In Chapter Four we provided a detailed discussion of the central policy context of rural homelessness. In particular, we considered the early legislation on homelessness in Britain and traced through some of the key features of restructuring initiated by the 1996 Housing Act. In this chapter we continue with this focus on homelessness policy but examine it from a different perspective. Here we consider the ways in which the implementation of central homelessness policy has become entangled with sets of local rural policy and political structures, and we discuss the important role played by new systems of local welfare governance – based on partnership working – in dealing with homelessness at the local level.

Local welfare governance and the shifting nature of homelessness support

The centralised provision of welfare and homelessness support in Britain is clearly bound up with complex sets of local socioeconomic, political and policy structures. Cochrane (1993), for example, has noted that local variation in welfare provision has long been a feature of the British welfare state reliant as it has been on local government as a key vehicle for its delivery. In a wider discussion of emerging systems of local governance, Stoker and Mossberger (1995) have pointed to two important components of the spatial differentiation of policy implementation – one involving ‘vertical’ linkages between central and local states; the other consisting of more ‘horizontal’ interconnections:

In relation to vertical processes of policy imposition, Stoker and Mossberger (1995) have proposed a typology of local authorities based on the ways in which they react to centrally imposed policies, with reactions boundup with complex mixes of localised political and socioeconomic structures. These types of local mediations of central policy are clearly evident inrelation to policy dealings with homelessness, with a number of recent studies highlighting widespread variations in the ways in which local authorities interpret central homelessness legislation (see Evans and Duncan, 1988; Audit Commission, 1989; Niner, 1989; Greve, 1991; Butleret al, 1994).