We are now closed for the Christmas and New Year period, reopening on Friday 3rd January 2025. Orders placed during this time will be processed upon our return on 3rd January.
Why do most welfare applicants fail to challenge adverse decisions despite a continuing sense of need? This book addresses this severely under-researched and under-theorised question. Using English homelessness law as their case study, the authors explore why homeless applicants did - but more often did not - challenge adverse decisions by seeking internal administrative review. They draw out from their data a list of the barriers to the take up of grievance rights. Further, by combining extensive interview data from aggrieved homeless applicants with ethnographic data about bureaucratic decision-making, they are able to situate these barriers within the dynamics of the citizen-bureaucracy relationship. Additionally, they point to other contexts which inform applicants' decisions about whether to request an internal review. Drawing on a diverse literature - risk, trust, audit, legal consciousness, and complaints - the authors lay the foundations for our understanding of the (non-)emergence of administrative disputes.
