15 results
four - The policy context of rural homelessness
- Paul Cloke, Paul Milbourne, Rebekah Widdowfield
-
- Book:
- Rural Homelessness
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 20 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 27 March 2002, pp 85-116
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Discussion of rural homelessness needs to be set within the relevant policy context. The first thing to note, however, is that there is no policy which specifically addresses the issue of rural homelessness. Consequently, in this chapter we focus on general homelessness policies and then on those rural policies which have a bearing on preventing and tackling homelessness in rural areas (see Table 4.1 for a timeline of key policy reports and developments).
In the first part, we trace the development of the homelessness legislation over the past 25 years. We begin with a brief review of the 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act, before looking in more detail at the events leading up to the implementation of the 1996 Housing Act – under which homelessness is currently dealt with. We then turn our attention to developments since the election of the New Labour government in May1997, examining the proposed reforms to the homelessness legislation asset out in the Housing Green Paper (published in April 2000) and Part II of the subsequent Homes Bill, introduced into the House of Commons later that year.
These documents make little or no reference to the particular needs of rural areas. Instead, it is left to the Rural White Paper (published in November 2000) to set out the government's policy in relation to housing and homelessness in these areas. In the second part of this chapter we provide a comprehensive account of this policy, looking in particular at government initiatives to increase the amount of affordable accommodation in rural areas. We also highlight the potentially positive contribution that non-housing policies can make both to preventing and dealing with homelessness in rural areas.
In the third part of the chapter we look at government efforts to tackle rough sleeping. To date, the homelessness legislation has been primarily geared towards addressing the needs of homeless families and a number of other selected groups deemed to be in priority need of accommodation. Priority cases are dominated by households with or expecting children who consistently account for two thirds of homeless households in this category. The single homeless have, for the most part, been left to make their own arrangements with the exception of one particular subset of this population – rough sleepers. This group has been the focus of a considerable amount of attention and has received substantial resources under the Rough Sleepers Initiative. We provide a brief overview of this and subsequent initiatives to reduce the number of people sleeping rough.
six - Local welfare governance and rural homelessness
- Paul Cloke, Paul Milbourne, Rebekah Widdowfield
-
- Book:
- Rural Homelessness
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 20 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 27 March 2002, pp 143-168
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In Chapter Four we provided a detailed discussion of the central policy context of rural homelessness. In particular, we considered the early legislation on homelessness in Britain and traced through some of the key features of restructuring initiated by the 1996 Housing Act. In this chapter we continue with this focus on homelessness policy but examine it from a different perspective. Here we consider the ways in which the implementation of central homelessness policy has become entangled with sets of local rural policy and political structures, and we discuss the important role played by new systems of local welfare governance – based on partnership working – in dealing with homelessness at the local level.
Local welfare governance and the shifting nature of homelessness support
The centralised provision of welfare and homelessness support in Britain is clearly bound up with complex sets of local socioeconomic, political and policy structures. Cochrane (1993), for example, has noted that local variation in welfare provision has long been a feature of the British welfare state reliant as it has been on local government as a key vehicle for its delivery. In a wider discussion of emerging systems of local governance, Stoker and Mossberger (1995) have pointed to two important components of the spatial differentiation of policy implementation – one involving ‘vertical’ linkages between central and local states; the other consisting of more ‘horizontal’ interconnections:
Change and particular models of operation and organisation are imposed by central government. Local authorities react in different ways to this imposition. Equally there is a horizontal dimension as circumstances and actors create the conditions for specific alliances and particular ways forward in different localities. (p 220)
In relation to vertical processes of policy imposition, Stoker and Mossberger (1995) have proposed a typology of local authorities based on the ways in which they react to centrally imposed policies, with reactions boundup with complex mixes of localised political and socioeconomic structures. These types of local mediations of central policy are clearly evident inrelation to policy dealings with homelessness, with a number of recent studies highlighting widespread variations in the ways in which local authorities interpret central homelessness legislation (see Evans and Duncan, 1988; Audit Commission, 1989; Niner, 1989; Greve, 1991; Butleret al, 1994).
Index
- Paul Cloke, Paul Milbourne, Rebekah Widdowfield
-
- Book:
- Rural Homelessness
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 20 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 27 March 2002, pp 237-245
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
two - Researching rural homelessness
- Paul Cloke, Paul Milbourne, Rebekah Widdowfield
-
- Book:
- Rural Homelessness
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 20 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 27 March 2002, pp 27-54
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Having set out the context of rural homelessness in Chapter One, we now want to discuss some key methodological issues bound up with researching homelessness in rural areas. This chapter is divided into three sections. In the first, we provide a critical review of the methodologies associated with recent academic studies of homelessness, drawing on research conducted both in Britain and in the US. The second focuses more specifically on rural homelessness and considers the ways in which the small number of studies undertaken have approached the subject. We also set out here the approach taken by the authors in their recently completed study of homelessness in rural England, and provide details of the main objectives, methodologies and products of this research. In the final section, we present a reflexive account of a range of ethical issues associated with researching rural homelessness, based on diary notes and research summaries provided by each member of the research team.
Researching homelessness
Any review of the large number of academic books and journal articles written on homelessness will reveal that the subject does not lend itself to easy research. In many ways, the complexities of definition discussed in Chapter One carry through into the process of researching homelessness. For example, a narrow definition of homelessness as rooflessness will tend to be associated with a research methodology that is different from one that would be utilised if a broader definition – encompassing a range of different housing situations – were to be adopted. Similarly, a normative definition of homelessness based on official statistical categorisations may necessitate a different methodological approach to one that relies on a definition of homelessness produced by homeless people themselves.
In this section we want to review the ways in which the subject of homelessness has been researched in Britain and the US over recent years. In doing this, we consider that it is useful to point to two main approaches that have been taken within homelessness research. The first is heavily quantitative in nature, and bound up with the collection and analysis of primary and secondary data sets on the extent and nature of homelessness.
By contrast, the second approach has utilised qualitative techniques, involving ethnographic research, in-depth interviewing, and discourse analysis. In reviewing the methodological underpinnings of recent homelessness research we are struck by two observations: that the vast majority of studies have taken either a predominantly quantitative or qualitative approach, rather than adopting multi-method techniques and that, as with other research subjects in the social sciences, the study of homelessness has been dominated by quantitative methods of enquiry.
Acknowledgements
- Paul Cloke, Paul Milbourne, Rebekah Widdowfield
-
- Book:
- Rural Homelessness
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 20 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 27 March 2002, pp iv-vi
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
References
- Paul Cloke, Paul Milbourne, Rebekah Widdowfield
-
- Book:
- Rural Homelessness
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 20 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 27 March 2002, pp 219-236
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
three - The cultural context of rural homelessness
- Paul Cloke, Paul Milbourne, Rebekah Widdowfield
-
- Book:
- Rural Homelessness
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 20 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 27 March 2002, pp 55-84
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Discourses of rurality and homelessness
In this chapter we explore some of the difficulties in bringing together the concepts of rurality and homelessness, arguing that particular cultural constructs of what it is to be homeless, and what it is to live in the countryside, serve to resist, and sometimes deny the recognition of any material reality which might be called rural homelessness. The background to this discussion is formed by the existence of privileged constructs of rural space. It can be suggested that the most identifiable and accessible group of meanings constructed and circulated about rurality in England are bound up with notions of idyll. Although it is problematic to search for any notion of a single construction of the rural as idyll, Cloke and Milbourne (1992) have suggested a number of key meanings that have come to be associated with rurality – “a bucolic, problem-free, hidden world of peace, tranquillity and proximity to the natural” (p 361). Such constructs have become reproduced directly within the dominant imagination through a range of different cultural circulations. In otherways, notions of rural idyll, and particularly ideas of problem-free country spaces, have remained largely unchallenged within academic and policy discourses. Only a handful of academic studies have addressed issues of poverty and marginalisation in rural Britain (Cloke et al, 1994, 1997a,1997b; Shucksmith et al, 1996; PSI, 1998), and these same issues have been conspicuous only by their absence within recent central policy documents on rural Britain (DoE, 1995; Welsh Office, 1996).
Such constructions of rurality have played a key role in reproducing dominant popular discourses on the British countryside. In one sense, a home in the country has become a much sought after commodity, witha recent national survey commissioned by the Countryside Commission (1997) highlighting that 54% of respondents in urban areas wish to reside in the countryside and that there is a more pronounced sense of contentment with place of residence among those living in rural areas than among those in urban and city environments. This combination of rural desires and urban discontentments has played a pivotal role in bringing about large-scale movements of new groups to the British countryside over recent years (for details of the scale of these movements, see Champion, 1994).
However, it is clear that such strong expressed desires for rural living are more easily realised by certain social groups than others.
one - Rural homelessness: an introduction
- Paul Cloke, Paul Milbourne, Rebekah Widdowfield
-
- Book:
- Rural Homelessness
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 20 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 27 March 2002, pp 1-26
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Homelessness ‘you don't see’?
It has been documented that there are four times as many animal shelters in this country as there are shelters for battered women. While emergency shelters do very important work, there are not enough of them to provide shelter to everyone knocking on their doors. For every homeless person you see on a street corner, there are another nine homeless people you don't see. People using couches for makeshift beds in the homes of friends and relatives, two or three families sharing a mobile home meant for just one, people living in substandard housing, people living in their cars, people living outside in parks, campgrounds and primitive wooded areas. The list goes on and on. (Stoops, in Lewallen, 1998, p 9)
This book is about some of the 9 out of 10 homeless people you do not see – those living in rural areas. In terms of numbers, the hidden rural homeless cannot ‘compete’ with those in urban areas, and by adopting a rural focus in this book we in no way seek to underestimate or undermine the significance of issues faced by homeless people in various urban situations. However, we do want to claim loudly and clearly that rural homelessness exists as an important, but often invisible, social issue of our time. If you read this claim as a statement of the obvious, then you are probably one of a relatively small minority of people who recognise that homelessness is not confined to the sites and sights of the city. Not knowing about rural homelessness is entirely forgivable. Popular discourses of homelessness repeatedly focus on images and ideas relating to on-street homeless people – usually labelled as ‘rough sleepers’ or ‘beggars’ – in major cities. Highly publicised policy responses to homelessness, such as the Rough Sleepers Initiative in Britain, tend to reinforce the interconnections between homelessness and the city.
Rural areas by contrast are associated with, and often defined by, very different discourses. Increasingly, many rural areas are constructed as ‘ideal’ places to live. If you want to be part of a close community; if you want to live close to nature; if you want to escape from the pollution and crime of the city; if you want a safe, happy, unspoilt environment in which to bring up your kids; then a house in the country is the commonly constructed answer. This ‘idyllisation’ of rural areas varies significantly in different international situations, but it has taken a firm hold on howrural areas are perceived in much of Britain.
Rural Homelessness
- Issues, Experiences and Policy Responses
- Paul Cloke, Paul Milbourne, Rebekah Widdowfield
-
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 20 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 27 March 2002
-
Rural Homelessness explores the shifting policy context of homelessness and social exclusion in relation to rural areas in the UK and other countries in the developed world. Drawing on the first comprehensive survey of rural homelessness in the UK, the book positions these findings within a wider international context.
eight - Tackling rural homelessness: the way ahead
- Paul Cloke, Paul Milbourne, Rebekah Widdowfield
-
- Book:
- Rural Homelessness
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 20 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 27 March 2002, pp 191-218
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Rural homelessness and policy
We began this book by arguing that the very invisibility of rural homelessness constitutes the principal barrier to effective policy responses. In most public and policy discourses rural homelessness is a mysterious concept – for some unknown, for others unbelievable, for most incompatible with what they know and believe about rural living. Our contention was that without appropriate encounters with the needs of homeless people in rural areas, and indeed with homeless people themselves, the mystery of rural homelessness will continue, to the detriment of the individuals and families who find themselves in circumstances of being homeless. Our survey of local authority homelessness officers in rural areas gave grounds for pessimism in this respect. The story we were repeatedly told was that local authorities in rural areas struggle to present informed discourses of the scale and scope of homelessness within their jurisdiction, let alone generate innovative policy responses. Given that local authorities are given considerable latitude in determining how to prioritise particular individuals and households within statutory definitions of homelessness, such struggles point to very significant policy issues for rural homelessness.
In Chapter Three we developed a series of ideas about why homelessness is so invisible in rural areas, focusing first on socio-cultural constructions of rurality itself. Here we argued that rurality is subject to popular imaginings which are often dominated by notions of idyllised places and life-styles, in which the benefits of close-knit community and environmental quality are intimately bound up with traditional moral values which emphasise the naturalised importance of home and settlement. Against this background, homelessness becomes dysfunctional – a series of out-of-place people and practices which cannot be envisaged as part of the idyll. Inability to envisage can lead to passive invisibility, but it can also lead to a more active purification of rural space through diverse political and cultural means that together deny the coupling together of rurality and homelessness in rural areas. The silence on rural homelessness in rural policy is deafening. As a result, those wishing to see innovative policy responses to rural homelessness recognise the need for a considerable shift in the ways in which these notions of spatiality and social problems are combined in the hearts and minds of rural people, and in the actions of policy makers.
Such a shift seems a long way off. As discussed in Chapter Four, the wider policy context within which homelessness is being tackled is itself urban-centric and thereby represents a contributor to the invisibility of rural homelessness.
seven - Experiencing rural homelessness
- Paul Cloke, Paul Milbourne, Rebekah Widdowfield
-
- Book:
- Rural Homelessness
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 20 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 27 March 2002, pp 169-190
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Stories
Rick
We interviewed ‘Rick’ in his house in a west Somerset village quite close to where he had grown up. Back in the 1970s he had spent time in the US (“living in a shack in the mountains”) and had participated in a number of squats in London, in one of which he met his partner, ‘Daisy’. He did not like London much, so came back to stay at his father's house in Somerset. Subsequently he and Daisy lived in a woodshed in rural Worcestershire, a wooden shelter, a caravan and (briefly) a flat in the Glastonbury area, and a caravan and a remote cottage in rural Devon. He told us:
“I just like the variety. I like to live quite isolated. I don't like to be overlooked. Like the caravan I lived in, up this track, up this valley, likeright out the back of beyond. And it was really wild. It was just magic.”
The seeming idealism of his life-style, however, was tempered with other, more difficult, memories:
“Sometimes I’d spend half the day just getting firewood, like just to keep me warm at night…. Sometimes it was quite desperate as well, you know, sometimes I just wanted company, and some money or something … the pay-off is that if you are living like kind of, sort of,like ‘on-the-edge’ sort of way, sometimes the ‘on-the-edge’ gets back to you.”
Rick and Daisy had a daughter, and after they split up they “lived in orbit around each other because of the kid”, finally deciding to settle together so that they could co-parent their child through her teenage years. Rick first stayed with friends:
“So I moved back up (to west Somerset) and lived in [friend’s] – a littleroom above [friend’s] kitchen, like a store room. It hasn't even got a staircase to it, you have to climb up through a ladder into the ceiling.”
Then he briefly moved into a house in the village, but he “fell out with the bloke that was living there” and when Daisy and his daughter returned from travelling, they once again shared with friends, until they finally found a house of their own. Their search was a hard one:
“We saw several places, but we had a lot of difficulty, bizarre little things like agents who said they had a nice house, and when you went round it was rubbish.
five - The spaces of rural homelessness
- Paul Cloke, Paul Milbourne, Rebekah Widdowfield
-
- Book:
- Rural Homelessness
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 20 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 27 March 2002, pp 117-142
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The previous two chapters have provided wide-ranging discussions of the cultural and policy contexts of rural homelessness. In this chapter we want to explore the complex geographies of homelessness in rural England. We want to do this in two main ways. First, we provide key findings on the scale and nature of homelessness in England by drawing on unpublished government homelessness statistics and a national survey of all local authorities in England. In this section of the chapter we not only compare the extent and profile of homelessness in rural and urbanareas, but also consider the spatial unevenness of homelessness within rural areas. In the second main section of the chapter we explore the local spaces of rural homelessness in two districts located in the study county of Gloucestershire. Here we consider the ways in which local housing structures and cultures of rurality impact on the experiences of homelessness in these two rural districts.
The scale, profile and spatial unevenness of homelessness in rural England
An analysis of unpublished official homelessness statistics reveals that 15,950 households were accepted as priority homeless by local authorities in rural England in 1996. This level of rural homelessness represents 14.4% of the total for England and is equivalent to 70% of the homelessness figure for London (Table 5.1). In relative terms, though, standardised levels of homelessness in rural England are lower than in London and urban authority areas. In 1996, homelessness accounted for only 3.5 per 1,000 households in rural areas, compared with standardised rates of 7.6 and 5.7 per 1,000 households in London and urban areas respectively. Infact, 19 of the 20 local authority areas recording the highest levels of standardised homelessness in England were located in either London (9) or urban areas (10), with only the mixed rural area of Redcar and Cleveland featuring in this list (Table 5.2). Nevertheless, 14 rural authority areas (equivalent to 17.5% of all rural areas) did record levels of standardised homelessness above the national mean (Table 5.2). The geographical distribution of homelessness in rural areas is provided in Figure 5.1. This map highlights important regional variations in levels of homelessness in rural England, with highest homelessness rates evident in parts of the South-West, East Anglia and the East Midlands, and lowest levels presentin northern regions. However, alongside these regional differences inhomelessness, it should be stressed that considerable localised variationsare evident. For example, both the North-East and South-West regionsare characterised by local authority areas with lowest levels of homelessness (less than 2 per 1,000 households) sitting alongside areas with highest homelessness rates (of more than 5 per 1,000).
Contents
- Paul Cloke, Paul Milbourne, Rebekah Widdowfield
-
- Book:
- Rural Homelessness
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 20 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 27 March 2002, pp iii-iii
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Frontmatter
- Paul Cloke, Paul Milbourne, Rebekah Widdowfield
-
- Book:
- Rural Homelessness
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 20 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 27 March 2002, pp i-ii
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
four - Homelessness in rural areas: an invisible issue?
- Edited by Patricia Kennett, University of Bristol, Alex Marsh, University of Bristol
-
- Book:
- Homelessness
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 05 July 2022
- Print publication:
- 15 September 1999, pp 61-80
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
VILLAGERS BUY THEIR TRAMP HIS OWN WOOD
Supertramp Max Smith has been crowned king of the road by kindhearted locals who chipped in £26,000 to buy him his own wood. They raised the cash so the happy hobo can live out the rest of his days under his favourite bush amid 90 acres of ancient forest…. Shopkeeper Graham Dando, 49, said “Everybody knows Max and there's a small network of us who keep an eye out for him each day…. If we don't see him we go and make sure he's all right. That wouldn't happen in the city”. (Johnson, 1997, p 10)
According to most popular discourses, homelessness is something that wouldn't happen in the countryside. Just occasionally, however, rural homelessness does hit a headline but then, as with this story from the News of the World cited above, normality is soon resumed. Instead of homeless people, rural areas entertain ‘happy hobos’. Instead of being socially excluded, the happy hobo is cared for by a supportive community. Instead of being forced to move on, he has his wood bought for him by kind-hearted locals for whom a supertramp somehow fits their romanticised view of the idyllic life-styles of country living. Readers can sleep safe in their beds as their rural idyll is being enhanced by the mysterious romanticism of the somehow ageless tramp, rather than being transgressed by the harsh social reality of homelessness.
In this chapter we want to argue that discourses from governments, academics, news media and many (but not all) voluntary agencies conspire to create the impression that the spatiality of homeless people is entirely encompassed by city limits. People's everyday experiences, both televisual and ‘live’, have served to assimilate homelessness in city sites/sights, and often to conflate homelessness with concomitant ‘urban’ issues such as the supposed street criminalities of drunkenness, vagrancy and begging. Without wishing in any sense to deny or undermine the socio-political importance of homelessness issues in the city, we want to argue that homelessness is also important in rural areas, and that its significance requires special emphasis precisely because it is usually hidden from view.
Homelessness and rurality appear to be an anathema, and we want to question why that is so. We suggest that in part, the invisibility of rural homelessness is about the ways in which homelessness is defined and recorded. In part, it has to do with the difficulties of gaining advice in rural areas, the assumed futility of trying to find affordable housing in expensive housing markets, and the reluctance of some rural people to admit that they have a problem.