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Privatisation Of Council Housing Case Study

1095 Words5 Pages

Key points:
• The privatisation of council houses resulted in a restricted accommodation availability for people in need, resulting in higher rates of homelessness and the creation of ‘sink estates’ where crime and antisocial behaviour became normalised.
• Crime, especially the acquisitive kind, was fuelled by the widening of economic inequality derived from cuts to the welfare state to the detriment of young and unemployed people in particular.
• Young people, specifically, were more likely to fall into the Criminal Justice System because of the changes in the educational system, that lead to higher levels school drop-out.

Context:
The neoliberal ideology promotes individualism and freedom (both for the individual and for the market) over …show more content…

The main change in this field was the 1980 Housing Act, that allowed tenants to buy council houses. This was a political move aimed to gather larger consent amongst that part of the working class that was aiming to climb the social ladder and resulted in an increase in home ownership rates, as shown in table 1. By 1997, “over 1.8 million council homes (1 in 4) [had been] sold to sitting tenants, helping to expand home ownership from 57% to 68% of UK households” (Hodkinson et al. 2013, p.8). The negatives of this changes were that tenants who were unable to afford their property were forced to move into specific areas characterised by social marginalisation and poverty, that became known as ‘sink estates’. Moreover, this meant having a lower availability of affordable accommodation in a moment of high need, due to policies in other sectors (for example benefit cuts, discussed below), resulting in higher rates of homelessness, especially amongst young people (Farrall and Hay, 2010). This process of ghettoization was also fostered by the 1985 Housing Act, that moved the responsibility for housing homeless people on local councils (Atkinson and Durden 1994 in Farrall and Hay, 2010). This means that those so-called ‘sink estates’ collected the most disadvantaged members of society, creating the perfect environment for antisocial behaviour and crime to proliferate and be normalised. In sum, the neoliberal turn in the housing policies had the effect to create marginalised and disadvantaged areas that were criminogenic per se. For this reason, amongst the others, Neoliberalism itself created the requirements for a stronger penal

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