ABSTRACT
The fulfilment of the Major government’s moral and ideological crusade on homelessness – Parts VI and VII of the Housing Act 1996 – took effect in early 1997 (1 April and 20 January, respectively). During 1996, it became much clearer that the central focus of the crusade was to reduce the numbers of people found homeless as well as providing a steady market for the private and quasi-private housing sectors. So, for example, certain people became ineligible for consideration as homeless so that, even if they had no accommodation at all in England and Wales, they would still not enter the central statistics. Local government was forced to withdraw its assumed responsibility to these people. The Act almost raised a presumption that most people will be housed in the private sector. In the same way as there are no more ‘jobs for life’, no longer is there to be ‘housing for life’ (see Morgan, 1996). The Housing Act 1996 provides an organized, formal means of enabling, or empowering, those requiring (re-)housing to have the ability to exit from local authority tenure (sometimes before there has been entry into that tenure) and into the private sector. After the privatization of the bricks and mortar, the category of persons known as homeless people were to be privatized. The scheme was high-risk because it assumed that the private rental market would adequately accept its increased role.
