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Nigel Sprigings (2017) Housing and Housing Management: Balancing the Two Key Contracts , Edinburgh : Dunedin , £19.95, pp. 170, pbk.
Sprigings' theme is the discord between the 'two contracts': the landlord/tenant contract with its long institutionalised history and the 'social contract' between citizen and state 'that guarantees and extends social citizenship' (p2). The book is mainly historical and there is little on contemporary social housing management such as current allocation procedures, choice based lettings, Housing Plus etc. Its focus is on local government with the role of housing associations, now managing the majority of the social housing stock, underplayed.
The landlord/tenant contract - with the landlord having the whip hand - is traced to the Romans in an interesting chapter that reveals striking similarities between the rented sector in Rome and in England. Long before such practices were exposed in London by George Bernard Shaw in his play Widower's Houses (1892), the Romans were in the business of buying dilapidated property and 'farming' overcrowded poor tenants before making huge gains from land prices when an area was redeveloped.
Starting with almshouses, the emergence and development of social housing in the UK and its implications for citizenship are explored. Although Sprigings identifies non-market allocation by the social housing sector as a social citizenship hallmark, he claims '.ￂ .ￂ . all the time the management of social housing was constrained by an unreformed and institutionalised tenancy contract that is designed to protect property ownership, wealth and privilege' (p.2). The social housing management accounts, in chapters four to seven, are replete with vignettes on how housing...