Previous chapters have highlighted not only the roles played by different tenures, but also some of the mechanisms for bringing forward greater housing choice for lower-income groups. One of the costs of not providing sufficient housing is the number of people who fall out of, or can never gain access to, mainstream housing in the countryside. In this respect, homelessness represents the clearest expression of failure within rural housing systems. Homelessness thus represents a key indicator of social and economic stress, and demands attention to alleviate its condition. Yet rural homelessness has had to struggle to find a way into policy discourses or indeed into being recognised.

At the same time, homelessness is also much more than a housing issue, and reflects wider, deep-seated social problems such as poverty, exclusion, chaotic lifestyles and the way that society responds to vulnerability. Solutions to homelessness require not only access to sufficient housing options in mainstream housing, but also a range of specific housing and support options that facilitate prevention, as well as routes out of homeless experiences. This chapter provides not only a focus on the particular challenges for tackling homelessness in rural contexts, but also a consideration of the way that the very existence of homelessness in rural localities has been downplayed and marginalised.

The contested nature of (rural) homelessness

The scale of the problem is in itself an issue for debate. The way that homelessness is defined obviously has implications for the number of households that are included in measurements. The definition of statutory homelessness is often much more tightly drawn than those definitions used by lobby groups or academics. For example, statutory homelessness is defined as affecting:

This statutory definition can be compared with the one used by Fitzpatrick et al (2009: 6) as: