Towards inclusive service delivery through social investment in the EU: the case of housing (Deliverable 6.3)

This report provides a qualitative overview of changes in social investment in housing in eight RE-InVEST EU-jurisdictions: Belgium, England and Scotland (in Great Britain), Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Romania and the Netherlands. Each country study analyses existing market regulations in relation to the human rights and capabilities in the basic service sector, which is the focus in this report: housing services. Whether the recent developments impacting on housing services as capability can be considered a social (dis)investment in capabilities and human rights is of key concern. Human rights are considered as a cluster of rights; the right to decent housing implying the right to sufficient quality housing: including the following dimensions: decent technical and comfort, decent access to local services and work, decent legal dimension. Each cluster of rights will be associated with a different price/rent. Holding household income constant, implies different impacts on housing affordability. EU-SILC data show that population that is living in at-market-price rental housing, or whose income is lower than the at-risk-of-poverty line, or is (severely) materially deprived, scores worse on diverse housing indicators, such as indicators of housing affordability. Furthermore, those at risk of poverty are relatively more likely to be tenants than owner-occupiers. Their share on average is larger in 2016 than in 2008. Furthermore, housing costs push a larger share of the population into the at-risk-of-poverty group based on income after housing costs. Last, but not least, a larger share of young adults (25-34) are living with their parents in 2016 than in 2008. Given these access indicators, marketisation trends, such as a rising market share of private renting, are likely to produce worse equity outcomes in the future, ceteris paribus. If these private housing options offer less secure in tenure than those in other tenures, this will add an extra socio-psychological layer to the deprivation that the occupiers are undergoing. From a consumer choice perspective and a policy perspective, making private renting a full-fledge housing option (for certain households), will require balancing the interests of suppliers and consumers. Taking human rights and capabilities as a starting point, Bonvin and Laruffa (2017) propose a new welfare arrangement, a ‘capacitating welfare state’. In this welfare state social investment empowers individuals in the doer, receiver and judge dimensions of capabilities to participate in achieving effective human rights allowing to focus on deprivation as a multidimensional framework of receivers lacking resources, doers lacking opportunity to act and judges lacking opportunity to voice and aspire. Any of these dimensions indicate a lack of real freedom to choose. In a capacitating welfare state the individual’s definition of a valued life must be leading for policy intervention. The Irish case study shows the usefulness of knowledge merging about the impact of market­isation of housing policy on the rights and capabilities of disadvantaged lone parent families. The research suggests also that just involving disadvantaged groups in policy dialogue is insufficient to actually address the power inequalities surrounding structural social exclusion. In order to enhance the rights and capabilities of such groups requires more ongoing capacity support through longer term Participatory Action Research approaches such as PAHRCA that was implemented in RE-InVEST. Guidance to all actors concerned for such intervention offers the ‘normal’ public policy management cycle. The cycle would steer the process based on problem signalling in the mechanisms at work and how ‘more desirable’ outcomes can be achieved. Monitoring the achievements based on context-bound indica­tors such as vacancy rates, waiting lists, and homelessness, would feed the policy management cycle. The Dutch case study shows that the capability approach in its anthropological meaning may have added value as an evaluation tool for unravelling dimensions of human wellbeing as defined by themselves. This definition allows moving towards a more complete understanding of what it is an individual is lacking in his/her capability set. Options to strengthen the individual’s capability set would not only include state support to the individual as receiver, but would also strengthen the individual’s action options as doer, as well as the realisation options of the capability to voice and aspire as judge. As a result, some of the solutions to housing problems will be more in the hand of the individual(s) than may be expected from a government focusing only on the receiver. This argument starts from a positive point of view: different types of deprivation can be tackled in different ways in order to strengthen the capability set of the individual. And strengthening those for housing will provide opportunities in other areas of social policies. The concluding chapter (Chapter 4) contains a summary of these theoretical insights, as well as some general principles for policy intervention and recommendations. The concluding discussion about moving towards social investment in the field of housing is organised along four headings: governance, legislation, funding and policies. Preferred measures will maximise the long-term individual and societal benefits in line with the prin­ciples derived from the capacitating welfare state, starting from the life fulfilment that people value. Stimu­lating the receiver, doer and the judge dimensions of the capabilities, where deemed valued, combined with a strong right to housing will maximise the inclusiveness of housing services for disadvantaged households