Homelessness policy and provision in three European countries: Ireland, Scotland and Norway

This paper examines recent developments in homelessness policy and provision in a comparative context focusing on Ireland, Scotland and Norway. The introduction considers situates the analysis in the broader context of comparative approaches to theorizing European welfare states, and explains the basis of the comparative case studies. The main body of the paper compares homelessness across the three countries in relation to: (a) issues of the definition and measurement of homelessness; (b) the profile of homeless people in the three countries and (c) changing homelessness policy and housing options for homeless people The concluding section provides a comparative discussion which relates developments in homelessness policy and provision to the approaches to welfare in Ireland, Scotland and Norway, and reflects on the potential for wider comparisons across Europe. Introduction: homelessness in times of prosperity and austerity The European Union and its neighbouring European countries retain diverse housing systems and varying approaches to defining, quantifying and resolving homelessness. The case for selecting countries for comparison could be made on a range of grounds, such as randomly or selecting similar or contrasting countries. Our approach here is to begin with three relatively close geographical neighbours which are similar in This paper is under revision: not for citation without prior permission of the authors 2 terms of size of national population and which appear to offer some commonality in contemporary approaches to tackling homelessness. One of our „countries‟, Scotland, remains part of the United Kingdom but policy on housing and homelessness is largely devolved to the Scottish Parliament with legislation and practice increasingly divergent from the rest of the UK (Fitzpatrick, 2004; Anderson, 2007, 2009). A minority Scottish National Party (SNP) Government was elected in the 2007 Scottish Parliament elections and by the 2011 elections the party had achieved an overall working majority in the Scottish Parliament for the next five years. In September 2007, the Scottish Government published its overarching principles and priorities for its first programme in Government, with the ambitious twin objectives of achieving stronger economic growth but also delivering a fairer distribution of the nation‟s wealth. The introduction to the SNP strategy stated: We believe that Scotland can match the success of similar countries – Ireland to our west, Iceland to our north and Norway to our east, nations that sit at the top of world wealth league tables and form an arc of prosperity around our shores. Scotland has important lessons to learn from each of these neighbours in terms of competitiveness, investment and economic growth and it is this government’s job to offer a vision for Scotland that enables us to match, and we hope, exceed their achievements (Scottish Government, 2007, p9, authors‟ emphasis). This ambitious vision of course pre-dated the economic crisis which commenced with the 2008 credit crunch and continues to affect all four countries mentioned to varying degrees. While it has not been possible to integrate Iceland into this analysis, we are able to offer some initial comparisons of the extent to which homelessness persists in the other three relatively prosperous northern European Countries, assess the degree of commonality and convergence (or otherwise) in their approaches to tackling the issue, and reflect on the impact of the post-2008 economic climate 1 . Approaches to the comparative analysis of social policy, including housing and homelessness, have developed substantially since the ground breaking work of Gøsta Esping-Andersen (1990) which set out the thesis of three distinct, path dependent models of welfare capitalism (universalistic, corporatist and liberal). Almost from its inception, however, the model presented problems for analysis of the European Union as the southern European countries (Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal) were not well served by the analysis and of course the project was completed prior to the collapse of communism in Europe and the much later accession of post-communist states into the European Union. Moreover, housing was not a component of welfare in the EspingAndersen analysis, and the extent to which housing can be interpreted as a „welfare‟ service or benefit is similarly highly variable across Europe. Indeed, prior to EspingAndersen‟s analysis, Norwegian social scientist Ulf Torgersen (1987) characterised housing as „the wobbly pillar under the welfare state‟, arguing that the status of housing within welfare was weaker in comparison to education, health and social security/pensions, which constituted the core of the welfare state. 1 Please note that this paper is a work in progress and the post-2008 analysis has not yet been