This chapter explores the first of the book's three key case studies of sociosymbolic domicide – the removal of the spare room subsidy, better known as the bedroom tax. However, before examining the impact of the policy itself, the chapter provides an overview of the broader context of social tenancy in the UK. I do so as the shifting ways in which social tenants have been framed and imagined over time is crucial in understanding the conception and impact of the bedroom tax.

Contextualising the bedroom tax: a brief history of social tenancy in the UK

Social housing in Britain was first introduced in the UK in London during the final years of the nineteenth century, and was borne out of the horrendous living conditions of the poor working classes, particularly in the East End of London, where the life expectancy of low-skilled labourers at the time was just 16 (Hanley 2007). The social scientist and philanthropist Charles Booth's seminal Inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People in London, a large-scale study of the lives and labour conditions of the city's working classes conducted between 1886 and 1903, brought to public attention the extreme nature of poverty in the capital. It was during this period that the state began to involve itself more in housing provision, and Britain's first council estate was built by the London County Council in 1893 on Boundary Street, between Shoreditch and Bethnal Green (Hanley 2007). However, it was not until the interwar period – and the 1919 Housing and Town Planning Act – that council house building was taken up at any significant scale. In the aftermath of the First World War, council housing was, for the first time, acknowledged as an integral long-term solution to slum housing (Ravetz 2001). The Act provided local councils with subsidies in order to encourage housebuilding, leading to council housing rising from roughly 1 to 10 per cent of the country's total housing stock during the interwar period (Bentley 2008).

Commitment to and investment in council housebuilding grew further during and in the wake of the Second World War.