Part A - Feantsa - Horus

Part A _ Articles
Increasing Access to Housing :
Implementing the Right to Housing
in England and France
Marie Loison-Leruste and Deborah Quilgars
Centre Maurice Halbwachs, Equipe de Recherche sur les Inégalités Sociales,
Paris, France
Centre for Housing Policy, University of York, York, England
> > Abstract_
The United Kingdom and France are the only two European Union
member states to have introduced a right to housing that is enforceable
through the courts. This paper investigates whether such a right to housing
increases homeless people’s access to appropriate accommodation. Focusing
on England and France, it begins by outlining the difficulties in accessing
social housing in each country before describing how a right to housing is
operated within this context. The differing, but in both cases complex, governance
arrangements for implementing this right to housing are reviewed. The
paper concludes that a right to housing does have the potential to ensure that
the accommodation needs of the most marginalised households receive
greater priority than those without such a right. However, implementation challenges,
including take-up issues, fragmented governance arrangements,
competing social goals, such as social diversity, and an overall lack of housing
may significantly restrict the impact of this right to housing.
> > Keywords_
Right to housing ; access to housing ; social housing ; homelessness
; governance ; France ; England.
75
ISSN 2030-2762 / ISSN 2030-3106 online