Across the last few chapters I have examined the various ways in which UK housing policy enacts domicide on working-class, low-income and vulnerable people. This chapter takes a slightly different approach, exploring the multitude of ways in which these domicidal policies have been fought and resisted. The resistive tools and techniques outlined here are varied in their strategies and scope – from legal challenges, to hiding in plain sight to avoid forced eviction, to actively using forced eviction as a means of exposing housing injustice, to the role of material objects in creating home in hostile environments. What all of these forms of resistance do have in common is the determination to fight for a right to home for all.

Using law and policy as tools of resistance

This book has so far highlighted how legislative and policy changes are deployed to purposefully strip away the homemaking abilities of workingclass and low-income people. And yet, just as law and policy can be used to further urban spatial injustice, they can also be reworked as tools of resistance. Scholars such as David Delaney, Nicholas Blomley and Katherine Brickell have called for social scientists to investigate these ‘contingencies and constraints of social justice’ (Delaney 2016: 267) in order to better understand the ways in which the law, in particular, can be used to resist spatial injustice. I argue that much of this work is already being done by the victims of domicidal policies, through grassroot networks that reshape legal and policy barriers into tools of resistance. The following section of this chapter focuses on the multifaceted ways in which housing injustice is challenged through legal and policy frameworks.

Legally challenging the bedroom tax

Challenging the bedroom tax through legal means has proved to be a prevalent, and often successful, method of resistance. In doing so, social tenants affected by the bedroom tax and their advocates have de-legitimised the government's actions using the same frameworks that have been designed to penalise them. As highlighted in Chapter 2, legal challenges to the bedroom tax have taken place on a range of scales.