Housing Law and Policy in Wales – A new blog

There is no doubt that housing law and housing policy in Wales are different from the rest of the UK.  That’s not just because the legislation affecting housing is now very different – Wales has the Renting Homes legislation with very different understandings of the renting relationship; we have different homelessness legislation; we have different regulation of renting – but also because the ambition of Wales in its general approach, exemplified by the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act, is enlightening.  Housing policy is also very different – certainly from Westminster, at least.  My limited understanding is that there is a desire to be collaborative, and that policy-makers don’t just pay lip-service to the halo effect of “partnership” but actually actively seek to make it work.  And that seems to extend to individual decision-making.  I don’t want to say that Wales is ahead of what’s going on elsewhere in the devolved governments – and there is so much going on – but there is what Kim McKee has called a need to appreciate the spatial nuance which now affects housing law and policy as a result of devolution.

The problem with this spatial nuance is that so much commentary and discussion is Westminster centric; there is very little information available about what is happening locally here in Wales.  I am in the middle of a research project, talking to people at the frontline and policy makers about a particular housing issue (more on that later), and our participants are telling me that they have no means of obtaining information about what is going on in housing law and policy in Wales on a regular basis. That is the purpose of this site – to reach out to social and private housing providers, supported housing providers, occupiers, local authorities, judges, lawyers and policy wonks, local authority officers, and the research community.

The ambition of this blog is to inform us all about what is going on in Wales around housing law and policy.

In England, there is the amazing Nearly Legal site, which carries occasional pieces about Wales written by Giles Peaker himself and Mike Norman.  This site is not seeking to step on their toes (nor could it), but it seems from what people are telling me that there is a need for a regular update of what is going on in Wales.  That leads on to the aim of this blog:

The aim is to provide a regular Friday update of all that is going on – please send me news snippets or information which might be of interest to the community.  If you want to help me write it, then please get in touch.

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