Reassessing Voluntary Action in English Housing Provision post 1900

This article considers the public and voluntary sector relationship in housing provision from an historical and social science perspective. It pays particular attention to models based on markets, hierarchies and networks and presents an overview of voluntary action and state intervention in English housing since 1900. The article focuses on housing agencies with charitable status, and on three periods - pre-1914, the 1950s and the 1970s. For the first two periods, the emphasis is on the William Sutton Trust, England's largest house-building charity. In the latter period, attention shifts to Shelter, founded in 1967 and the most successful of the homelessness charities. In these case studies, the role of the courts, charity commissioners, government legal officers, Ministries responsible for housing, parliament and local authorities are discussed. The importance of attempts to politicise charity law and charitable status throughout the twentieth century is underlined. Central government is shown to play a significant part in this process, legitimising its preferred response from local authorities and voluntary agencies. A hierarchical interpretation of state intervention is tempered, however, by stressing the significance of unintended consequences attending central government's successive interventions in housing provision

Action (physics) · Economic interventionism · Government (linguistics) · Interpretation (philosophy) · Intervention (counseling) · Local government · Parliament · Political science · Politics · Poor relief · Psychological intervention · Public housing · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science) · Unintended consequences · Voluntary action · Voluntary association · Voluntary sector · Homelessness and Social Issues · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · Medicine · Public Administration

• Korporatism och bostadsregimer

  Open Access•Jim Kemeny•Sociologisk Forskning•2003

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• Corporatism and Housing Regimes

  Jim Kemeny•Housing Theory and Society•2006

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