The affordability of ‘affordable’ housing in England: conditionality and exclusion in a context of welfare reform

Contemporary debates around affordability have largely focused on homeownership and private renting. This article considers the affordable social rented sector in England, in which reforms to social welfare assistance, reduced security of tenure, and a shift towards midmarket rents, are changing access to ‘affordable’ housing for those on the lowest incomes. Drawing on in-depth interviews with housing associations and stakeholders, the article highlights the increasing use of affordability assessments for prospective tenants. These assessments interact with mid-market rental products to increase the potential for exclusion from affordable housing on the grounds of ability to pay. This conditionality is applied not only at the point of tenancy access, but also at renewal of fixed-term tenancies. The research highlights that the combination of welfare and housing policies, in the context of a financialising housing association sector, has the potential to erode access to social housing for those who are perceived as a financial risk, reshaping the focus of social housing

Integrative Use of Information Extraction, Semantic Matchmaking and Adaptive Coupling Techniques in Support of Distributed Information Processing and Decision-Making

In order to press maximal cognitive benefit from their social, technological and informational environments, military coalitions need to understand how best to exploit available information assets as well as how best to organize their socially-distributed information processing activities. The International Technology Alliance (ITA) program is beginning to address the challenges associated with enhanced cognition in military coalition environments by integrating a variety of research and development efforts. In particular, research in one component of the ITA ('Project 4: Shared Understanding and Information Exploitation') is seeking to develop capabilities that enable military coalitions to better exploit and distribute networked information assets in the service of collective cognitive outcomes (e.g. improved decision-making). In this paper, we provide an overview of the various research activities in Project 4. We also show how these research activities complement one another in terms of supporting coalition-based collective cognition