Contemporary British housing policy and practice is increasingly diverging across the devolved regimes in the UK. This raises questions about differing policy objectives, commitments, resourcing, mechanisms and outcomes. Apart from being a window on wider public policy devolution and politics, it also offers considerable opportunities to undertake comparative housing analysis of policy, process and practice within the UK. The course will draw heavily on comparative housing research, policy transfer and public policy analysis lenses such as scenario/futures planning.

Semester 1, typically, delivered in 3 hourly blocks, once per week, over 5 consecutive weeks...

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Students will complete a written assignment based on learning outcomes (50%) and will complete a group project which will be a practical report based on the external visit/or case study policy. Both should be 2,000 words

British housing policy and practice is increasingly diverging across the devolved regimes in the UK. This raises questions about differing policy objectives, commitments, resourcing, mechanisms and outcomes. Apart from being a window on wider public policy devolution and politics, it also offers considerable opportunities to undertake comparative housing analysis of policy, process and practice within the UK.

In particular it will:

■ Provide a rich sense of the way on which housing policy has diverged since 1999 in each country alongside familiarising ourselves with the different processes, regimes and outcomes in each country's housing system.

■ Critically assess the policy transferability of specific policy innovations in different countries.

■ Investigate a number of case studies of policy innovations outside of Scotland and consider their relevance to the Scottish housing system.

■ Using different analytical and disciplinary perspectives, evaluate the impact of housing policy change since 1999 in each respective country

■ Consider the future paths of housing policy in England and Scotland under different future scenarios wherein each country 'borrows' likely policies from elsewhere in the UK

By the end of this course students will be able to:

■ Critically analyse the main housing policy developments since 1999 occurring within each member nation of the UK, alongside the special case of London.;

■ Critically understand and apply key concepts such as policy divergence, policy transfer and policy mobility to the study of housing contexts.

■ Develop specialist case study knowledge of innovative housing policy and practice happening outside of Scotland.

■ Evaluate housing policy and practice approaches as a whole In different parts of the UK through the application of critical analytical skills across a range of sources and methods.

■ Critically judge the criteria with which to assess the future trajectory of policy in each part of the UK

■ Synthesise a range of academic and non-academic evidence to understand the potential to share and converge housing policy across the UK

■ Students should also as a result of taking this course:
- develop digital and interactive learning skills
- undertake group learning and project activities
- apply their learning outcomes to real world situations associated with the course though external visits

Students must submit at least 75% by weight of the components of the course's summative assessment. Taught courses on the Housing Studies Programme (MSc and PGDip) require attendance.