This collection builds on a previous volume covering social exclusion and housing and the value of this new book is evident: inequality is currently worsening in UK society, with over a fifth of the population living in relative poverty. Following the introduction, Isobel Anderson provides a useful conceptual framework, refocusing on structural inequality as a key concept in understanding social difference and as a basis for analysis. Crucially, she identifies the centrality of connections between wealth and poverty – a relationship often neglected in the myriad concepts within this crowded field including social exclusion, social cohesion and social justice.

The following trilogy of chapters offers contextual investigations of housing and inequality. Lindsey Appleyard and Karen Rowlingson powerfully identify the central role for property in national wealth and the importance of inequalities in assets as well as income, examining how these inequalities are manifested in tenure. Alison Wallace develops an authoritative account of the interrelationships between housing and employment inequalities and how income affects access to housing markets. She concludes with a thoughtful discussion of whether housing policy, including asset ownership (rather than debt), may redress employment inequalities. Eoin O'Sullivan provides a wider European dimension, identifying the rise in homeownership rates across the EU-27. O'Sullivan describes the influence of the EU, despite an absence of an explicit housing policy, and challenges conceptions of a widespread retrenchment in welfare regimes in terms of spend (as opposed to entitlement).

The third section focuses on neighbourhood disadvantage. Keith Kintrea outlines how housing processes translate inequalities into spatial forms of socio-economic segregation and how neighbourhood hierarchies are maintained over long historical periods. Indeed, Kintrea's depiction of limited spatial worlds and populations relating to each other as if ‘on another planet’ (p. 101) precisely mirrors Disraeli's (Reference Disraeli1845) description of the early industrial city. Douglas Robertson reiterates such arguments in starker terms, stating that promoting housing renewal and regeneration programmes as tackling poverty is ‘illusionary and intellectually dishonest’ (p. 126), given that many sites of social exclusion in the 1930s remain so today. His chapter examines the centrality of place to the processes and relationships of class and social distancing and how particular localities retain and reinforce class identities and social gradations (and degradations). Rebecca Tunstall provides an alternative framework for analysing the impacts of housing and regeneration policy. In the context of huge gaps in median household wealth between tenures, she finds, after considering trends in a broad range of social policy fields, that there were modest reductions in some dimensions of social exclusion in the first decade of the twenty-first century, attributed to the economy and mainstream housing policy as well as estate renewal initiatives. Ian Cole and Steven Green continue the examination of social segregation through charting the demise of the policy vision of mixed communities, arguing that policies aimed at fostering greater social diversity in residential neighbourhoods are insufficient to ameliorate processes of ‘balkanisation, selectivity and displacement’ (p. 163).

The fourth part of the book examines social inequality impacts on particular groups. Caroline Dewilde, Clara H. Mulder and Annika Smits assess housing inequality over the life course and identify the insecurity of housing as realisable wealth and the importance of emotional rather than financial investments in home. However, they note that inter-generational inequality may be increasingly prominent as children's access to future home ownership is further predicated on parents’ tenure status. Nicholas Pleace presents a thoughtful essay on homelessness, making the link with wider social inequality and the current injustices of apportioning responsibility for addressing homelessness, whilst also reflecting on the progressive possibilities within coercive care and surveillant practices. John Perry and Duncan Sim chart the rise of new migration as a key issue of housing inequality, investigating the barriers facing migrants and how this is linked to competing discourses of rights in terms of access to housing. A truly excellent study of disability and housing inequality is contributed by Diane Theakstone, covering legislation, policy responses and the independent living movement, complemented by empirical findings from Scotland. In the concluding chapters, Alan Murie and then John Perry offer a thoughtful prognosis of how housing and inequality may evolve and the potential role for housing policy in ameliorating its worst excesses, although they correctly note that housing outcomes are affected primarily by global capitalism. This is why Anderson's recognition of the need for an ‘internationalisation of welfare’ (p. 28) is so urgent.

The editors do not claim comprehensive coverage and there is scope for further theoretical and normative development, for example engaging in more depth with concepts such as the right to the city and the just city (Fainstein, Reference Fainstein2011; Lefebvre, Reference Lefebvre1968; Harvey, Reference Harvey1973), particularly as contemporary reforms to local housing allowances and greater conditionality in housing benefits represent new threats to low income groups’ rights to occupy urban space. There is also a need for greater conceptual rigour in the new normative discourses around ‘fairness’ in housing systems, as several contributors touch upon. In addition, this volume is primarily a study of housing inequality in the UK and its coverage of devolution is to be welcomed. However, a global perspective on housing inequalities is also necessary, given that these issues play out most prominently in the informal settlements of the global south (Davis, Reference Davis2006).

Contributors identify progressive possibilities arising from public attitudes recognising the importance of social housing or the blatant visibility of housing poverty demanding policy attention. However, despite longer-term historical reductions in poverty, it is difficult to argue with the depressing statement that ‘the only certainty is that there will always be a housing and inequality agenda’ (p. 17). This is a very accessible and well-edited volume which should be a key text for students on housing, social policy and urban geography/studies courses, as well as an important reference source for practitioners, policy makers and academics.