A house, not a home? Examining the use of the private rented sector to resolve homelessness in Scotland

Changes to homelessness legislation in post-devolution Scotland have resulted in an expansion of rights for homeless households seeking formal assistance from local authorities. These changes have led to Scotland’s homelessness arrangements being considered among the most progressive in Europe. In recent years, however, the Scottish Government has increasingly promoted homelessness prevention and Housing Options approaches as a means by which homelessness might be avoided or resolved without recourse to statutory rights. As part of that, they have promoted greater use of the private rented sector (PRS) as a key housing option, with the potential to meet the needs of homeless households. The arguments made to support use of the PRS have much in common with arguments for privatisation in other areas of social policy, notably greater choice for the individual promoting better welfare outcomes, and competition among providers encouraging improvements in quality of service provision. Critics have argued that such benefits may not be realised and that, on the contrary, privatisation may lead to exclusion or act to worsen households’ outcomes. This thesis considers the extent to which the PRS has been utilised in Scotland to accommodate homeless households, and the consequences of this for their welfare. The thesis uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. To examine trends in the use of the PRS, it presents quantitative analysis of the data on the operation of the statutory system and Housing Options arrangements, and of data from a survey of local authority homelessness strategy officers. To examine the consequences of this for homeless households, the thesis uses qualitative research involving face-to-face interviews with 35 homeless households across three local authority areas. This research considers the extent to which households’ experiences of homelessness, housing need and the PRS reflect the arguments presented in the literature, and how settled accommodation has impacted on households’ ability to participate fully in society. The research found an increasing but still limited role for the PRS in resolving statutory homelessness in Scotland, with indications that the PRS is being increasingly used as part of the Housing Options approach and as a means of resolving homelessness outside the statutory system. The PRS is being utilised to varying degrees across different local authority areas, and a variety of methods are being used to do so. While local authorities saw clear advantages to making greater use of the sector, a number of significant barriers including affordability, available stock and landlord preferences - made this difficult in practice. Research with previously homeless households in the PRS similarly found broadly positive experiences and views of the sector, particularly with regard to enabling households to access good quality accommodation in desirable areas of their choosing, with many households highlighting improvements relating to social inclusion and participation. Nevertheless, concerns around the security of tenure offered by the sector, repairs, service standards and unequal power relations between landlord and tenant persisted. As such, homeless households frequently expressed their decision to enter the sector in terms of a trade-off between choice and security.

Re-imagining the theology of human sexuality in the Methodist Church: the use of narrative in theological methodology

This thesis proposes the development of a narrative methodology in the British Methodist Church. Such a methodology embraces and communicates both felt experience and critical theological thinking, thus producing and presenting a theology that might have a constructive transformative impact on wider society. In chapter one I explore the ways in which the Church speaks in public, identify some of the challenges it faces, and consider four models of engagement. If the Church is to engage in public discourses then I argue that its words need to be relevant and connect with people’s experiences. To ground the thinking I focus on the context of the British Methodist Church and explore how the Church engages in theological reflection through the lens of its thinking on issues of human sexuality. Chapter two reviews how theological reflection is undertaken in the British Methodist Church. I describe how the Methodist Quadrilateral of Scripture, tradition, reason and experience remains a foundational framework for theological reflection within the Methodist Church and consider the impact of institutional processes and the ways in which the Methodist people actually engage with theological thinking. The third and fourth chapters focus on how the British Methodist Church has produced its theology of human sexuality, giving particular attention to the use of personal and sexual stories in this process. I find that whilst there has been a desire to listen to the stories of the Methodist people, there has not been a corresponding interrogation or analysis of their stories so as to enable robust and constructive theological reflection on these experiences. Using resources from Foucauldian approaches to discourse analysis, I critique key statements and the processes involved in their production, offering an analysis of this body of theological thinking and indicating where possibilities for alternative ways of thinking and acting arise. The proposed methodology draws upon resources from social science methodologies, and in chapter five I look at the use of personal experience and relevant strategies of inquiry that prompt reflection on the hermeneutical process and employ narrative approaches in undertaking, analysing and presenting research. The exploration shows that qualitative research methodologies offer resources and methods of inquiry that could help the Church to engage with personal stories in its theological thinking in a robust, interrogative and imaginative way. In chapter six an examination of story and narrative is undertaken, to show how they have been understood as ways of knowing and how they relate to theological inquiry. Whilst acknowledging some of the limitations of narrative, I indicate how it offers constructive possibilities for theological reflection and could be a means for the British Methodist Church to engage in public discourse. This is explored further in chapter seven, which looks in more detail at how the British Methodist Church has used narrative in its theological thinking, and outlines areas requiring further attention in order for a narrative theological methodology to be developed, namely: attention to the question ‘whose experience?’; investigation of issues of power and the dynamics involved in the process of the production of theological thought; how personal stories and experiences are interrogated and how narrative is constructed; and how narrative might be employed within the Methodist Quadrilateral. The final chapter considers the advantages and limitations of such an approach, whether the development of such a method is possible in the Methodist Church today and its potential for helping the Church to engage in public discourse more effectively. I argue that this methodology can provoke new theological insights and enable new ways of being in the world