Housing options for older people in a reimagined housing system: a case study from England

The housing options of older people now extend far beyond the traditional choice between staying put and making do, or moving to specialist housing or residential care. A flexible suite of options has emerged, centred on promoting independence and wellbeing. Valuable insights have been provided into the development, delivery, costs and benefits of these options. Light has also been cast on the experiences and preferences of older people. However, little is know about who gets what housing, where and why. This reflects a tendency within analysis to consider these different housing options in isolation. This study responds by situating the housing options of older people within wider debates about the reimagining of the housing system driven by the neoliberal transformation in housing politics. Taking a case study approach, it explores the gap between the ambitions of policy and realities of provision at the local level, relates this to the particular intersection of state practices and market mechanisms manifest in the case study and, in doing so, rises to the challenge of extending analysis of the impacts of the neoliberal approach on the right to housing to new groups and different settings

Youth, terrorism and education: Britain’s Prevent programme

Since the 7/7 bombings of July 2005, Britain has experienced a domestic terror threat posed by a small minority of young Muslims. In response, Britain has initiated ‘Prevent’, a preventative counter-terrorism programme. Building on previous, general critiques of Prevent, this article outlines and critically discusses the ways in which Prevent has approached young Muslims and their educational institutions. The article argues that, rather than trust in broader and non-stigmatising processes of anti-extremist education, the police-led Prevent has ‘engaged’ with and surveilled young Muslims. Within Prevent there is little evidence of educational processes that explicitly build youth resilience against extremism. Instead, Muslim youth are viewed as both ‘risky and at risk’ (Heath-Kelly, 2013), ‘at risk’ of catching the terrorist disease, with the contested model of ‘radicalisation’ and child protection concepts utilised to portray risks of exploitation by Islamist extremists that necessitate a deepening process of education-based surveillance. The article identifies non-stigmatising alternatives to the approach of Prevent, approaches of anti-extremism education that learn from previously problematic anti-racist educational efforts with white young people. This enables the article to advocate for enhanced human rights-based approaches of citizenship education (admittedly, in themselves contested) with all young people as the most effective way of building individual and collective youth resilience against terrorist ideologies

Abolishing the Audit Commission:framing, discourse coalitions and administrative reform

The abolition of the Audit Commission in England raises questions about how a major reform was achieved with so little controversy, why the agency lacked the institutional stickiness commonly described in the literature on organisational reform and why it did not strategise to survive. In this paper, we apply argumentative discourse analysis to rich empirical data to reveal the pattern and evolution of storylines and discourse coalitions, and the ways in which these interact with and affect the practices of Parliament, the media and the Audit Commission itself. Our analysis shows that the politics of administrative reform are as much about discursive framing and the ability of pro-reformers to gain discursive structuration and institutionalisation as they are about the material resources available to a newly elected government and its ministers. Questions of technical feasibility are unlikely to derail a reform initiative once its promoters gain discursive ascendency

The Impact of Domestic Energy Efficiency Retrofit Schemes on Householder Attitudes and Behaviours

Retrofitting existing housing stock to improve energy efficiency is often required to meet climate mitigation, public health and fuel poverty targets. Increasing uptake and effectiveness of retrofit schemes requires understanding of their impacts on householder attitudes and behaviours. This paper reports results of a survey of 500 Kirklees householders in the UK, where the Kirklees Warm Zone scheme took place. This was a local government led city-scale domestic retrofit programme that installed energy efficiency measures at no charge in over 50,000 houses. The results highlight key design features of the scheme, socio-economic and attitudinal factors that affected take-up of energy efficiency measures and impacts on behaviour and energy use after adoption. The results emphasise the role that positive feedback plays in reinforcing pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours of participants and in addressing concerns of non-participants. Our findings have implications for the design and operation of future domestic energy efficiency retrofit schemes

Putting the squeeze on "Generation Rent": housing benefit claimants in the private rented sector - transitions, marginality and stigmatisation

The term 'Generation Rent' has gained currency in recent years to reflect the fact that more 25 to 34 year olds in Britain now live in rented accommodation rather than owner-occupation. The term also conveys the extent to which age-related divisions in the housing market are becoming as significant as longer standing tenure divisions. However, this portmanteau term covers a wide array of different housing circumstances - from students, young professionals and transient households to the working and non-working poor. This paper focuses on the position of a specific category of this age cohort - those 25 to 34 year olds living in self-contained accommodation in the private rented sector who are in receipt of Housing Benefit. On the basis of survey evidence and qualitative interviews with landlords and housing advisers, the paper considers how the marginal economic and housing market position of this age group is being reinforced by the stigmatising attitudes of landlords which formerly applied to tenants in their late teens and early 20s and are now being extended further along the age band. The paper suggests that the use of a 'housing pathways' approach to signify the housing transitions of young adults needs to be revisited, to give greater weight to collective and creative responses to constraints in the housing market and to recognise the key role played by gatekeepers such as landlords in stigmatising groups according to assumed age-related attributes

Mapping household direct energy consumption in the United Kingdom to provide a new perspective on energy justice

Targets for reductions in carbon emissions and energy use are often framed solely in terms of percentage reductions. However, the amount of energy used by households varies greatly, with some using considerably more than others and, therefore, potentially being able to make a bigger contribution towards overall reductions. Using two recently released UK datasets based on combined readings from over 70 million domestic energy meters and vehicle odometers, we present exploratory analyses of patterns of direct household energy usage. Whilst much energy justice work has previously focussed on energy vulnerability, mainly in low consumers, our findings suggest that a minority of areas appear to be placing much greater strain on energy networks and environmental systems than they need. Households in these areas are not only the most likely to be able to afford energy efficiency measures to reduce their impacts, but are also found to have other capabilities that would allow them to take action to reduce consumption (such as higher levels of income, education and particular configurations of housing type and tenure). We argue that these areas should therefore be a higher priority in the targeting of policy interventions

The impact of open data in the UK: complex, unpredictable, and political

This article examines the democratic impact of the UK coalition government's Transparency Agenda, focusing on the publication of all local government spending over £500 by councils in England. It looks at whether the new data have driven increased democratic accountability, public participation, and information transmission. The evidence suggests that the local government spending data have driven some accountability. However, rather than forging new ‘performance regimes’, creating ‘armchair auditors’, or bringing mass use and involvement, the publication creates a further element of political disruption. Assessment of the use and impact of the new spending data finds it is more complex, more unpredictable, and more political than the rhetoric around Open Data indicates. The danger is that the gap between aims and impact invites disappointment from supporters

The Muslim problematic: Muslims, state schools and security

Muslims are folk-devils that mark the ubiquitous moral panic. For some, the idea of the Muslim problematic signifies a long and worrying trend of creeping ‘Islamification’ of state schools. For others, the discourse of the Muslim problematic reflects the ongoing racial patholigisation of Britain’s minoritised communities. One thing is for certain, the current debate marks a significant moment in the nature and function of the neoliberal state as it reframes race relation policy in Britain in the light of the security agenda. The Trojan Horse affair, surrounding claims of infiltration of radical Islam in state-run schools, marks a significant moment in the embedding of the security agenda in Britain’s inner city schools through the medium of the Prevent agenda. It argues that one of the best ways of understanding the security agenda is by locating it within a broader sociological and historical context of the functioning of the racial state

Infrastructure, planning and the command of time

​Governments in many countries have sought to accelerate the time taken to make decisions on major infrastructure projects, citing problems of ‘delay’. Despite this, rarely has the time variable been given careful empirical or conceptual attention in decision-making generally, or in infrastructure decision-making specifically. This paper addresses this deficit by analysing decision-making on two categories of major infrastructure in the UK – transport and electricity generation – seeking both to generate better evidence of the changes to decision times in recent decades, and to generate insights from treating time as resource and tracking its (re)allocation. We find that reforms introduced since 2008 have done relatively little to alter overall decision times, but that there are marked and revealing changes to the allocation of time between decision-making stages. While public planning processes have their time frames tightly regulated, aspects led by developers (e.g. pre-application discussion) are not; arranging finance can have a bigger effect on project time frames, and central government retains much flexibility to manage the flow of time. Speed-up reforms are also sectorally uneven in their reach. This indicates how arguments for time discipline falter in the face of infrastructure projects that remain profoundly politicised

Ensuring the right to education for Roma children : an Anglo-Swedish perspective

Access to public education systems has tended to be below normative levels where Roma children are concerned. Various long-standing social, cultural, and institutional factors lie behind the lower levels of engagement and achievement of Roma children in education, relative to many others, which is reflective of the general lack of integration of their families in mainstream society. The risks to Roma children’s educational interests are well recognized internationally, particularly at the European level. They have prompted a range of policy initiatives and legal instruments to protect rights and promote equality and inclusion, on top of the framework of international human rights and minority protections. Nevertheless, states’ autonomy in tailoring educational arrangements to their budgets and national policy agendas has contributed to considerable international variation in specific provision for Roma children. As this article discusses, even between two socially liberal countries, the UK and Sweden, with their well-advanced welfare states and public systems of social support, there is a divergence in protection, one which underlines the need for a more consistent and positive approach to upholding the education rights and interests of children in this most marginalized and often discriminated against minority group