Tag Archives: family

Children, Young People and the Built Environment: A Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Select Committee Inquiry

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With a group of activists, professionals and academics, led by Tim Gill, Playing Out and allies, I was involved in a call for a Parliamentary Inquiry into Children and the Built Environment in spring last year. In late November, the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (LUHC) Committee launched an inquiry, framing their focus as follows:

It’s important for children and young people’s mental and physical health that they have access to spaces to play and to socialise. In our inquiry, we want to find out more about how children and young people experience outdoor spaces in towns, cities and rural areas across England. What policy interventions from local and central government could help to deliver streets, estates, villages, neighbourhoods and parks that enable kids to enjoy active outdoor lifestyles and engage with others?

Over 100 people and/or organisations submitted evidence to the inquiry, and oral sessions begin next week in the House of Commons.

I joined dozens of other experts and allies, from spheres as diverse as play, children’s rights, planning, green space, architecture and housing, in a joint statement of evidence, which concluded:

Children’s needs in the built environment have been ignored by Government policy for too long, resulting in enormous damage to their health, happiness and wellbeing – and incalculable cost to society. This now needs to change. The positive impact of prioritising children’s needs in this area could be enormous. Many organisations and experts would gladly contribute to developing a new Government policy approach to children and the built environment, ensuring children can safely access the space outside their homes and across their wider neighbourhoods, giving them the free play, social contact, freedom, healthy development and physical activity they need and benefitting society as a whole.

I also submitted an individual statement of evidence, focused on the connections between play, children’s everyday geographies, and questions of community, aiming to highlight how important children’s play on streets and in neighbourhoods is not only for children’s developing sense of belonging, place attachment and everyday mobility, but also for their wider communities. I draw on my own research, but also on strong evidence from decades of playwork, geography and related research and practice, and, of course, on the experience and expertise of Playing Out (who also submitted their own evidence).

I will be giving evidence next week at the House of Commons, alongside both experts in children’s mental and physical health and activists and campaigners. These sessions will be broadcast live on ParliamentLive.TV.

All of the submitted evidence will be published as the oral sessions get started, and I’ll update this post to include a link.

Children, families, the environment and play on streets

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This brief talk [presented at the British Sociological Association’s Family, Relationships and the Environment symposium] reflects on ongoing research and activism around play streets, and play on streets, over the last 7 or 8 years. Some of this is speculative, some autoethnographic, and some derived from research on and with play streets. I’ll talk both about formal ‘play streets’ schemes (where roads are legally closed for a few hours to create space for play) and more informal, autonomous play on streets.

For most of my time researching these issues, my focus has been much more on social space and on questions of social and spatial justice, albeit with a clear commitment to thinking about the materialities of the street, but I am now working to develop a greater focus explicitly on ‘environments’, at a variety of scales and especially on questions of environmental justice and the ways in which play on streets intersects with, enables and challenges questions of environmental justice, at a variety of scales.

In the few minutes I have, I’d like to talk through five intersecting perspectives on play on streets and ‘the environment’ as a means to start to explore these issues; these perspectives connect with ongoing conversations and conceptualisations about grey spaces, common worlds, damage, repair and care, and justice.

  • Streets might be seen as archetypal grey spaces – not just made of tarmac and concrete, brick and paving (though perhaps interspersed with green space, both public and private) but also interstitial, ambiguous and undervalued; the quality of these environmental contexts varies enormously in terms of care, damage, and pollution, including the dominance of motor vehicles and their associated risks of slow and fast violence, and scales of investment and disinvestment in public and private spaces on the street. But we know that these are the spaces that children choose to play in – and have done for decades – if they are able to, over and above more distant green, blue – or plastic – spaces of play; and yet playing children themselves are often seen as pollutants, out of place in the street environment.
  • In these spaces, children develop forms of play which are entangled with the more-than-human worlds of the street, from granular engagements with the road surface, front gardens, bugs and plants, to moving at different speeds and scales – climbing, running, crawling, scooting – along, around and across the street and its trees, walls, paths, kerbs, its social and environmental affordances for play, experiencing the street in all seasons and all weathers, mapping the spaces, shapes, entanglements, and materialities of the street, and sharing experiences of play with other children of all ages, and with adults who shape and survey children’s play and perhaps remember their own play on their own doorsteps.* Children play on their doorsteps, with more-than-human ‘things’ with complex environmental histories – toys, bikes, balls, and much more. They experience the street with cars displaced (though often as obstacles) and active forms of movement – running, walking, cycling, scooting, skateboarding – valued.
  • We see that these kinds of entanglements and experiences – shared on the street and in family and community conversations about the street, both as the children play and back inside in the homes on the street – can open up ways of thinking about and valuing the street for more-than-cars, reimagining the street itself as a space for dwelling, and starting to act to reclaim, repair and care for the street through small acts of greening or litter picking, which then sometimes grow into conversations about more substantial transformations – claiming more space with planters and parklets, slowing and stopping cars with Children Playing signs, or conversations with councillors and campaigners, and imagining the street anew.
  • In some places and at some times, these microlocal conversations and actions grow further, and connect with other spaces – to think about creating active, liveable and healthy neighbourhoods where children and their families are safe from environmental and social risks, to challenge the place of cars, car culture and motornormativity, and to think about the environmental and climate questions invoked by challenging cars – emissions, air quality, net zero, for example. And in the space of the street and the community, these can connect to questions of intergenerational responsibility and action, to children’s rights not only to safe spaces for play, but also to safe futures.
  • But, as the variety of neighbourhood contexts suggests, these experiences are uneven, and may reinforce inequalities; the capacity to claim space on the street – for children and their adults – is classed, gendered and racialized, in terms both of the nature of the spaces on doorsteps, where risks, obstacles and resources are uneven, and also the very idea that children and their families can claim public space, are entitled to do so. And there are real concerns – although not always reflected in realities – that as some streets (re)claim space for play, for children and adults, the risks of vehicles and pollutants are displaced to neighbouring streets, to others, and to their entangled environments. Yet these challenges and inequalities can themselves mobilize communities for action, to engage with each other and with others locally to connect the different contexts and build bigger campaigns.

Through all these spheres, we can highlight both the complexity and the potential of engagements between children, families and their environments, doorstep and more distant, as they play on their streets.

* The focus in this paper, given the symposium context, was primarily on family relationships but many of these engagements and experiences develop with neighbours, as relationships on the street are transformed by play.

Playing Out, Relationships and Loneliness: Making Connections?

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The recent debates about loneliness and, in particular, the launch of the government’s strategy to tackle loneliness have really animated me in recent weeks and months. More and more reports which explore the experience of loneliness for groups across society, including children and young people, are heartbreaking and angry-making in equal measure. With Sarah Hall, I have argued strongly for a much more political perspective on loneliness, which takes account of austerity and the uneven impacts and burdens of loneliness, but more substantively, I’m also trying to reflect on, understand and explore alternatives to some of the social shifts that have brought us to this place.

Others are better placed and have much more expertise to theorise loneliness. My focus is on thinking about how playing out – an international movement promoting temporary residential road closures to enable children to play and neighbours to meet, involving over 800 streets in nearly 80 UK local authorities – might create the space and atmosphere for connection and present a radical challenge to the erosion of social infrastructures and community spaces, broadly defined.

Academic literatures demonstrate that play itself and spending time outdoors are critical for the formation of a sense of belonging and for relationships to wider communities (Lester and Russell 2010, Gill 2007; Prisk and Cusworth 2018); and streets have long been identified as potential spaces of encounter (Hubbard and Lyon 2018). Recent research by Playing Out (2017) suggested that these benefits are evident on streets that play out. 91% of participants knew more people on their street as a result of playing out, and 84% felt they belonged more in their neighbourhood. In pilot research carried out with streets that play out in North Tyneside, particular forms of sociability that enabled emotional, social, and material flows between neighbours and facilitated a positive reinvigoration of relationships on streets were regularly identified (Stenning 2018).

Although the government’s strategy argues that “loneliness doesn’t discriminate”, there is considerable evidence (DDCMS 2018; What Works 2018) that particular populations are more at risk, such as those with disabilities, special needs, or poor physical or mental health (and their families), new parents, carers, and those who have recently moved home (especially if in the context of bereavement or separation). There is also considerable evidence of loneliness amongst children and young people (Action for Children 2017). These are also groups that have been particularly hard-hit by cuts to benefits and to statutory services, for whom access to spaces to meet and find support are likely to have diminished in the context of austerity (Stenning and Hall 2018). Yet, these are also groups which are likely to be well-represented on streets where neighbours play out.

My research around these themes is focused on two deeply interconnected projects.

The first, developed collaboratively with Playing Out, is centred on the desire to build an evidence base around playing out and loneliness and identify strategies to develop playing out in particular ways that might alleviate loneliness. This is funded by Newcastle University’s Social Justice Fund and will be based on pilot research in Bristol in the first half of 2019.

The second is a broader – as yet unfunded – project which asks how playing out shapes residents’ attachments, material and emotional, to their streets and the people on them and how play has the potential to challenge the erosion of relationships in everyday places. It is rooted in an idea of potential space, developed from the work of Donald Winnicott and defined as “an inviting and safe interpersonal field in which one can be spontaneously playful while at the same time connected to others” (Casement, 1985, 162). This part of the research seeks to think about how playing out might connect not only to the reported rise in loneliness, but also to longer-standing debates about austerity and neoliberalism and their impacts on communities and relationships. Through this, it connects to ideas about the loss of shared spaces of intergenerational encounter and community and of social infrastructures (Klinenberg 2018) and about a continuing decline in the quality of relationships in our everyday lives (Rustin 2013), including with our neighbours (The Young Foundation 2010).

Play on streets is about making connections, in all sorts of material and emotional ways, but it also offers me an opportunity to think about and make connections between lots of different literatures and ideas that excite me.

Feeling the squeeze: Towards a psychosocial geography of austerity in low-to-middle income families

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The first actually-published paper from the research in Cullercoats that initiated this blog is now available online in Geoforum. Some of the ideas were developed in my short Discover Society article, and more are forthcoming when this presentation gets properly written up, hopefully within the next few months.

If you can’t access it through the paywall, drop me an email and I can send a copy.

Potential Space? Play, Parents and Streets

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At this week’s Child in the City international seminar, I was paying particular attention to thinking about the links between play, space and community in the city, in the context of my developing research on street play and everyday relationships (see also an earlier blog post here). At various points, ideas that connected to the street as a place for play and for relationships emerged and I want to try to pull some of those together here.

Firstly, for children, as Adrian Voce made clear in his introduction, building on the work of Stuart Lester and Wendy Russell, play is seen to be a critical space through which they get to know, engage with and become attached to the spaces and relationships of their everyday lives, as they play with the environmental affordances (such as playgrounds and open spaces, but also kerbs, car parks, walls, and so on), and move between their homes and those of their friends. In these ways, play can be seen as a key catalyst for the relationships that develop between children and their homes and communities.

Secondly, and relatedly, as Ben Tawil and Mike Barclay of Ludicology argued, children primarily want to play in the public spaces near their homes, the streets, pavements, walls, car parks; this is their clear preference over other, perhaps even better-equipped, spaces, even just a few dozen metres from their front doors. It seems that children’s is to be in and play in their most proximate spaces, where they can see and meet other local children. We might ask if this preference reflects convenience – it’s simply easier to play out close to their homes – or something more profound about familiarity and security, and about making play an embedded part of their everyday lives.

What these two claims also make me question is, what about adults? How might we think about adults, play and streets? So, we might ask if we can think about how adults play on their streets, or at the very least how they engage in playful activities on their streets, such as chatting, socialising, joking, laughing, and drinking. And if so, do they also have a preference, acknowledged or unacknowledged, for proximity? And if they do, is their preference about convenience or about something else, perhaps echoing their children’s – and even their own childhood memories of – hope for engagement, attachment and belonging through play on and around their streets?

A further theme, raised by architect Dinah Bornat, is that children are the generators of community. Children’s everyday play can animate streets as they occupy pavements, gardens and driveways, and move between each other’s homes. Children playing out can draw adults out, as they watch, talk to, and care for their children. Where children play, adults meet and communities are potentially created and strengthened. In this sense, we might think about how children’s play creates spaces and relationships in which adults can also be playful. Sukanya Krishnamurthy talked about how parents in Eindhoven in the Netherlands wanted services for adults around play spaces – such as benches, cafes, shelters – that might enable turning watching children play into a more collective, sociable, even playful experience for adults too.

Finally, as Ellen Weaver, lawyer and legal researcher, suggested, adults seem to have more confidence in their children playing out when they know that their children know, recognise and relate to other adults as their parents’ friends – or play-mates – and therefore might themselves feel confident asking someone else’s parent, or another neighbour, for help if they fall over or lose a ball under a car, for example.

In all these ways, play seems to work as interaction and integration, for children and adults. Moreover, adults’ and children’s playful relationships appear to be symbiotic, reinforcing each other and reinforcing the potential for residents of all ages to build relationships in their streets. Interestingly, however, during the seminar two playing out activists explicitly stated that they were surprised by the animation and transformation of their communities through street play, that they did not plan for or anticipate these changes. By contrast, I both hoped for and expected this – it was, for me, an equal goal to that of creating a playful space for my daughter and her friends on the street, in the hope that a playful atmosphere would transform our relationships with each other as neighbours and with the street, that play would be a catalyst for adults to develop greater familiarity with and stronger attachments to their everyday environments and relationships too, and it is this that lies at the heart of my research and of my part in the launch of Play.Meet.Street North Tyneside (which is explicitly about playing and meeting).

In thinking about all of these questions, I’m working with the ideas of Donald Winnicott, a paediatrician and psychoanalyst who was profoundly engaged in ideas about space, play and everyday relationships. Winnicott believed play to be vital for those of all ages, seeing adult play – in art, creativity, humour, conversation – as equally important as children’s play in creating a liveable life. He also saw an innate connection between play and relationships, through the idea of potential space, which he saw as a space between people – children and adults – that is playful, safe, trustful, and creative, and, critically, founded on an idea of a relationship to real and imagined others, who can witness, join in, celebrate, remember and enjoy the play and creativity.

Together these debates raise the following questions for my research:

  • What do parents hope for, for themselves, consciously or otherwise, as they plan to create playful spaces on their streets for their children?
  • What, if anything, is important about play? Why are parents choosing to create spaces of play, rather than any other forms of community interaction (such as The Big Lunch, or litter picking, though these are clearly not mutually exclusive)? Does play create a potential space, following Donald Winnicott, for the creation of meaningful everyday relationships?
  • Does street play generate community for children and adults? How is this felt and valued by adults and children?

 

Playing Out and Everyday Relationships: Mapping the Psychosocial Geographies of Street Play in North Tyneside

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This new project, funded by the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, will enable me to assess the feasibility, value and relevance of a developing project of participatory, psychosocial research around the idea of ‘playing out’ (organised sessions of street play for children and families) and everyday relationships (with friends, family, and neighbours), which builds on my recent work on everyday relationships and the psychosocial geographies of austerity and extends existing work on ‘playing out’.

From around 2009, Playing Out CIC has promoted and supported the development of temporary residential street closures for play across the UK, starting in Bristol and expanding to over 400 streets in around 50 different towns and cities. Since 2015, House of Objects, an educational community interest company (CIC), has worked with Play England and Playing Out CIC to support neighbours to close their streets for play on a regular basis in North Tyneside. Ten North Tyneside streets have run one-off or regular ‘playing out’ sessions in the last two years, each attended by 15-25 children of varying ages, and their parents, grandparents and other carers. There have already been some studies of this phenomenon, in geography and beyond, but these have, not surprisingly, focused on play and on changing children’s geographies (e.g. Ferguson and Page 2015; Tranter 2016; Murray and Devecchi 2016). Attention to the wider psychosocial (social and emotional) geographies of street play have received important but incidental attention. It is commonly argued that street play supports increasing social cohesion and stronger communities, and these have become core ideas in the promotion of playing out. This project aims to interrogate this further, paying attention to ideas around security, belonging, trust, identity, attachment, togetherness, and neighbouring through a focus on street play and ‘everyday relationships’ in North Tyneside to ask if and how playing out transforms the psychosocial geographies of the streets involved. This pilot project asks the following key questions:

  • How do participants imagine, understand and experience ideas of community and neighbouring in the context of their street play sessions?
  • What changes have participants witnessed in the geographies of their streets’ everyday relationships?
  • How, if at all, have the effects of street play sessions ‘spilled over’ into the wider everyday life of the streets involved?

This will be a small-scale, qualitative, (auto)ethnographic and participatory project, developed with the existing North Tyneside street play organisers (of which I am one, through PlayMeetStreet North Tyneside), with the following key stages:

  1. Planning and preliminary meetings with key organisers.
  2. Focus group with street organisers to develop the notion of everyday relationships and street play. This will enable me to hone the focus to guide interviews and participant observation.
  3. Visit Playing Out CIC (Bristol) to interview national organisers to set research in wider context.
  4. I will join at least one street play session in each currently active street (likely to be between 5 and 8), observing and participating in the activities of both children and adults. During these sessions, I will also arrange follow-up, in-depth, qualitative interviews with participants (2 or 3 from each street) to develop responses to the key research questions.
  5. Write and present report to local and national playing out activists; present preliminary paper to internal seminar.

Austerity and Everyday Relationships in Low-to- Middle Income Families in the UK

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This is a PDF of my recent presentation at the Nordic Geographers’ Meeting in Stockholm. I’m hoping to get this written up in the next few months, but in the meantime…

NGM Presentation

The paper’s abstract was as follows:

In the context of a research project which explores the experiences of austerity in a small number of ‘squeezed middle’, ‘just about managing’ (low-to-middle income) families in north east England, this paper focuses on the place of everyday relationships within and beyond the family in mediating austerity. It uses a psychosocial framing to foreground the importance, complexity and diversity of relationships in making sense of and negotiating changing socio-economic circumstances, attempting to think about and connect the psychic dynamics of families’ relationships and the social dynamics of austerity and recession, and to develop a psychosocial geography of everyday austerity. After setting out some ideas about the nature and value of relationships, the paper asks how and why relationships with family, friends, neighbours, acquaintances and wider communities have been invoked, used, challenged, remade, and imagined as families have navigated the transformations of austerity. As part of the ‘squeezed middle’, these are not families living in poverty, but they have all experienced real threats and losses in the context of austerity, redundancies, falling incomes, tightened budgets, and growing insecurities, for example. The paper explores the ways in which these shifts are connected, in families’ reflections and narrations, to the place of children and their futures in family dreams, the diverse support and demands of friends in crises, large and small, memories of earlier family lives, and everyday negotiations with partners, husbands and wives, and wider families. It seeks to map these shifting relationships, identifying the varying sites and spaces, within and beyond the family home, in which they are made and remade. In these ways, the paper connects to ongoing debates, political, popular and academic, about relationships, austerity, and neoliberalism more widely, to reflect on their diverse and complex articulations.

Thanks to Sarah Hall, John Horton and Helena Pimlott-Wilson for organising the session.

A bit more information about interviews for possible participants…

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This is just a quick post with a bit more information about what interviews for this project might involve.

If you’ve just arrived here from a link, tweet or FB message, please first have a look here, where you’ll find more information about this research project.

I’m looking for low-to-middle income families or individuals (the ‘squeezed middle’) living in Cullercoats or on the Marden estate. If you fit the bill, then please read on. 

Ideally, I’d meet you twice over a few weeks (maybe with an additional meeting at the start, just to meet each other and talk about the research in a bit more detail). Each interview will take about an hour, but it depends on how much you have to say.

The first interview will focus on your family – who lives with you, how long you’ve lived in Cullercoats, what jobs you have, if you have other family living locally, for example – and on your experiences of recession – on your jobs, on shopping, on your budgets and so on. I won’t ask for details like your salary or what benefits you receive. I won’t ask many questions, but will leave you to talk about the things you want to tell me.

In the first interview, we’ll also talk about your friends and family, to get an idea of who is important to you. To help do this, I’ll ask you to fill in a diagram (a ‘personal community map’) like the ones below:

At the end of the first interview, I’ll ask if you’re interested in filling in a diary for a week, noting down which of your friends, family, neighbours and acquaintances you meet and what you do with them.

If you do agree to do this, then we’ll arrange another interview for when you’ve finished and talk about these relationships in more detail, focusing particularly on if and how they help you cope with the effects of recession on your family. Again, I’ll try not to ask too many questions and let you tell me what you want me to know.

We can meet anywhere that suits you. This may be your home, or someone else’s home, or your workplace, or a public place such as a café or even a park. We can also meet at a time that suits you.

With your permission, I would like to record the interviews but anything we do discuss will be anonymised before I use it in any presentations or publications. I will keep all the information you give me safe.

As a thank you for participating, after our final meeting, I’ll give you £20 worth of high street vouchers.

If you are interested in being interviewed, please contact me by email, phone or text.

Mobile: 07580 386874

Email: alison.stenning@ncl.ac.uk

 

Updates and more information about the project can be found at:

blogs.ncl.ac.uk/alisonstenning

www.facebook.com/researchingcullercoats

Twitter: @alisonstenning

 

Recruiting interviewees

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What is this research about?

Some say that in our global world, local communities are becoming less important. Yet, as many individuals and families are struggling with the effects of recession, it seems that these local, personal relationships, and the support they offer, are becoming important again. This research tries to explore this question in Cullercoats and on the Marden estate.

I’m particularly interested in exploring whether our relationships with family, friends and neighbours help us to deal with economic uncertainty. This might be through the moral support they offer, or because they give us time, or money, or other kinds of help that make it easier for us to get by.

The North East has been hit especially hard by the effects of recession and austerity (such as job loss, pay squeezes, benefits reductions, service cuts). Within the region, the ‘squeezed middle’ (low-to-middle income households, with a total income of roughly £12,000 to £40,000) has been particularly vulnerable.

Cullercoats and the Marden estate are home to a significant number of these households. They have dense and long-standing networks of community relationships and a relatively well-defined identity. All of this means this is a good place to explore the questions I’m interested in.

To explore these questions, it is important to me to first get to know Cullercoats and the Marden estate well. I want to get a sense of the life and history of the communities and to find out what is important to people living there.

The next step will be to carry out interviews with individuals and families in Cullercoats and on the Marden estate. These will involve discussions of the recession and of everyday relationships, with friends and family.

 

Why am I doing this research?

I believe the question of how individuals and families are living with the effects of the recession is an extremely important one and I think that people’s relationships with each other have a real influence on how they deal with economic stress. I have a young daughter, I work part-time and I live on the coast so these issues are personally important to me too.

 

Who is funding it?

Newcastle University, through their Catherine Cookson Foundation. The University has a longstanding relationship with Cullercoats through the Dove Marine Laboratory and is keen to support research that connects to the lives of local communities. Of course, Catherine Cookson herself was very interested in communities like Cullercoats.

 

Who will use the research?

Most importantly, this research will, I hope, be the beginning of a long-term relationship with Cullercoats, one that allows me to research issues that are important to people who live there. So I plan to feed what I find out back to the people I interviewed, including to those working in institutions that support community life. I will also be writing blogs and papers to present at conferences and to publish in academic journals.

 

How will any information you share be used?

In all meetings and interviews, I will discuss and agree how the information will be used. If you would like it to be anonymised before it is used in presentations or publications, we can agree that. All material gathered in interviews and meetings will be stored safely. I will be the only person who has access to it.

 

Are you interested in being interviewed about your experiences of recession and community in Cullercoats?

I’m currently looking for families living on low-to-middle incomes in Cullercoats and on the Marden estate to interview. Interviews will focus on your experiences of the current recession and your relationships within the local community.

Interviews can take place with one or more family members and can be arranged at a time and place that suits you.

If you are interested, please do get in touch and I will send you more information about what is involved.

 

Getting in touch

If you live in Cullercoats or on the Marden estate, think you belong to the ‘squeezed middle’, and are interested in being interviewed, please contact me by email, phone or text.

Mobile: 07580 386874

Email: alison.stenning@ncl.ac.uk

 

Updates and more information about the project can be found at:

blogs.ncl.ac.uk/alisonstenning  

www.facebook.com/researchingcullercoats

Twitter: @alisonstenning

 

A PDF version of this information can be downloaded here.

 

 

 

Geography, relationships and the ‘bedroom tax’

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Although most of those affected by the so-called ‘bedroom tax’ are not what we’d identify as ‘squeezed middle’ households (since, by definition, they’re in receipt of housing benefit), exploring the effects of the government’s clampdown on what it sees as ‘under-occupation’ gives an insight into some of the issues at the heart of this project.

What the ‘bedroom tax’ belies is a determined attempt by the Coalition and its thinkers to ignore the importance of everyday relationships and their geographies, within and beyond the home. The determination to cut the housing benefit bill by ‘taxing’ recipients who have one or two spare rooms threatens the relationships which protect families and individuals, which help them to feel secure and looked after.

How does it do this? In two primary ways, I think.

One, it disregards the complexity of family relationships within the home. For example, the insistence that siblings share rooms (depending on age and gender) fails to acknowledge a raft of circumstances that might make this difficult, including special needs or disabilities, or time and space for study, or even radically different personalities. Forcing siblings to share in some of these circumstances might put so much pressure on relationships in the home that they begin to break. Similar arguments could be made about the expectation that couples must share a bedroom, regardless of circumstance. Or consider the numerous cases where a sister or a nephew or a cousin provides unofficial care for an adult family member with an illness or a disability; under the new regime, those sisters, nephews or cousins don’t count as ‘family’ and so wouldn’t be entitled to a room of their own in the house where they’re providing care. Finally, think of those families whose circumstances have suddenly changed, through separation, estrangement, death, or even just an adult child leaving home. The ‘bedroom tax’ would mean that, unless they choose to pay the penalty, those families will have to move before they’re had time to get used to the changed circumstances or to come to terms with the loss. Polly Toynbee in The Guardian recounts the desperate case of a family who recently lost their seven year old daughter to cancer and who, as a result, are seen to ‘under-occupy’ their home.

Two, it fails to value the place of embedded, long-term, local relationships and their contribution to people’s wellbeing. In another Guardian piece, Amelia Gentleman talks to residents on the Bushbury Hill housing estate in Wolverhampton, but their tales will be replicated nationwide. Dozens of residents are being forced to choose between paying the ‘tax’ or relocating and losing the relationships they’ve built from living on the estate for decades. Those relationships, with friends or neighbours or local shops and services, might be offering all kinds of support: community, conversation and friendship, childcare, loans of money, food, equipment, a watchful eye on each other’s homes, to name a few. In short, these kinds of relationships are invaluable, and especially for more vulnerable and isolated households. Their loss may have a real impact on welfare, in ways that may be impossible to quantify but which are nevertheless costly. The head of Public Health England recently argued that “Being isolated and living alone shortens life and increases disability. It is equivalent to 15 cigarettes a day.”

An additional irony, if you can call it that, is that many who do relocate will end up in homes which, though smaller, are more expensive, such that the housing benefit bill increases rather than decreases.

It’s a terrible policy, one with a potentially enormous human cost. Relationships matter and we need to take care of them.