Tag Archives: rented housing

Guest post: Stories from lockdown – interviews show how poor housing quality made life even more tough

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Mike_shots/Shutterstock

Philip Brown, University of Huddersfield

Life during COVID-19 has not been a uniform experience. There have been distinct differences in how people have contended with lockdown, depending on whether they have access to safe, secure and decent accommodation.

New research from the University of Huddersfield has looked at how people were coping while living with poor housing conditions in the north of England during the first lockdown, between May and July 2020. We spoke to 50 households: 40 in the private rented sector and 10 owner-occupiers, as well as eight housing workers.

The findings are stark and unsettling. The study found that the state of homes were causing increasing distress and were costing more to run and maintain. People in rental properties, in particular, felt increasingly insecure in their tenancies.

Worsening conditions

The majority of the people we spoke to were living in privately rented accommodation. We found that for these households, existing poor housing conditions worsened during lockdown.

Many households expressed a suspicion that landlords were using lockdown as an excuse to indefinitely postpone or delay repair works (repairs were permitted at the time the study was conducted). Others reported that their landlords had refused to arrange repairs. People told us about leaking roofs and guttering, and about how water coming into their housing had caused internal damage, damp and mould.

Woman looking at mould in corner of room
Damp and mould were recurring problems. Burdun Iliya/Shutterstock

These households faced the choice of waiting and trying to cope, or using their own income and savings to fix their homes. As one resident told us:

In the end I had to pay for someone to come out and get rid of the mice myself because I can’t have mice running about the flipping house… when it was leaking on the roof I had to pay to have tiles put in.

Our findings showed that people were not reporting or following up concerns or making complaints, due to a fear of possible revenge evictions or rent increases which they could not afford. Many respondents told us that they were putting paying for housing costs ahead of food and other outgoings.

Making ends meet

We heard accounts of the challenges of living in cold and damp conditions. This was a recurring factor in the lives of those people on low incomes, as well as for people for whom the pandemic had added a new layer of uncertainty.

A lack of control over rising energy costs in the home was an ongoing source of anxiety. A single parent said:

I don’t put my heating on as much as I should do. I make sure my daughter walks around in slippers, dressing gowns. You come into the home, you take your coat off and you put a dressing gown on, so you walk round in a housecoat, basically.

Often, these accounts did not come from people who had existing experience of the welfare system, but from people who were still working full-time in professional occupations.

Elderly woman wrapped in blanket adjusting thermostat
Energy costs cause anxiety. Paul Vasarhelyi/Shutterstock

Spending weeks at a time in poor-quality accommodation had a crushing impact. One woman reported:

I’ve got really bad damp in my house…it’s always bothered me, but it’s bothered me more and more and more because I work from home, and I’m working in the kitchen, and I’m looking at it every day directly and seeing it there. It’s just getting worse. The landlord keeps saying, “There’s nothing I can do”.

Existing problems

The report makes it clear that the issues households were facing did not begin during lockdown. Rather, households were put into lockdown within homes that were already low quality. The stories within the report are not isolated cases – around 1 million homes across the north fail to meet basic decency standards.

Research has shown that those most at risk of experiencing the worst impacts of the pandemic are those people who are already vulnerable: those receiving benefits, living with long-term health conditions, in precarious employment or living in insecure housing or with poor housing conditions. These issues are particularly acute in the north of England.

Immediate action is needed to ensure people retain as much income as possible, their outgoings are minimised and their housing is secure. The housing crisis in the UK is not just about a lack of new homes, but also about the quality of existing homes that many of us will continue to live in for decades.

Philip Brown, Professor of Housing and Communities, University of Huddersfield

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Further reading: more on housing from The Knowledge Exchange blog:

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“Generation Rent” – are there lessons from Germany?

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Berlin Housing (Photograph: James Carson)

Berlin Housing (Photograph: James Carson)

By James Carson

Could a lower level of home ownership in the UK become the new normal? That’s one of the questions arising from a recent Halifax report  that examined perceptions and changes in the first-time buyer market.  Although there has been an increase in the number of first-time buyers in the past five years, the report identified a growing number of people aged 20-45 who do not believe they will ever own their own home.

The authors concluded that if this trend continues the UK could be moving closer to the German housing model, where renting is the norm.

While about 60% of Britons live in owner-occupied accommodation, barely half of Germans own their own home (the lowest proportion in Europe). A number of factors explain the enduring preference for renting in Germany :

  • A good supply of high quality rental accommodation from housing associations and municipal authorities;
  • Rents are transparent and tightly controlled, and tenants enjoy substantial rights and protection from bad landlords;
  • Lending requirements have been traditionally more stringent than in the UK, and there is less of a borrowing culture in Germany;
  • German house prices have shown lower levels of growth and volatility.

In recent years, there have been some signs of a shift towards home ownership in the German market, particularly in Berlin. But, having looked on with disquiet at the fallout from property crashes in the rest of Europe, many Germans remain suspicious of booming housing markets. In Germany, renting is still seen as a perfectly respectable alternative to home ownership.

Could that happen here? Prohibitive deposits, high property prices and low incomes are preventing many people getting a foot on the property ladder. Faced with a shrinking social housing market, they are increasingly turning to the private rented sector (PRS), which now forms the second largest form of tenure in England (18% of the total households).

The Halifax report suggests that the German model is not unattractive, but also warned that a shift away from home ownership means problems in the UK’s PRS need to be addressed.

These issues were detailed in another recent report, from the Just Fair Consortium. Among its findings:

  •  33% of PRS dwellings do not meet basic standards of health, safety and habitability;
  • Tenants are afraid to complain about the poor quality of properties for fear of retaliatory evictions or arbitrary rent rises;
  • The cost of PRS housing is almost double that of social housing, and private tenants are increasingly unable to meet the costs.

The report’s authors noted that, while the rise of the PRS has been characterised by the government as a positive development, this has not been the experience for everyone:

“The UK government has increasingly presented the PRS’s expansion as based on lifestyle choice, and as a form of tenure suited to greater labour market mobility and flexibility. While this may be the case for some economically empowered renters, the overall context of private rentals suggests that the sector provides housing for a number of households, particularly families, for whom a private rental home is a source of anxiety over tenure security, cost, habitability, and quality, rather than a sought-after choice.”

The problems associated with the PRS in the UK may be contributing to a reluctance to rent. But if there were improvements to security of tenure, quality and affordability, the PRS might appear a more attractive option. Danny Dorling, professor of human geography at Oxford University, recently contrasted the UK’s rented sector with the situation in Germany:

“In Germany tenants cannot be evicted on a whim. Often landlords have to bribe them out if they want control of the property back before the agreed date. Property is of good quality, well soundproofed, spacious and well insulated. Pension companies often hold it, so you know where your rent is going: it is paying for your parents’ generation’s old age.”

If Generation Rent is here to stay, this has implications for the private property market, for the social and private housing sectors, for planning and economic development, to say nothing of the social impact. The UK is unlikely to return to mass private renting any time soon, but if current trends continue, perhaps there are lessons to be learned from the German model.

The Idox Information Service can give you access to a wealth of further information on housing; to find out more on how to become a member, contact us.

Further reading*

Rent increase (Britain’s housing tenure landscape)

The future of London’s private rented sector

Resilient? (social housing in Scotland)

Ownership status, symbolic traits, and housing association attractiveness: evidence from the German residential market

Making a rental property home

*Some resources may only be available to members of the Idox Information Service

To regulate or not to regulate? Housing standards in the private rented sector

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To Let housing signs

Image from Flickr user Locksley McPherson Jnr, licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons License

The Scottish Government published its ‘Consultation on a New Tenancy for the Private Sector’ on the 6 October 2014. The paper states that 333,231 homes are rented privately in Scotland and it puts forward proposals to modernise the sector including giving tenants greater security of tenure, including:

  • Landlords to offer tenancies of not less than 6 months.
  • A bar on repossession except in specific circumstances.
  • The introduction of a model tenancy agreement.

The consultation poses a series of questions relating to rent levels, in particular ‘what action, if any, should the Scottish Government take on rent levels in the private rented sector in Scotland?’ Clearly the focus of the consultation is on the affordable private rented sector, but the implications of legislative change are likely to be far broader and impact across the whole rental sector.

The consultation raises a number of big issues for a range of stakeholders including tenants, landlords, citizens’ advice bureaux, local authorities, and indeed for the broader social rented sector, because any changes may well have knock-on implications far beyond the private sector tenant/landlord relationship.

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