Modernisation, marketisation and housing reform: The use of evidence based policy as a rationality discourse

Abstract

Abstract AbstractEvidence based policy (EBP) has served as a persuasive rationale for government intervention; providing a framework for evaluation through techniques of comprehensive and systematic review, closely associated in the UK with the welfare reforms undertaken by the Blair and Brown led Labour governments. In this article, we show how EBP serves as a convenient device for governments to present policy-making to a wider public, gaining legitimacy through an appeal to technical rationality and thereby shielding from scrutiny the underlying ideologies and politics that constitute housing practice. Following a brief discussion of the emergence of an 'instrumental' turn in housing policy, we consider the deployment of evidence based rationalities using the examples of public housing stock transfer, the housing market renewal programme and the 2011 Localism Act as evidence to support our arguments. Our key claim is that whilst housing policy makers continue to promote EBP to justify decision making, the choices they pursue are best explained by factors largely unrelated to 'evidence'; for example the relative power and influence of interest groupings both within government and beyond. We conclude with the suggestion that housing policy research requires a significant reorientation if it is to provide insights into aspects of policy making that remain under-examined.

Housing and the Realignment of Urban Socio-Spatial Contracts

“…Big Society and localism discourses of dispersing power to communities articulate a form of governing without government that conceals major realignments in property and power relations between social classes and generations (Jacobs and Manzi, 2013). The reduction in state intervention to ameliorate processes of economic reproduction directly affects the allocation of housing opportunities between social classes and generations (Pierson, 2006).…”

“…While this was always embedded in a wider sense of nationalism, it is the changing socio-spatial relations between elite power and locality that drives the contemporary crisis. The notion that public housing is redundant is a dimension of a much wider project of demunicipalisation (Jacobs and Manzi, 2013) and dismantling the associative figurations and covenants that municipalisation was built upon. The housing situation in London powerfully illustrates this: it is estimated that 60 per cent of new-build property in central London was bought by overseas investors (Hodkinson, 2013).…”

“…as if it were completely divorced from governmental and societal processes and priorities, denying any possibility of an alternative (see Jacobs and Manzi, 2013).…”

“…This paper argues that the conceptualisation of the Big Society in England masks a more significant project of redefining the socio-spatial contracts-imagined and legal-at national and local scales that have underpinned the temporal and spatial rights to housing. This is being enacted through dismantling previous actually existing rights to access affordable housing and occupy urban space, in which the presence and purpose of social housing, and the forms of governmental interventions and responsibilities that enabled it, are defined as obsolete (Goetz, 2013;Jacobs and Manzi, 2013). Therefore, the rationales of the Big Society and localism need to be understood as coinciding with, and being intrinsically linked to, radical housing welfare and benefit reforms.…”

‘The party’s over’: critical junctures, crises and the politics of housing policy

“…Whilst the 1970s saw a combination of events which frustrated decision making, subsequent periods have seen policies presented as wholly pragmatic interventions, based on an evidence base ostensibly free from ideological bias. As has been argued elsewhere the concept of 'evidence-based policy' is highly problematic (see for example Jacobs and Manzi, 2013), introducing new modes of governance, removed from the political arena and resting on a flawed concept of 'depoliticisation' (Flinders and Buller, 2006). Contemporary welfare reform, despite variations in approach within UK territories, can be therefore be viewed as a form of what Raco (2009) terms 'existential politics' founded on individual 'aspiration', managed by the state, rather than a politics based on collective expectations of improvement.…”