This paper discusses the outcomes of a participatory research process with homeless parents living in Dublin-based emergency accommodation, during which a critical appraisal of a range of government schemes was coconstructed. The focus is on examining the impacts on vulnerable families of the marketisation of social housing. This is examined through the homeless families’ attempts to procure private rented housing using the Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) and their experience of life in family hub emergency accommodation. The significant challenges experienced by homeless families are examined from the perspectives of human rights and capability theory. The paper concludes that the Rent Supplement, Rental Accommodation Scheme and HAP are costly market-oriented schemes and unlikely to provide satisfactory long-term housing solutions, while family hubs are far from ideal from a capability or human rights perspective. Only a significant increase in the direct provision of social housing by local authorities and housing associations can provide ontological security and well-being, and advance human-rights-based social housing.
This paper contributes to the analysis of policy making processes in the Irish context. It offers original insights into recent policy changes in Irish activation and social housing policy which, over the period of austerity, were subject to significant institutional reshaping and structural reforms including marketisation. A three I's framework tracing the interaction of key ideas, institutions and interests isolates dynamics informing the implementation of marketisation in these sectors and allows insights into how policy is shaped by key variables including markets, civil society and international actors. Attention is drawn to the different pathways to, and implementation of, marketisation in the different sectors. Marketisation reforms were largely implemented in PES and activation reforms, but marketisation pathways had different fortunes when it came to meeting social housing need. The paper explores why this is the case and suggests issues of scale and degrees of financialisation are important factors informing different pathways to and experiences of marketisation of social policy, with, in both sectors, important consequences for social policy and human rights. Issues of ideology, centralisation, international f(actors), timing and scale are important variables in shaping different pathways to marketisation with consequences for likelihood of political resistance to such processes.
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