Governing “The Homeless” in English Homelessness Legislation: Foucauldian Governmentality and the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017

Abstract

This article contributes to the growing body of work exploring governmentality theory in housing and homelessness law by engaging a Foucauldian neoliberal, governmentality framework to the recently-enacted Homelessness Reduction Act 2017. This is the first time this major piece of English homelessness legislation has been examined through a Foucauldian governmentality lens and this article therefore fills a gap in the literature. In so doing, this article locates the place of governmental activity to be scrutinized as the homeless population and contends that the Homelessness Reduction 2017 (‘HRA 17’) can be interpreted as operating according to three intersecting modes of problematization of the homeless: (1) biopolitical problematization; (2) governmental problematization; and (3) ethical problematization. Drawing on the writings of Dean (1999) , Rose (1999) and Hamann (2009) on neoliberal governmentality and building on the emerging governmentality literature in housing and homelessness law of Cowan and McDermont (2006), Cowan, Pantazis and Gilroy (2001), McKee (2009), Evans (2012) and others, this article explores the insights neoliberal governmentality provides. In so doing, this article reveals that the 2017 Act reflects a shift in neoliberal thinking on housing in constructing images of the homeless as forming a ‘risk population’, subjectified, autonomized individuals; exhorted to self-work and ethical self-fashioning as responsibilized citizens taking account of their own housing precarity. This article makes a novel and unique contribution to the scholarship in this field in arguing that the new 2017 legislation can be understood as operating according to an ordering theme of risk. This article proceeds in 4 parts. Part one introduces and unpacks the concept of neoliberal governmentality and reflects on its prescience as a tool for critical understanding of contemporary forms of political and legal governance of homeless populations in England. A second part offers a brief overview of the recently-enacted Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 and its key provisions before a third section operationalizes a neoliberal governmentality framework; locates risk as the organising rationale of the new legislation and explores the three, intersecting problematizations of the homeless at play under the 2017 Act: biopolitical, governmental and ethical. A final section explores the implications of the governmentality framework and reflects on wider lessons to be learned including for homelessness legislation in other countries outside England.