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In New Labour’s 1997 Manifesto, housing was not a prominent issue - in part because their approach did not represent a significant attack on or departure from Conservative policies (Mullins and Murie, 2006: 66). The fact that housing was not high up on the agenda, or a subject of political debate during this time led

academics to question whether housing policy was in a process of ‘terminal decline’

(Bramley, 1997: 387). As Cowan and Marsh (2001) note, the conclusion seemed to be that ‘if it does have future, it will be very different from its past,’ in a

subservient position to other social and economic policy concerns (p261). Although committed to addressing the insecurities associated with home ownership including

‘record mortgage arrears, record negative equity and record repossessions,’ New Labour supported the continued extension of owner occupation, and proposed a series of market rather than state sponsored solutions to address these problems (Labour Party, 1997). These including flexible mortgage products, consumer protections for mortgage buyers and the end to boom and bust housing market cycles (ibid).Whilst committed to investing in social housing, the incoming government sought to do so through the continued transfer of council stock to housing associations, and by ‘deploy[ing] private finance’ in order to ‘build new houses and rehabilitate old ones’ (ibid). The dual policies of home ownership expansion and social housing restructuring were set to continue.

The introduction of the Decent Homes Standard, which had to be met by all social housing providers, encouraged the transfer of council stock to housing associations and Arms Length Management Organisations⁴² (DETR, 2000a: 10). Although

42. The standard gave local authorities a time-limited responsibility to improve their stock whilst at the same time restricting their capacity to borrow for the purpose (Watt, 2009). As a result local authorities

tenants were balloted, Ginsburg (2005) questions the extent to which this represented a real ‘choice’ when councils continued to be starved of capital investment funds (p118). As a result of stock transfers, the ownership and management of social housing changed dramatically. Just as the Government had intended, by 2005 housing associations had become the ‘majority providers of social housing’ (DETR, 2000: 10), owning and managing 45 per cent of social stock (Pawson, 2006). New Labour’s modernisation programme not only affected the ownership and management of social housing but also fundamentally altered the housing association sector (Malpass and Victory, 2010; Flint, 2003). Housing scholars began to critically examine the positive and negative implications of regulation and funding regimes designed to encourage greater commercial and consumerist orientations (Walker, 1998, 2001; Mullins, 2000).

Stock transfers were also linked to the New Labour Government’s regeneration and neighbourhood renewal strategies, with improvements to social housing focused on the most deprived local authority areas (Mullins and Pawson, 2010: 82). Transfers were often the pre-cursor to large-scale demolition and reconstruction schemes. In rebuilding, housing associations were encouraged to include a ‘choice’ of

‘affordable’ units, including low cost home ownership schemes, in order to attract more affluent households into deprived areas (DETR, 2000a: 10-14). As Goodchild and Cole (2001) argue, the concept of ‘social exclusion’ became important during this time, with an emphasis on processes that prevent people from participating in the ‘mainstream’ (p109). New Labour policy came to explicitly address the

‘concentration’ of poor communities within ‘closed’ neighbourhoods, based on a belief that mixed tenure developments would solve the problems of poverty by encouraging social interaction with better-off households (Kearns, 2004: 2).

However, as Lees (2008: 2456) and others have since asserted, the idea of ‘social mixing’ is something of an ‘analytical sack of potatoes’ (Fine, 2001: 190), based on limited research into cause and effect (Goodchild and Cole, 2001; Tunstall, 2003;

Kearns and Mason, 2007). Further, as Kearns (2004) argues, these discourses conveniently shift the policy focus away from structural explanations of poverty, towards ‘softer’ individual and community issues, including behaviour, ‘skills and cultures’ (p3).

were left with one of three choices to; set up Arm’s Length Management Organisations (ALMOs) as vehicles for housing management; obtain a Private Finance Initiative or; to transfer stock to existing or newly formed housing associations (ibid: 234-235).

The recasting of housing as ‘assets and investments’ as opposed to ‘just places to live’ (ODPM, 2005: 10) was consolidated during the New Labour era. This can clearly be seen in their continued support for the ‘further major extension of Britain’s home owning, asset owning, property owning democracy’ (Brown, 2005 cited in Smith, 2008: 522). In the context of rising house prices between 1995-2006, investment in housing became an increasingly important part of the national

economy, as well as individual wealth [and debt] portfolios (Ong et al. 2013: 1013).

At the same time, deregulation of the mortgage market made housing increasingly fungible due to the development of innovative mortgage equity release products (Smith and Searle, 2008). The result was a shift in the perception of mortgages once seen as ‘large loans, used as leverage into home ownership and steadily paid off’

they were now ‘a source of credit which, although secured against property, [could]

be spent on other things’ (Smith and Searle, 2010a: 34). Research carried out into the use of housing wealth, point to the fact that even in buoyant economic periods, funds were used to manage financial hardships, support family members and to cover health or care costs (Smith et al. 2007). Housing wealth came to be

repositioned by the state as an asset base for welfare, and by individual households as a ‘feel safe resource,’ ‘filling the gap left by welfare retrenchment’ (Searle and Smith 2010b: 357).

If housing assets were to be used as a source of privatised welfare, then the uneven geographic distribution of housing wealth was a problem to be addressed (Hamnett, 1999). The Housing Market Renewal (HMR) pathfinder programme, sought to tackle ‘market failure’ in nine of the ‘most deprived’ areas across the North of England and the Midlands (ODPM, 2003: 24). The aim was to replace obsolete housing, provide a ‘better mix’ of housing types and tenures, and to encourage people into once stigmatised areas by ‘choice’ (MacLeod and Johnstone, 2012: 9).

As Allen (2008) argues, whilst previous forms of clearance and renewal had focused on improving physical conditions in run-down areas, HMR sought to renew ‘the market for houses … rather than simply the houses themselves’ (p122). The measure of success was seen to be an increase in house prices and house purchases by the middle classes (ibid). This dominant view of housing as a commodity has been shown to be problematic on a number of levels. Firstly, the official and media view of inner city areas ‘in decline,’ do not necessarily correspond with the ‘lived view’

of working class residents who value their houses as ‘dwelling places’, rather than assets (Allen, 2008: 166). Secondly, by ignoring the views and experiences of existing households, and imposing stereotypes on ‘low demand’ areas such

discourses come to justify the removal of working class households from their homes in favour of market interests (MacLeod and Johnstone, 2012).

The global financial crisis: exposing the ‘new’ risks of home