Understanding Housing Policy is part of the Policy Press's Understanding Welfare series and provides an informative and readable overview of the issues and policies that have shaped housing policy in Britain up until the present day. The book is accessible at many levels. Although perhaps primarily useful as a student text, it would also be suitable for academic researchers and practitioners. Little previous knowledge of social policy or housing policy is assumed and key concepts and terminology are explained as they are encountered in the main text.

The focus of the book is on housing in contemporary Britain and the historical events and thinking which have shaped current housing policy. Other subjects such as theoretical perspectives, political influences and comparative studies are dealt with more briefly. However, references to key texts are provided at the end of each chapter for those wishing to explore a particular subject in more detail.

In Chapter 1, Lund defines housing policy as ‘concerned with the process involved in state intervention in the housing market’ and describes the main approaches to understanding housing policy in terms of how they define housing problems and link them to policy solutions. Having laid out the theoretical background in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 gives an account of housing policy in Britain from the initial identification of the negative externalities in moral and physical health that turned poor quality housing into a social problem in the late eighteenth century to the marketisation of housing supply in the 1980s and 1990s under the Conservative Government. The governance of housing between 1997 and 2005 under New Labour is covered in Chapter 3. The next chapter introduces comparative housing policy by using five case studies chosen to illustrate housing policy in various welfare state settings characterised by Esping-Andersen's typologies. There is a brief discussion on the impact of globalisation on the convergence of housing policy.

The remainder of the text, Chapters 5 to 10, discusses many of the major issues affecting housing policy in Britain throughout the twentieth century and beyond, namely: affordability, homelessness, decent homes, overcrowding, low demand and the relationship between housing and social justice. Each of these topics is dealt with sensitively and critically, drawing particular attention to the definitional problems surrounding them and the linkages between them.

Chapter 5 on affordability describes the failure of the supply of affordable housing to keep pace with the increasing desirability of homeownership and the limited success of producer and consumer subsidies in closing the supply gap. The discussion on homelessness in Chapter 6 traces the evolution of concepts of homelessness from a social problem to a structural problem to a process influenced by personal and structural factors. Attention is drawn to the problems faced in defining homelessness in order to identify those in priority need of housing assistance without generating ‘perverse incentives’. Lund clearly argues for recognition of the multiple interacting factors that can result in homelessness and how these must be considered together when developing policy.

Issues of overcrowding and poor quality housing are discussed in Chapters 7 and 8 from a historical perspective through to the most recent policy changes. Lund explains how definitional problems and the huge cost of upgrading housing stock to a ‘decent’ standard coupled with the need to have a cheap and flexible supply of accommodation has lead to these issues being inadequately addressed. The author discusses the attempts of New Labour to raise much of the funding required to maintain local authority dwellings at an acceptable standard via transfer of housing stock to registered social landlords, and how this policy has been criticised for the associated reduction in local-authority-controlled housing stock.

Chapter 9 is of particular interest to anyone working in regeneration or neighbourhood renewal. Lund discusses the emergence of areas of low demand or ‘problem estates’ and how policy solutions have shifted from a focus on only improving the area to examining the broader economic and social context that has caused neighbourhood decline. Recent initiatives such as the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund and the New Deal for Communities have attempted to tackle the multiple problems of deprived neighbourhoods by co-ordinating the work of main-stream agencies and local community partnerships. As neighbourhood change is a long-term process the success of such initiatives is currently uncertain, there is also a lack of definitive evidence on whether the trend towards achieving mixed communities is workable or effective. The final chapter on housing and social justice makes important mention of how housing outcomes can contribute to inequality and social exclusion in the areas of race, gender and disability.

Conclusions on the future direction of housing policy draw together the main themes from the book. Housing policy is examined using a social constructionist framework and Lund uses this perspective to explain New Labour's construction of housing problems within ‘Third Way’ thinking. For example, he suggests that New Labour's emphasis on building strong communities as well as promoting choice has generated conflicting messages in the struggle to tackle neighbourhood deprivation, as those in deprived areas are expected to recover ‘lost’ communities without taking advantage of the mobility and choice that results from breaking traditional community ties. Overall, Understanding Housing Policy is an insightful exploration of contemporary housing problems and an excellent introduction to the subject.