Governing “The Homeless” in English Homelessness Legislation: Foucauldian Governmentality and the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the growing body of work exploring governmentality theory in housing and homelessness law by engaging, for the first time, a Foucauldian neoliberal, governmentality and risk framework to the recently enacted Homelessness Reduction Act 2017. This article locates the place of governmental activity to be scrutinized as the homeless population and contends that the Homelessness Reduction 2017 (‘HRA 17ʹ) can be interpreted as operating according to three intersecting modes of problematization of the homeless: (1) biopolitical problematization; (2) governmental problematization; and (3) ethical problematization. In so doing, this article reveals that the 2017 Act reflects a shift in neoliberal thinking on homelessness in constructing images of the homeless as a “risk population”, as subjectified, autonomized individuals exhorted to self-work and ethical self-fashioning as responsibilized citizens taking account of their own housing precarity.