Housing has been labeled a ‘wicked’ problem: complex, territorial, open-ended and intractable. Housing Politics in the United Kingdom: Power, Planning and Protest underscores the role of politics in generating this ‘wickedness’, highlighting the ‘actors’ involved in the political process and the entrenched territorial electoral politics involved in the ‘housing question’. It concentrates on preparing, disputing and implementing policy rather than on policy outcomes and the social and economic determinants of continuity and change.

Its subtitle reflects the book's themes. Power is acquired formally through the electoral system but is exercised through a variety of mechanisms, including ‘governmentality’ – the techniques that regulate and order the people's behaviour. Planning draws attention to attempts to modify the role of markets in housing outcomes and includes landuse planning and the influence of alleged ‘rational’ solutions applied to ‘the housing problem’. Protest concerns the ‘outsiders’ in the political system and their attempts to secure a voice and perhaps eventually become the power-holders.

Chapter One sets out the book's principal themes, outlining the major theoretical approaches framing the content of Housing Politics in the United Kingdom: Power, Planning and Protest: the ‘new institutionalism’, social constructionism and public choice theory.

Chapter Two explores political conflicts on the land issue. It charts fluctuations in political focus from ownership to ‘betterment’ taxation and then to development rights, illustrating the interactions between local and national political concerns. Chapter Three reviews the territorial politics of urban renewal, with its strong connections to campaigns for the preservation of rural Britain.

Chapter Four chronicles private landlordism's fall and rise analysing the role of protest movements and internal and external class conflicts in the demise of private landlordism and the political implications of the recent rapid increase in the number of people joining ‘generation rent’.

Chapter Five examines the political salience of the ‘property-owning democracy’ idea and its support from the financial institutions, whereas, in Chapter Six, the fluctuations in the political base of local authority housing, once the major rival to homeownership as a replacement for private landlordism, are charted.

Chapter Seven is concerned with the changing fortunes of ‘housing's third arm’ – ‘voluntary’ housing associations. It highlights the attempts made to shape the sector's hybrid nature for political purposes.