The Discourse of Housing Debt: The Social Construction of Landlords, Lenders, Borrowers and Tenants

The critical role of discourse and the social construction of the UK housing system have been highlighted in a number of recent studies. This article is concerned with the construction of tenure within housing policy discourse, with a focus on the tenure-specific conceptualisation of housing debt, particularly arrears of rents and mortgages and how landlords and lenders respond to them. By scrutinising politicians' housing debt discourse and comparing it with other, contrasting housing debt discourses we seek to further our understanding of how tenure stigmatisation becomes internalised within the political policy-making process. We apply Schneider and Ingram's theory of the impact of the social construction of a target population on policy design. In doing so we explore how the constructed images of owners and tenants, lenders and landlords influence the policy agenda and the rationalisations that legitimise policy choices, and test the usefulness of Schneider and Ingram's model in drawing these out.