What the English Housing Survey says about private renting
Posted: August 2, 2018 Filed under: Private renting | Tags: English Housing Survey 1 CommentOriginally posted on August 2 on my blog for Inside Housing.
The second in a series of blogs looking at the latest English Housing Survey considers the state of the private rented sector in 2016/17.
Home to a fifth of us
The private rented sector has doubled in size over the last 20 years from 10% of households in 1996/97 (2.1m) to 20% in 2016/17 (4.7m). Most of the growth took place after 2003.
To put that growth into perspective, the private rented sector now accommodates a greater share of households than at any time since 1970. As recently as 1997, following rapid decline in the 1970s and 1980s, it was half the size of the social rented sector.
The state of owner-occupation
Posted: September 5, 2017 Filed under: Home ownership, Mortgages | Tags: English Housing Survey Leave a commentOriginally published as a column for Inside Housing on September 5.
The decline of owner-occupation in England resumed in 2015/16 after a brief uptick in the previous year.
The English Housing Survey shows that owner-occupation as a whole fell below 63% to return it to levels last seen in 1985, when the Right to Buy and Margaret Thatcher’s drive for a property-owning democracy were in full flow. The ownership rate is now down eight percentage points on its peak in 2003.
However, even that conceals the full scale of the decline. Owner-occupation is made up of two very different groups – people who own their home outright and those who are buying with a mortgage – and the split between them has changed radically over time.
Here are some key points that I picked out from the English Housing Survey for 2015/16:
1) Owning’s rise…
Outright ownership is still rising as people who first took out a mortgage 25 years or more ago pay it off. From 25% of households (4.5 million) in Mrs Thatcher’s heyday, it has grown to overtake mortgaged ownership two years ago and reach 34% (7.7 million) in 2015/16.
The state of private renting
Posted: August 2, 2017 Filed under: Private renting | Tags: English Housing Survey Leave a commentOriginally published as a column for Inside Housing on August 2.
As home ownership and social renting continue to decline, the astonishing rise and rise of the private rented sector continues.
But who is the sector housing and what are the consequences for tenants? Here are a dozen key points that I picked out from the English Housing Survey for 2015/16.
1) Overall growth
One in five of us – 4.5 million households – now rent from a private landlord. That is 2.5 million more than in 2000.
2) Age
Growth continues to be fastest among young people as high house prices stop them buying and social housing is in short supply.
The proportion of 25 to 34 year olds renting from a private landlord has increased from 24% to 46% in the last ten years. As recently as 1991, just 12.9% of 25-34 year olds were private tenants.
That figure is for households, so it could well mask an even stronger growth in the number of individual young people renting as more of them share.
The average private renter household reference person (HRP – the oldest or highest-earning person in the households) is 40, making them much younger than social renters (52) and owner-occupiers (57).
However, since the financial crisis private renting has grown among all age groups, with sharp increases also seen among the 35-44s, 45-54s and 55-64s.
Five things we learned from the English Housing Survey
Posted: March 2, 2017 Filed under: Home ownership, Private renting, Social housing | Tags: English Housing Survey Leave a commentOriginally published on March 2 on my blog for Inside Housing.
So what have we learned from the new English Housing Survey? The largest annual survey of households and housing conditions is just out for 2015/16 and here’s what caught my eye.
1) ‘The fall in owner-occupation has abated’
The official story is one of relatively little change this year: the number of owner-occupiers seems to have stabilised at 14.3m and there were still 3.9m social renters. The survey says that ‘the rate of owner occupation has not changed since 2013-14, indicating that the fall in owner occupation has abated’. Here’s the graph summing up the trend:
However, that’s not the full story. First, a note of caution: the 2013/14 survey had sampling issues that probably exaggerated the fall in home ownership and rise in private renting in that year. As a result last year’s survey showed a surprise fall in private renting and slight rise in owner-occupation that was hailed as a turning point by the government. Private renting resumed its rise in 2015/16, with the number of private renters up 250,000 at 4.5m.
2) But mortgaged ownership falls below 30%
The picture changes again if you look at the proportion of households in each tenure rather than the number. The survey shows that the owner-occupation rate fell to 62.9%, the lowest it’s been since 1985, while private renting rose from 19.0% to 19.9% and social renting fell slightly to 17.2%. Decline abated? Not so much.
Home ownership: Decline and rise?
Posted: February 18, 2016 Filed under: Home ownership, Private renting, Social housing, Tenure change | Tags: Brandon Lewis, English Housing Survey Leave a commentOriginally posted on February 18 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
At first sight, headline results from the English Housing Survey published on Thursday are very good news for Brandon Lewis.
As the housing minister was quick to point out, the survey shows 2014/15 was the first year since 2003 when the home ownership rate in England did not fall. And, as this graph also shows, private renting fell for the first time since 1999:
He might also have pointed to this graph showing a surprise turnaround in the tenure prospects of Generation Rent:
The fall in ownership over the last 10 years has been most marked among young people, so this increase in ownership among the 25-34s in 2014/15 and decline in private renting is a marked reversal of that trend.
On the face of it then it’s good news for ministers in their quest to revive the property-owning democracy and bad news for doom-mongers (like me). Perhaps all those dire predictions that we are on course to become a nation of private renters are wrong? Maybe Help to Buy really is working? Did Labour commission the Redfern Review into the decline of home ownership to look at a problem that no longer exists?
State of the nation
Posted: July 16, 2015 Filed under: Home ownership, Private renting, Social housing | Tags: English Housing Survey Leave a commentOriginally published on July 16 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Results from the latest English Housing Survey reveal some fascinating details about where and how we live and how much we pay for it.
Headline findings from the survey for 2013/14 were published in February. As I blogged at the time, they revealed the full scale of the shift in tenure: this was not just about private renting overtaking social renting but outright ownership overtaking buying with a mortgage.
The results published on Thursday provide much more detail on that and much more besides. Here are some details that caught my eye:
100 years of changing tenure
Most of the 20th century was all about the decline of private renting from a tenure that housed three-quarters of us in 1918 to less than 10% of us by the 1980s. Until then, social renting was expanding almost as quickly as home ownership but it retreated again in the wake of the right to buy. But the 21st century has seen a big decline in home ownership too and the rebirth of private renting:
The tenure trap
Posted: February 25, 2015 Filed under: Housing market, Mortgages, Private renting, Social housing | Tags: English Housing Survey, Generation Rent Leave a commentNew official figures show stunning changes in housing in England. Here are a dozen examples of what’s happening. We already knew that the number of people who own their own home has shrunk rapidly, that the number of private renters has soared and created Generation Rent and that private renting has overtaken social renting. However, the first results from the English Housing Survey 2013/14 show that these trends are not just continuing: they are accelerating. Everywhere you look in the report and the accompanying tables there are stunning new comparisons to be made:
- More people now own their home outright than are buying one with a mortgage. The split between them is not available going back very far but I reckon this must be for the first time since the 1930s, when the inter-war mortgage boom was in full flight. Here are the main tenure trends since 1980:
Jules Birch 