Housing for health: can the market care?

For over two decades British public policy has been fuelled by the notion that markets are the most effective way to accumulate and distribute resources. Such markets are driven by price, respond to ability to pay, and are not, for the most part, seen as having a welfare role. Using the example of housing, and drawing on lay experiences of ill health, the authors suggest that British households do, nevertheless, look to markets (in this example, to owner-occupation) to meet some welfare needs. Households value, in particular, the qualities of flexibility and security which they associate with homeownership and which promise both practical and psychosocial gains. However, there is a notable gap between what people aspire to and what they can achieve. This arises not because markets cannot care but because, so far, there has not been sufficient political imagination to make them do so.