Legal Rights and Political Realities: Governmental Responses to Homelessness in Britain

This article presents a “contextual” study of Britain's Housing (Homeless Persons) Act 1977. The article addresses the ostensibly perplexing policy question of why Britain's homeless population has almost trebled in the 14 years since the homelessness legislation was introduced. The answer is found by subjecting the legislation to a very wide-ranging contextualization process. Rather than simply focusing on the administrative arena in which the act is implemented, the article seeks explanations for its apparent inefficacy in ideological considerations preceding its enactment, in the legislative process itself, in the (im)precise wording of the emergent statute, and in subsequent government policies in various relevant constitutional and social policy areas. The article concludes that a thorough understanding of the impact of this particular law requires it to be located in a series of interrelated contexts, a conclusion that might plausibly be extended to all studies of “law in society.”