This book is born out of a discussion at the Socio-Legal Studies Association annual conference in 1999 (in Loughborough) between Dave Cowan, Caroline Hunter and Simon Halliday. We all had an interest in homelessness, law, administrative justice and decision-making, and had a background in researching these issues. In particular, Dave had done some early work about informal internal appeal systems which had been developed in the early 1990s in homelessness cases.