Social Housing and Social Exclusion in the Netherlands

Abstract

After a hesitant start, the debate on poverty and social exclusion gained a firm position on the agenda in the Netherlands. When the issue emerged in Europe, the initial position of the Dutch was that their low-income households were guaranteed to meet their basic needs by the rather generous social security system, national health insurance, as well as the large social rented sector. Poverty was supposed to be absent. Nevertheless, the debate gained momentum rapidly. One reason was a highly publicized statement by one of the Catholic bishops in the Netherlands who quoted the biblical phrase that "people were allowed to steal bread if they were too poor to feed their children". The protracted debate that followed in the mass-media led to a new political awareness of persisting poverty among cabinet ministers. Even the prime minister found it necessary to go on record on the issue. A second impetus for the debate was the redefinition of the issue in terms of social exclusion rather than poverty as such. In the brief for this working group issued by Holt-Jensen (1998) this interpretation is underlined. He described social exclusion in terms that can be summarized as follows: Exclusion from the political arena, denying participation in decision-making, from the cultural arena restricting access to channels of cultural communication, and from the economic arena, the labour market in particular. In combination, this leads to the emergence of a marginalised group often concentrated in deprived inner-city tenements or large-scale peripheral housing estates