This paper seeks to make a contribution to the debate about competition in social housing provision in Europe (Elsinga et al 2006, Oxley et al 2007,) by considering a recent reform in procurement of new social housing in England intended to expose non-profit providers to direct competition from the private sector. While this reform, introduced by the Housing Act 2004, is still at a relatively early stage of implementation, some issues arising from this attempt to create a mixed economy of production of social housing are already evident (Campbell Tickell, 2006). This paper draws on some concepts from the literature on network governance (Kickert et al 1997, Koppenjan and Klijn 2004) and organisational economics (Nygaard et al 2007 add further references) to theorise these changes and uses some preliminary interviews with some of the actors involved to assess the significance and likely impacts of this reform.
As a result of two decades of reform across Europe the role of social housing has been both diminished and transformed (Primeus et al 1999). Part of this transformation has involved changes to the nature and mode of operation of social landlords which have become more commercial and market orientated and more focused on financial and asset management (Gruis and Nieboer, 2004, Gruis and C 2007). Another aspect has been the creation of mixed economy or unitary markets (Kemeny 1992, 1995) in which non-profit providers co-exist with profit distributing landlords (Elsinga et al 2005). While there have been very distinctive national paths in the allocation of responsibility for social housing provision between state, non-profit and market sectors the tendency for mixed economy markets is increasing.