Transforming Social Housing: Taking Stock of New Complexities

The last 10 years has been a period of rapid change in the social rented sector, reflecting broader changes in the nature of housing problems, structures of housing provision and patterns of housing consumption in the UK, rooted in fundamental shifts in the political, economic and social landscape. By way of introduction to this special issue, this paper cuts across conventional frameworks of analysis to explore the pressures and challenges raised by these changes for the social rented sector through consideration of three key facets of the contemporary housing system: market change, community dynamics and modes of governance. Within this framework, patterns of increasing differentiation and fragmentation within the UK housing system are revealed and the extent to which the transformation of the social rented sector is working with the grain of these changes is considered.