Annual Janine Sargoni Lecture: Professor Dave Cowan

This lecture will be held in Room 3.31 Wills Memorial Building as well as online via Teams: this link will also be sent to atendees inboxes the day before the event.

A “charter for scroungers and scrimshankers”: A biography of the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act 1977

Inspired by Sally Sheldon and colleagues’ biography of the Abortion Act 1967, in this lecture I discuss the background to a new project which seeks to apply their insights to how homelessness law has developed over the last nearly 50 years sketching out and developing why such a legal biography is so important. Originally described as “a charter for scroungers and scrimshankers”, the core elements of the Act have had remarkable longevity, engaging a duty on local authorities to provide accommodation to households which meet certain criteria. Those elements have survived even into devolved governments’ legislation (at least for a while).

If it is to be argued, as socio-legal scholars do, that associations between people and objects must be taken seriously to analyse and comprehend their co-constitutive significance for shaping of legality, what then can biography add? Legislation is self-evidently a translation, one which is then translated into the everyday bureaucratic machinery of decision-making, templating the truths into decision-letters. Perhaps, then, this kind of biography can identify how law unfolds even as it folds ideas like the “housing crisis” into its truths.

A biographer sees things from the vantage point of today so theirs is a retrospective. As we might look at it today, with the effects of the housing crisis all round us, and devolved jurisdictions have moved on, the Act appears out of time in granting rights to non-existent accommodation; and in its discretionary decision-making format of 50 years ago as we move in to governance by algorithm within the technocracy. Despite those changes, what can be offered is a life history of the lack of legislative change beyond mere tweaks, and one which weaves one’s own subjectivities in with the subject-matter.

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