Council Housing and the Undeserving Poor

Kevin Ralston, University of Edinburgh

‘here we are paying them to have kids it beggars belief, people like this should be forced to live in poor houses like they did 100 years ago, I bet she would soon look for work then’
Scott, Norwich, online response to newspaper article

‘£1200 a month plus a free house…The benefits entitlement crowd is a waste of space the lure of an easy life on the state gives little encouragement to work’
db2712, London, online response to newspaper article

Last month (at the time of writing, August 2015) the Chancellor, Gideon ‘George’ Osborne commended an emergency budget to the House of Commons. Included in the Chancellors fiscal revision was the removal of housing benefit for young people aged between 18 and 21 who are out of work. Young parents with children are exempted, as are the vulnerable and those who had been working for a 6 month period prior to claiming (Summer Budget, 2015). To currently qualify for housing benefit an individual must be on a low income or claiming other benefits and have low savings.

The justifications that are made for the policy of general reductions in benefits pursued by this Government fall into two categories. 1. Deficit reduction and 2. Rebalancing to make benefits fairer by cutting excess monies being given to those who do not deserve it.

The idea that people are given houses and benefits they do not deserve is widely conveyed. In 2014 the Daily Mail published a story headlined: Jobless mum advises her daughter, 19, to get pregnant – for an easy life on benefits . This included the statement that the daughter ‘became pregnant six months ago, and is now in line for an extra £400 a month courtesy of taxpayers when her baby is born, as well as a two-bedroom council house’.

This style of popular reporting is ubiquitous and encourages readers to draw negative moral conclusions regarding both the behaviour of the individuals highlighted and people who occupy council house tenure in general. The notion of the undeserving poor has coloured the political narrative around how the less well off should be engaged with for hundreds of years (Katz, 2013, Robbins, 2002). This is not only a condemnation of the individuals concerned but of the system, which is portrayed as allowing, and more, positively encouraging people to abuse it. The quotes given above, at the introduction to this piece, suggest, that articles like this, from the Daily Mail, help generate, reflect and sustain a belief in the way in which council houses may be accessed, and in how a culture of state dependence may perpetuate. This kind of narrative propagates the idea that young people have children in order to gain access to council housing and also the perception that this happens, in large numbers, and as a matter of course. This is just one of the mechanisms through which socialised housing and supports have been under sustained attack in the UK since the 1980s (Malpass and Mullins, 2010).

There are several assumptions underlying the negative reports and views expressed around council house allocation and residence. There is the concept of benefits culture, that several generations have formed a dependence on state benefits (Macdonald et al., 2013). There is the assumption that the general circumstances and actions are undertaken by relatively large numbers of people ‘the benefits entitlement crowd’. There is the understanding that access to benefits and social housing is too easy to achieve and simply triggered by shifts in circumstance, like becoming a parent. This is also associated with the implication that young people who live in council house tenure with their parents will simply have a child and move into their own council house. Finally, it is assumed or implied that the motivations that people have for doing this are morally questionable, being borne of laziness or a wish to live at the cost of others.

Is there really a ‘benefits entitlement crowd’ accessing council housing in the way portrayed by the mainstream media? Recently I have been doing a bit of work using the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) to quantify the numbers who actually move to council house tenure from different tenures and after having children.The BHPS is a longitudinal dataset which follows individuals over time. Members of the panel are interviewed at each wave, so that changes over time can be measured. The BHPS began in 1991 and ran until 2008, for 18 waves. The aim of the work is simply to assess the numbers of people to whom the Daily Mail characterisation may actually apply.

The sample I looked at included all young people documented as original sample members aged between 16 and 19 and who are recorded as children (own child, step-child or foster-child) to a household reference person (HRP – head of household) when first observed and who had not previously had children themselves. Anyone who becomes a panel member when they become 16 and is also a child of an original panel member is also included. The sample consists of 2271 cases. 941 of these are observed as switching from a child in the parental home to their own home.

Table.1, Tenure at move by whether it is preceded by a birth

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                                        % No-birth    % Birth    n
Owned/mortgage         93.07              6.93          332
Council Housing           74.29              25.71        105
Housing Association    78.18              21.82        55
Private Renting             97.17              2.83          389
Other Renting               94.87              5.13          39
n=    920
Chi sq=0.00, Cramers V= 0.29
Source, BHPS waves 2-18

Of the 941 moves from the parental home to an independent household observed, 920 are to a known tenure. Of these only 75 (8%) are preceded by a birth of a child. 26% of the moves following a birth occurred to those who moved to a council house tenure, with the majority occurring to those who moved to other tenure statuses (see table 1). This is disproportionate as less than 12% of overall moves are to council house tenures and the chi-square and association suggests a relationship between a prior birth and the move to various tenures. Despite the descriptive relationship whereby a birth precedes a move to a local authority rented house, this represents only a very small proportion of the total sample. Those who move to council house tenures following the birth of a child account for less than 3% of all the moves from the parental home observed (27 moves).

Perhaps 3% constitutes a crowd. Even if all of this group were entirely dependent on benefits it is clearly only a tiny minority of young people to whom the Daily Mail characterisation would apply. More realistically, the media is generating, reflecting and maintaining a skewed perception about the numbers of young people who move to council housing, and their circumstances.

It is also questionable whether the Chancellors priority really is deficit reduction. Or whether someone with a BA in Modern History (2:1) is really best placed to understand the technicalities of an unfathomably complex international economy, but those are separate issues altogether.

References:

Katz, M., B., 2013. The Undeserving Poor: America’s Enduring Confrontation with Poverty, 2nd ed. ed. Oxford University Press, USA.
Macdonald, R., Shildrick, T., Furlong, A., 2013. In search of “intergenerational cultures of worklessness”: Hunting the Yeti and shooting zombies. Crit. Soc. Policy. doi:10.1177/0261018313501825
Malpass, P., Mullins, D., 2010. Local Authority Housing Stock Transfer in the UK: From Local Initiative to National Policy. Hous. Stud. 17.
Robbins, R., H., 2002. Global problems and the culture of capitalism, 2nd ed. ed. Allyn and Bacon, Boston.
Summer Budget, 2015. HM Treasury, London.

The only way is Essex (Summer School), but where are the Brits?

Roxanne Connelly, University of Edinburgh

I am writing this post from the 2015 Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis. I have worked for a few years here as a teaching assistant on the course Introduction to Multilevel Models with Applications. Previously I have come to the summer school as a student where I undertook courses in Logit and Probit Models by Professor Marco Steenbergen and Latent Class Analysis by Professor Allan McCutcheon. These courses were of the highest quality available and I was taught, in-depth, the statistical concepts which enabled me to develop the standard of quantitative data analysis skills which I hope will enable me to have a successful career.

Essex Summer School also forms a legendary element of the PhD years. Where else can you spend two weeks socialising with groups of people who share your substantive and methodological interests. There are even rumours that the summer school serves as flourishing marriage market.

But I have one burning question, where are the British PhD students? On our course this year UK PhD students are again very much the minority. I am yet to meet a single UK PhD student from any of the other courses (although I am sure there are a few). For a world-leading summer school based in southern England it seems strange that there is a lack of interest from those local students who, perhaps, need this training the most.

Essex summer school is largely made up of Northern Europeans, Germans and the Dutch. For many years every second person you met at the SU bar was Swiss, but changes in Swiss funding arrangements seem to have drastically reduced their numbers. Currently UK PhD students who are fortunate enough to hold an ESRC studentship receive a £750 annual Research Training Support Grant, those who hold the Advanced Quantitative Methods (AQM) Stipend gain an extra £250 per year. Fees for an Essex course are £1050, those on the AQM stipend could just about manage. It may seem steep at first glance, but these courses are exceptionally good value for money given their quality and intensity. Attending a single one day methods course at other locations may cost upwards of £100. I am not convinced that cost is entirely to blame for this problem.

It may be that the pressure to publish early in the PhD and to present research at conferences from an early stage is leading UK PhD students to forgo training for these types of activities. This is unfortunate as, at the current time, the quantitative skills of PhD students in the UK often lag behind those in other European countries (as highlighted in the recent British Academy Report, Count Us In). This is realisation that UK students may not reach, if they do not seek out opportunities to network and study with international students early in their PhD. I would strongly encourage UK PhD students to consider undertaking these advanced training courses, and I am certain that their skills and research would improve as a result. Even now I would relish the opportunity to come back to the summer school as a student, and further my skills in an additional element of social science data analysis!

P.S The British Academy has launched a scheme to fund scholarships to enable undergraduates from UK universities to undertake courses at the Summer school. This excellent scheme aims to improve the skills of students at the earliest possible stage of higher education. Hopefully in years to come this will contribute to building the popularity of the Essex Summer School amongst UK students.