Sprigings’ theme is the discord between the ‘two contracts’: the landlord/tenant contract with its long institutionalised history and the ‘social contract’ between citizen and state ‘that guarantees and extends social citizenship’ (p2). The book is mainly historical and there is little on contemporary social housing management such as current allocation procedures, choice based lettings, Housing Plus etc. Its focus is on local government with the role of housing associations, now managing the majority of the social housing stock, underplayed.

The landlord/tenant contract – with the landlord having the whip hand – is traced to the Romans in an interesting chapter that reveals striking similarities between the rented sector in Rome and in England. Long before such practices were exposed in London by George Bernard Shaw in his play Widower's Houses (1892), the Romans were in the business of buying dilapidated property and ‘farming’ overcrowded poor tenants before making huge gains from land prices when an area was redeveloped.

Starting with almshouses, the emergence and development of social housing in the UK and its implications for citizenship are explored. Although Sprigings identifies non-market allocation by the social housing sector as a social citizenship hallmark, he claims ‘. . . all the time the management of social housing was constrained by an unreformed and institutionalised tenancy contract that is designed to protect property ownership, wealth and privilege’ (p.2). The social housing management accounts, in chapters four to seven, are replete with vignettes on how housing management has harassed social tenants such as a 1921 London County Council tenancy agreement ‘“forbidding keeping pigs or fowl or rabbits” (cheap food)’ (p 89). Cheap food, maybe, but as a former local authority tenant, I would not have welcomed pigs next door.

Whether such alleged disrespect has been the consequence only of protecting ‘property ownership, wealth and privilege’ is another matter. The form of ‘social’ housing was set in a capitalist structured context; even ‘general needs’ local authority housing – devoid of the ‘embellishment’ characterising the houses built for homeowners – had a uniform character. The houses built for slum dwellers, court flats in the 1930s and high rise from the late 1950s to the early 1970s ‘seemed to emphasise that they were rough places for rough people’ (Branson and Heinemann, 1971, p 211). However, it can be argued that social housing management became divorced from mainstream capitalist relationships via the Idealist philosophy that permeated ‘social administration’. Jose Harris claims that the social philosophy of Richard Titmuss – doyen of the ‘social’ – ‘was full of muffled resonances of the Idealist discourse’ (Harris, Reference Harris and Gladstone1999, p 60).

When a section of the housing domain becomes institutionally decommodified it can become subject to different norms. Octavia Hill – steeped in the Idealist philosophy – despised private landlords as interested only in profits, not their tenants’ moral fibre. She wanted housing managers to be ‘fit and proper persons’ to induce character improvement in their tenants. In one of his occasional flashes of praise for social housing management, Sprigings recognises positive features in Hill's management style stating ‘it may well be that she had a better understanding of the needs and desire of her tenants than modern commentators and critics’ (p74). Although Hill's methods competed with the pure administration ethos of local authority housing ‘superintendants’, they helped to set the tone for post-war housing management. ‘Over-parenting’ the passive tenant became part of social housing's problem.

Despite the empathy with Hill's approach, this book's ethos is that social housing management embodies social control set in capitalist relationships. Special censure is levelled at Anti Social Behaviour Orders. In the glossary, yes, the glossary, antisocial behaviour is defined as ‘Used to be known as neighbour nuisance until right-leaning politicians subjected the problem to a form of conceptual inflation that led to ASBOs. . .; part of a move to stigmatise public housing’ (p vii). In fact, as Sprigings recognises, most tenants were untroubled by management control, paying their rents, being good neighbours and getting on with their lives. Nonetheless, 31% of social tenants regard anti-social behaviour as the principal drawback to living in social housing (British Social Attitudes, 2012) with a tiny minority of people responsible for the problem. In defending ASBOs, Blair (Reference Blair2006) stated:

. . .spitting at an old lady on her way to the shops is and has always been a crime. . . . Petty vandalism, the same. Having money on you that is from drug dealing, likewise. . . In theory, in each case the police charge, the prosecutor prosecutes and the court decides. In theory there is no need therefore to change these criminal law processes. Except that, in practice, it's not what happens. In practice, the person who spits at the old lady is not prosecuted because to do so takes many police hours, much resource and if all of that is overcome, the outcome is a fine. The result is the police do not think it worth it; and so it doesn't happen.

The reference terms for the Grenfell fire inquiry were criticised for excluding an examination of the wider implications of social housing policy (Guardian 2017). In responding to this criticism, Theresa May said ‘I am determined that the broader questions raised by this fire – including around social housing – are not left unanswered.’ (London Evening Standard, 2017). Despite its reductionism, Housing and Housing Management: Balancing the two key contracts, by placing current attitudes to social housing tenants in their historical context, supplies helpful signposts to the deep roots of these unanswered questions.