Marginally housed or marginally homeless?
Marginally housed or marginally homeless?
The English homelessness scheme has been lauded as being one of the most progressive in the world for offering an individually legally enforceable right to housing to those people who meet the statutory criteria. Its definition of homelessness is also liberal by comparison with many other countries within Europe and beyond, extending significantly beyond the stereotypical rooflessness experienced by rough sleepers. Nevertheless, the scheme is highly selective and targeted, and assesses homelessness through a test of relative need, rather than enshrining a minimally acceptable standard of housing. It thereby creates a category of the marginally housed whose housing needs are assessed as insufficiently poor to be officially categorised as homeless, yet who are living in severely inadequate housing. To reduce the uncertainty and contingency of the current test, the paper proposes the adoption of a new test of habitability.
England, habitability, homelessness, social policy
69-84
Laurie, Emma
c1dd220c-d784-4d82-a3ae-c6cdedd48a18
6 April 2022
Laurie, Emma
c1dd220c-d784-4d82-a3ae-c6cdedd48a18
Laurie, Emma
(2022)
Marginally housed or marginally homeless?
International Journal of Law in Context, 18 (1), .
(doi:10.1017/S1744552322000040).
Abstract
The English homelessness scheme has been lauded as being one of the most progressive in the world for offering an individually legally enforceable right to housing to those people who meet the statutory criteria. Its definition of homelessness is also liberal by comparison with many other countries within Europe and beyond, extending significantly beyond the stereotypical rooflessness experienced by rough sleepers. Nevertheless, the scheme is highly selective and targeted, and assesses homelessness through a test of relative need, rather than enshrining a minimally acceptable standard of housing. It thereby creates a category of the marginally housed whose housing needs are assessed as insufficiently poor to be officially categorised as homeless, yet who are living in severely inadequate housing. To reduce the uncertainty and contingency of the current test, the paper proposes the adoption of a new test of habitability.
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Marginally housed or marginally homeless
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Accepted/In Press date: 6 March 2022
e-pub ahead of print date: 6 April 2022
Published date: 6 April 2022
Additional Information:
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press.
Keywords:
England, habitability, homelessness, social policy
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 457359
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/457359
ISSN: 1744-5523
PURE UUID: b3226a75-1ae8-4a99-99e6-84395c2a61aa
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Date deposited: 01 Jun 2022 16:45
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 02:48
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