Report: Impact of legal rights to housing for homeless people – Scotland & Ireland

A report examined the impact of legal rights to housing for homeless people, focusing on the capacity of such rights to empower those experiencing homelessness, using Lukes’ three-dimensional view of power and Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ to distinguish between conceptualizations of empowerment.

It drew on a qualitative comparison of approaches to homelessness in Scotland and Ireland, and said that, although in Scotland virtually all those who were homeless had a legal right to settled accommodation, Ireland had rejected the ‘legalistic’ approach, pursuing instead a consensus driven ‘social partnership’ model.

The article argued that legal rights could effectively empower homeless people, and said that the findings called into question popular and political understandings of the relationship between legal welfare rights and self-reliance.