A Comparative Study of Social Housing Privatisation in the UK and China

This thesis aims to compare and explore the convergent and divergent trends of social housing privatisation in the UK and China. Western economies are the mainstream of the discussion of housing theories, and Asian countries are excluded from this discussion. However, neoliberalism and global trends have brought recent changes and have also widely restructured interactions among the state, the market, and local governments, leading to dynamics and variations in the social housing sector and challenging existing comparative housing theories. This thesis fills the gap to provide new evidence to propose a comparative housing framework based on the UK and Chinese cases, by comparing and conceptualising three forms of social housing privatisation. Against this background, the qualitative research method is employed by establishing a method of analysis for systematically examining official documents and building a methodological foundation for qualitative in-depth interviews with stakeholders in the social housing sector. Additionally, the case study design is employed as the foundational comparison of social housing in the two countries and sub-cases (Greater Manchester in the UK and Hangzhou in China) are adopted. The findings show that social housing privatisation in Greater Manchester and Hangzhou has been directed towards the convergent trend in general, but both are failures in the social housing sector. A large-scale authority-owned housing has been privatised. Housing associations in the UK and City Construction Companies are given more freedom to seek a wider type of private finance and profit-making activities. Social housing privatisation shows convergency in contracting out the maintenance and management services of social housing to private property management companies. Despite ideological differences, local authorities tacitly endorse and encourage privatisation, resulting in a vague stance of supporting social housing as being ‘the financial asset’, ultimately leading to the privatisation failure and the ‘demise’ of social housing. This thesis theoretically and empirically contributes to redeveloping existing comparative housing theories and providing new data at the city-region level.