What’s the problem with the Private Rental Sector?

Research by Julie Aitken (2021)

The Private Rental Sector (PRS) is growing across the UK – having increased from 13% in 2007 to 20% of all housing stock in 2017 (Office for National Statistics, 2018). It is well documented that state action forms and influences housing markets and sectors (Kemeny, 1995, 2006; Hoekstra, 2009; Alves, 2017). If state action has the effect of structuring the housing market and provision – the study of how governments problematise housing (in this case, the PRS) make an important topic of research. Such analysis provides insight into the future formation of the sector, the impact these problematisations have on those residing and letting in the PRS, and the broader intersections with housing, education, and health policy that are shown through the problematisations of whether markets or state are responsible for ensuring housing security.

The UK presents a unique research entity for comparative research - as a result of devolution, Scotland and England are diverging in their approach to housing policy (McKee et al., 2017, Moore, 2017; Stephens, 2019). Using the Scottish Government’s ‘Housing to 2040’ strategy and Westminster’s ‘Fixing our broken housing market’, this paper explores divergence in how both governments problematise the PRS using Carol Bacchi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to Be?’ (WPR) method. It finds divergence in how Holyrood and Westminster problematise the PRS and proposes that this extends to divergent discursive effects for society and divergent lived effects for tenants in the PRS in England and Scotland.