Glen Bramley

• PhD, Urban Studies, Bristol, 1988
• Professor at Heriot-Watt University

The homelessness monitor is a longitudinal study providing an independent analysis of the homelessness impacts of recent economic and policy developments across the UK. Separate reports are produced for England, Scotland and Wales, with the most recent Great Britain synthesis report published in 2022. This year's Scotland Monitor is an account of h...

‘Destitution’ has re-entered the lexicon of UK social policy in the 2010s, highlighted by the rapid growth of food banks and rough sleeping in a context of controversial welfare reforms and austerity policies, yet theoretical literature on this remains limited. Specialist surveys have been developed to measure and profile these phenomena, but these...

Producing statistically robust profiles of small or ‘hard-to-reach’ populations has always been a challenge for researchers. Since surveying the wider population in order to capture a large enough sample of cases is usually too costly or impractical, researchers have been opting for ‘snowballing’ or ‘time-location sampling’. The former does not all...

Background The number of food banks (charitable outlets of emergency food parcels) and the volume of food distributed by them increased multi-fold in the United Kingdom (UK) since 2010. The overwhelming majority of users of food banks are severely food insecure. Since food insecurity implies a nutritionally inadequate diet, and poor dietary intake...

This fascinating book provides a detailed national picture of poverty and social exclusion. Chapters consider a range of dimensions of exclusion and explores relationships between these in the first truly multi-dimensional analysis.

The homelessness monitor is a longitudinal study providing an independent analysis of the homelessness impacts of recent economic and policy developments across the UK. Separate reports are produced for England, Scotland and Wales. This year’s Wales Monitor is an account of how homelessness stands in Wales in 2021, or as close to 2021 as data avai...

This study arose out of a growing public concern about the deteriorating financial positions of many people on low incomes over the last decade. Mainstream media had frequently reported on issues such as homelessness, the use of food banks, and children coming to school hungry, and the term ‘destitution’ had re-entered everyday usage. The rapid gro...

Walkable neighbourhood characteristics, such as connectivity and land use mix, have been found to correlate with people walking more and being active. However, the relationship between the built environment and behaviour is highly complex making it difficult to develop generalisable and predictive models. This paper reports qualitative findings fro...

This ninth annual report provides an account of how homelessness stands in England in 2020 (or as close to 2020 as data availability will allow), and analyses key trends in the period running up to 2020. This year's report focuses in particular on what has changed over the past year, with a particular focus on impacts resulting from the COVID-19 pa...

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There is growing policy interest in the UK in adults who exhibit severe and multiple disadvantage (SMD), combining homelessness, substance misuse and offending. Triangulation of administrative datasets enables estimation of the scale and characteristics of these overlapping groups, and geographical mapping permits quantitative examination of the ar...

Background: Studies of adults show that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are associated with health and social problems and are more common among people living in deprived areas. However, there is limited information about the geographical pattern of contemporary ACEs. Methods: We used data from the police, social services, schools and vital...

The homelessness monitor England 2019 is the eighth instalment of an annual state-of-the-nation report looking at the impact of economic and policy developments on homelessness. Drawing on statistical analysis, insights from a large scale survey with local authorities and in-depth interviews with key informants, this year’s monitor reveals the cha...

The Homelessness Monitor series is a longitudinal study providing an independent analysis of the homelessness impacts of recent economic and policy developments in Scotland and elsewhere in the UK. This update report provides an account of how homelessness stands in Scotland in 2018, or as close to 2018 as data availability allows, and how things h...

‘Neighbourhood cooperation’ can be viewed as a key element for livelihood improvement, particularly within areas of urban poverty in Least Developed Countries (LDCs). Such cooperation might be useful for mobilising resources and sharing risks of investing in infrastructures/services and maintaining common goods. This article explores the structural...

Executive summary Key points It is unacceptable that anyone should face destitution in the UK. Yet this report estimates that 1,550,000 people, including 365,000 children, were destitute in the UK at some point during 2017. This means they could not afford to buy the bare essentials we all need to eat, stay warm and dry, and keep clean. Destituti...

The homelessness monitor is a longitudinal study providing an independent analysis of the homelessness impacts of recent economic and policy developments in England. It considers both the consequences of the post-2007 economic and housing market recession, and the subsequent recovery, and also the impact of policy changes. This seventh annual repo...

There have been growing concerns about various manifestations of extreme hardship in the UK, which are investigated using both PSE and a survey of emergency service users. A consensus-based definition of destitution is developed and applied to show its current extent and incidence in Britain. While no single cause dominates, the importance of arrea...

Poverty as measured by material deprivation through lack of economic resources remains absolutely central to understanding the causation and patterning of most aspects of social exclusion and a wide range of social outcomes. Concerns are expressed about the implications of trends to greater inequality, marketization and loss of social cohesion, as...

While public support for local services as ‘essential’ remains high, there have been divergent trends in usage, with increases in public transport, corner shops and childrens services, but declines in information,leisure and cultural services. Distribution of service usage has become slightly more ‘pro-poor’, yet poorer groups are still more likely...

Housing affordability problems are exacerbating poverty, particularly for working age households increasingly reliant on private renting, and housing needs have increased, reversing long-standing trends. UK housing still partially insulates the poor from bad housing experience but this tendency is weakening. Fuel poverty has significantly worsened...

Exclusion from financial services in the form of bank accounts has fallen and appears less significant than informal borrowing and problem debt, which have increased dramatically and are strongly associated with poverty. The most common arrears problems are with housing, local taxes and utility bills, not consumer credit. About a fifth of household...

Introduction While most of this book is concerned with relative poverty and social disadvantage in the context of a mature post-industrial welfare state, this chapter focuses on the more extreme end of conventional poverty measures, ‘severe poverty’, and then steps beyond that to examine literal ‘destitution’. There has been growing concern that su...

Introduction Good quality, accessible local services can provide significant benefits ‘in kind’ to households across the income spectrum and may help to compensate the poor for some material lacks as well as promoting a spirit and practice of common citizenship. Their presence and quality may provide a vital reassurance to people at particular life...

Introduction In this concluding section we attempt to provide some synthesis from the rich detail and insights developed across the preceding chapters. We do not attempt to simply reproduce the conclusions from each chapter. Rather, we have identified some larger themes which cut across the individual chapters and place the emergent findings from t...

Introduction This chapter discusses the concepts of debt and financial exclusion, and considers the significance of the findings of the PSE-UK survey in the light of policy and social developments in this area in the UK over the past decade. At the time, the Millennium (PSE) Survey in 1999 was one of the first to look the relationships between pove...

Introduction In the post-war British welfare state, housing was seen as one of the key sources of welfare, primarily through the vehicle of public housing but also through regulation of rents and standards and, increasingly, through the provision of Housing Benefits and Allowances. However, more recently, housing has been characterised as ‘the wobb...

Based on the largest UK study of its kind ever commissioned in the UK, this book provides the most detailed national picture of poverty and social exclusion. Chapters consider a wide range of dimensions of disadvantage, covering aspects of household resources, participation and quality of life. On resources, the book charts changing views about the...

The homelessness monitor is a longitudinal study that provides an independent analysis of the impact on homelessness of recent economic and policy developments across the UK. The key areas of interest are the homelessness consequences of the post-2007 economic recession, and the subsequent recovery, as well as welfare reform and cuts. Separate repo...

Is the common pressure group and media refrain that ‘we are all two pay cheques away from homelessness’ justified by the evidence? Drawing on multivariate analysis of two cross-sectional datasets (the ‘Scottish Household Survey’ and the UK-wide ‘Poverty and Social Exclusion’) Survey and one longitudinal data-set (the ‘British Cohort Study 1970’), t...

That contemporary austerity is being realised to a large extent in and through cities is a growing theme in urban scholarship. Similarly, the concern that the economically marginalised are disproportionately impacted as ‘austerity urbanism’ takes hold drives a significant body of research. While it is clear that substantial austerity cuts are being...

There are a number of reasons for looking at the British experience of planning for housing, from a wider international perspective. Firstly, Britain may be characterized as having a relatively ‘mature’, well-established planning system. However, notwithstanding the intellectual influence of British planning on other countries, the British approach...

The economic boom which gripped Ireland from the mid-1990s to late 2000s, known colloquially as the ‘Celtic Tiger’, brought about a radical shift in the socio-economic profile of the nation. Ireland went from being a country distinguished in the 1980s by unemployment and outward migration (Norris and Shiels 2007; Kitchin et al. 2012), to one charac...

Any attempt at appreciating contemporary experience of urban development and housing must certainly encompass the Asian experience, and particularly that of East Asia, where the processes of economic development and urbanization have been most impressive in recent decades. Whilst Japan was the first case to emerge and mainland China is increasingly...

This book re-examines the role of urban policy and planning in relation to the housing market in an era of global uncertainty and change. The relationship between planning and the housing market is a contested problem across research, policy, and practice. Problems with housing supply and affordability in many nations have been linked to planning s...

This chapter examines changing tensions between housing and urban policy in the United States, where restrictive local planning systems emerged as a mechanism for suburban “exclusion” over the early and mid 20th Century, exacerbating socio-spatial divides. Proceeding from this overview, the chapter explains contemporary different housing roles of t...

The question of whether, and how, planning impacts on the housing market, continues to stir public debate in many countries. At heart, these debates reflect underlying views—often ideological or political—about the role of government intervention in the market. Free market advocates and industry representatives often argue to reduce government regu...

Whether the planning system contributes to or can help solve housing affordability problems has been a constant theme throughout this book. On the one hand, there are concerns that regulatory burdens associated with the planning system might constrain land supply and push up house prices. On the other, there is potential to use these very regulatio...

This chapter introduces modern urban planning as a response to the 19th and 20th century housing problems. It outlines contemporary normative urban planning goals (environmental, transportation, social equity, health, and economic) and the significance of housing as an organizing force in urban and regional structure. The chapter also sets a framew...

The concluding chapter draws together the different perspectives and experiences presented in the book to highlight a series of common issues and emerging lessons. The case for governments to take housing problems seriously is restated, while acknowledging the role of distinctive, historically evolved political forces in mediating particular respon...

Housing and the dream of home ownership have been central to the Australian psyche almost since white settlement. Indeed, by the time the ‘First Fleet’ set sail for Australia in 1788, overcrowding and crime in England’s cities had become so rampant that prison inmates were housed in boats on London’s River Thames. So in one sense, Australia, as a c...

With the exception of small city-states such as Hong Kong, planning investment and implementing policies to achieve desired housing outcomes has a significant local/regional dimension, because of the intrinsic features of housing—durability, spatial fixity, slow supply adjustment, externalities and information problems (Maclennan 1991; O’Sullivan 2...

This chapter explains and decodes the key features and operations of the housing system, including the social and economic significance of housing, processes of housing production, tenure, the drivers of housing demand and supply, housing market cycles, sub markets, and measures of market responsiveness and failure. The objective is to provide a wo...

This introductory chapter situates the book in relation to contemporary public debates about housing affordability and urban planning, and the wider comparative housing and urban studies literature. Key concepts, questions, and research sources are summarized and the overall structure and content of each of the following chapters are explained, as...

How many people live in poverty in the UK, and how has this changed over recent decades? Are those in poverty more likely to suffer other forms of disadvantage or social exclusion? Is exclusion multi-dimensional, taking different forms for different groups or places? Based on the largest UK study of its kind ever commissioned, this fascinating book...

This report defines destitution in the UK, looking at how many people are affected, who they are, and the main pathways in and out of destitution. It looks at the impact and experience of those people directly affected.

This study examines the quality of open spaces in the most deprived areas in Edinburgh from the perspective of end-users; and the influence of the physical and spatial qualities on how open spaces in such areas are used. The study was informed by an extensive review of the literature and a critical analysis of the relevant Scottish policies and gui...

The housing system in England has experienced unprecedented stress and instability over the last decade, absorbing the impact of demographic pressure, a credit-fuelled boom, financial crisis, recession and policy change. A failing supply system and unexpected tenure changes now confront austerity and welfare cutback. How have these conditions impac...

Being the primate city of Bangladesh, higher population growth and inward migration from rural areas is making Dhaka to experience an unprecedented level of urbanization. This has brought two-fold implications- pushing it high up the mega-city size ladder while also posing the planners and city managers with more complex spatial and socio-economic...

Being the primate city of Bangladesh, higher population growth and inward migration from rural areas is making Dhaka to experience an unprecedented level of urbanization. This has brought two-fold implications- pushing it high up the mega-city size ladder while also posing the planners and city managers with more complex spatial and socio-economic...

This article starts by reviewing the determinants of demand and looking at recent and current evidence on the extent of excess or unmet demand for housing in general and affordable housing within that, drawing on evidence from a range of recent studies and sources. It considers the future prospects for demand, including particularly demographic cha...

The recent history of planning policy in England leaves the treatment of housing supply in a confused position. Much depends on the analysis of evidence on the current and future need and demand for housing for groups of inter-related localities. Arguably the most appropriate spatial scale of analysis of market adjustment processes is the functiona...

This introduction to the Symposium sets out the context for local government in the UK at the current time. It outlines the scale of the reductions in funding since 2010, showing how uneven these cuts have been across the country and the reasons for this. It also describes the increased exposure to risk of both local government and of the citizens...

The scale of the cuts to local government finance, coupled with increasing demand for services, has led to unprecedented ‘budget gaps’ in council budgets. Arguably, two competing narratives of the trajectory of local government have emerged in which contrasting futures are imagined for the sector – a positive story of adaptation and survival and mo...

reviews existing evidence about destitution in the UK;  analyses expert definitions of destitution;  provides new evidence on the general public's views on destitution;  summarises early results from a statistical analysis of households in severe poverty and potentially at risk of destitution. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) commissioned th...

As we stand at the halfway point of the government's austerity programme, this timely report examines its impact on local government, with evidence from national data and local case studies. • The most deprived areas have borne the brunt of the cuts. On one key measure, the most deprived English authorities have had a level of cut nearly six times...

Open access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2014.1000834 Social mix policies have become controversial. Claims about the harms caused by neighbourhood effects have been challenged while counter-claims have been made about the potential benefits for low-income households from living in poor communities. This paper examines two aspects of this de...

Problems of housing supply and affordability in England have long been recognized by policy-makers. A key barrier to supply is seen to be community activism by so-called not-in-my-back-yard activists (NIMBYs). The localism policy agenda, or devolving decision-making down to the local level, is central to how the UK coalition government seek to over...

There has been growing interest in the impact of land-use regulation and planning on housing development and markets, and a consequent search for quantified measures of their extent and efficacy. Nevertheless, despite the UK having a longestablished and comprehensive planning system, this kind of quantitative analysis of system performance has been...

The continued expansion of Dhaka means that within the next 20 years, it will become one of the most populated megacities in the world. Considering the importance, to its development, of understanding the nature of its pattern of growth and evolution, we examined that growth over a period of 400 years. The dynamics of Dhaka’s urbanisation along wit...

In a rapidly urbanising megacity such as Dhaka, identifying the driving factors that influence urban growth at different spatio-temporal scales is of considerable importance. In this study, based on literature survey and data availability, a selection of drivers is chosen and then tested through logistic regression. Using the CLUEs land use modelli...

There is a longstanding concern about middle-class capture of the benefits of public service provision, although relatively little evidence exists on the exact nature of any advantage or on the processes by which this comes about. Using a framework developed from Gal (J. Gal, 1998. Formulating the Matthew Principle: on the role of the middle-classe...

What are the links between housing and poverty, and how will this change in decades to come? This report examines the relationship between poverty and housing by studying the circumstances of 5,000 people over an 18-year period. It also projects how this relationship will change by 2040. Researchers combined information about the types of tenure in...

Due to a combination of government planning policies and market pressures in England in the period 2000-08, there was an increase in the construction of flats and high-density developments and a decline in the construction of houses. In this paper, an analysis of the effects of these policy constraints is undertaken. Using hedonic pricing models we...

This paper interrogates pathways into multiple exclusion homelessness (MEH) in the UK and, informed by a critical realist theoretical framework, explores the potential causal processes underlying these pathways. Drawing on an innovative multistage quantitative survey, it identifies five experiential clusters within the MEH population, based on the...

This paper reviews the application of economic housing market models to planning in the UK context. It reviews the evolution of planning policy and practice in relation to new housing supply numbers, and shows how, since 2000, a new economic paradigm has contended for attention. The main economic model-based contributions are examined, including bo...

This report reviews and compares emerging approaches to planning for affordable housing in Australia, with a focus on models being applied in urban renewal contexts in Brisbane, Adelaide and Sydney. The report examines the factors that shaped the design and introduction of these models, their effectiveness to date, their integration with other avai...

As Australia's national urban policy framework evolves there is growing concern for the quality and performance of Australian planning systems (Local Government and Planning Ministers' Council 2011, KPMG 2010, Productivity Commission 2011). In the context of serious housing supply and affordability problems, there is particular scrutiny of the rang...

Over the last 25 years, ‘affordability’ has become a more important issue in housing policy, although it is still not fully enshrined in agreed standards, partly due to different views about how it should be measured and at what thresholds. This paper argues that subjective evidence of payment problems and material hardship can be used to validate...

Recent advances and greater availability of geographic information systems (GIS) and remote-sensing (RS) technologies and data have opened wider possibilities for tackling many challenging issues of urban planning and management in developing countries, particularly in detecting, monitoring, analyzing, and modeling land-use and land-cover change (L...

This study addresses issues of social or environmental justice in local urban environmental services, through the particular lens of street cleaning services. While UK policy gives some legitimacy to the idea that services should be enhanced in disadavantaged areas, it is unclear how much service and resource discrimination are necessary or appropr...

This report explores how budget cuts will affect the capacity of local government to meet the needs of more deprived households and communities. There is real concern that more deprived groups will suffer the most. This report provides early, systematic evidence of the scale of the cuts and of how local councils are grappling with these issues. The...