These are turbulent times for disabled people in the UK. Increasing unemployment, welfare retrenchment and the impact of the property crisis have disproportionately affected disabled people, as with many other marginalised groups (Hogarth et al., Reference Hogarth, Owen, Gambin, Hasluck, Lyonette and Casey2009; Wood, Reference Wood2011). As Laura Hemingway's book cogently illustrates, all these factors have a role to play in affecting how far disabled people are able to access appropriate housing and explain why disabled people are over-represented in certain housing sectors (most notably social rented housing). They cannot apply for a mortgage if they do not meet the criteria of credit worthiness, and a lack of appropriate private housing stock means that finding a suitable property to buy in the first place can be problematic; these barriers are in turn reflective of a society in which disabling attitudes have failed to take account of disabled people's (housing) needs. The core strength of Hemingway's analysis lies in its holistic examination of the complex, and interlinked, barriers that disabled people face in negotiating the housing system.

Disabled People and Housing takes a ‘bird's eye view’ of disabled people's relationship to housing. It considers their experience across different tenures and therefore explores the multiple processes that disabled people encounter in their journey through the housing maze (for example, the process of applying for a mortgage, or the criteria local authorities use in allocating housing). Based predominantly on the UK experience, it combines analysis of policy and literature with findings ‘from the author's own research to address key gaps in knowledge’ (p. 7). The book, then, is intended to be a synthesis, with the substantive sections organised around three key sets of barriers: physical and communication barriers, financial issues and attitudinal barriers. It concludes by exploring how these barriers impact on how disabled people construct a sense of ‘home’.

The book vividly highlights the sheer complexity of issues that disabled people encounter in trying to navigate the housing system. Arguably, the most original insights come in the sections which address how disabled people are treated in the context of mortgage lenders and the processes of credit scoring. Here we see how labour market disadvantage and a dependence on benefits create the financial instability which serves to preclude disabled people from accessing a loan. Attitudes expressed by mortgage lenders in the empirical research are revealing in terms of highlighting assumptions about disabled people's abilities or status in terms of being viable ‘borrowers’. Indeed, it is the empirical data which gives the text its richness and it is a shame we do not hear about what the research involved, and its methodology, in more depth. Instead, quotes from individuals are used at points throughout the book in a rather decontextualised form.

The book is explicit in its commitment to applying a ‘social model’ analysis to disabled people's experiences of accessing housing. While Hemingway argues for this on the basis of the model's focus on collective action, there are some loose strands in terms of asserting the explanatory potential of the model. The social model places a focus on structures, which have been shown to act as barriers to disabled people's access to housing, and these are convincingly laid out. What is less clear is where these structures end, and the ‘biological body’ begins. Chapter 3, for example, stresses the need to explore how the ‘perceptions and classifications’ (p. 61) of impairment (for example by mortgage lenders) affect access to housing, as opposed to impairment per se, and argues that, ‘Accordingly, impairment may be incorporated into the social model, via the external relations to a person's impairment rather than restrictions associated with the impairment itself’ (ibid.). This is a valuable argument, but there seems to be a general reluctance to acknowledge the body in its biological and emotional form. This ‘physicality’ is hard to deny in a context where, as Chapter 7 clearly demonstrates, disabled people's living environments, and barriers to access in housing, are intimately connected to how people feel about their home, and their experience of the ‘body-in-space’. Conceptually, there was also a missed opportunity to explore the notion of risk and risk assessment which was acknowledged in the book as being central to disabled people's access to mortgages, and owner occupation. How is it, as authors such as Lupton (Reference Lupton1999) have noted, that certain bodies and subjects come to be identified as inherently more ‘risky’ than others, and with what effect?

There is little doubt that the book will be invaluable to housing policy and practitioners, as well as those studying in this area who wish to gain an overview of the housing barriers that disabled people experience. It is a necessary and insightful addition to both housing and disability studies literature. However, there are at least four books in one here, and, arguably, some depth has been lost in the goal to provide an overview and synthesis. Specifically, more could have been made of the empirical findings which provide the greatest insights into the discrimination that disabled people still routinely experience at the hands of housing and mortgage providers, and the importance that the ‘home’ has in the lives of disabled people. In relation to the latter, the words of interviewees speak for themselves: ‘a property where I can be one hundred per cent independent is just about everything . . . I suppose that's what having the home that I've got now means to me, in that it allows me to be the person that I want to be’ (p. 161).