in part, shaped by changes in other aspects of government action elsewhere, especially in terms of the management of the economy and the housing sector, and were accordingly lagged (Farrall and Jennings, 2012). As Stewart and Burridge argue, “during periods of crisis, law is instrumental in the uneven and unequal distribution of national resources, and that while the normative form of many law pretends towards national equality, the individual rights that are the vehicle for recent housing policy effectively convey spatially-defined uneven benefits” (1989: 78), or less prosaically, the law acts as a system for producing unequal outcomes despite its claims to produce national-defined equality. Whilst there have been numerous studies of who bought their homes under the right to buy scheme and what some of the social consequences have been, few have sought to piece together empirically the legislation, the changing social nature of housing provision which this produced, and the impacts which this has had on the distribution of crime

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ORCID for Will Jennings: orcid.org/0000-0001-9007-8896

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