The local spaces of welfare provision: responding to homelessness in rural England

In this paper we contribute to recent discussions of the spatial restructuring of welfare provision in the UK. We focus on a particular sector of welfare — the provision of welfare support for homeless people — and consider the complex spatialities that are bound up with agency responses to homelessness. The paper is divided into two main parts. In the first, we position central homelessness policy within a broader context of welfare restructuring in the UK and consider important connections between central and local processes of welfare and homelessness provision. In the second part of the paper, we focus on the local spaces of welfare provision and explore sets of central–local policy entanglements bound up with the provision of homelessness support in two rural counties in England. In doing this, we highlight how the imposition of central homelessness policy is complicated by historical and contemporary local structures of welfare support, the nature of local homelessness, and the practices of individual local authorities. We also show how the provision of homelessness support is further complicated by the activities of new local networks of welfare provision.