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- Who’s to blame for the Housing Crisis? The Rental Market
Who’s to blame for the Housing Crisis? The Rental Market
#3 The Cost of Renting in the UK
mssng is on a mission to tackle tough questions and spark new insights through the power of data. Our blog dives into the heart of the issues — some of those big topics that fuel debate, make headlines, shape policies, or change behaviours. We go to the source, uncovering the data to bring you clear, meaningful context. We hope these insights make your inbox a little more interesting, and if you have a challenge that could use a data-driven edge, we’d love to hear from you.
The continued failure to hit targets for building new homes has put increasing pressure on those who need to rent. First-time buyers are getting long in the tooth because of the rising costs (the average age is now 34 - see our previous post), causing a ripple effect in the rental market.
Adult children living with their parents increased by 14.7% in a ten-year period - 4.9 million in 2021, from 4.2 million in 2011 [1]. The average age for moving out has risen from 21 to 24 years-old in that time.
And aside from the queue for the bathroom each morning, that’s understandable because rent payments as a proportion of earnings remain high.
2023, excluding any housing benefits [2].
Those percentages of earnings actually represent a very marginal improvement over the last 15 years, but other problems are mounting up.
The National Housing Federation estimated in 2021 that 8.5m people in England faced an “unmet housing need” and that nearly half of those (4.2m people, or the equivalent of 1.6m households) would be best served by social housing [3]. However, social housing stock has slowly declined from the mid-1980s…
From a high watermark of 5.49 million homes in 1981, the subsequent sell off through Right to Buy means social housing stock was at 4.24 million in 2023, a number that’s only grown by an average of 10,500 dwellings a year since 2009 [4].
In 1991, 23% of all households in England rented from a social housing landlord. That dropped to 17% in 2021 [5], but the underlying demand for social housing remains consistent with 1.29m households on the waiting list in 2023, despite changes in the qualifying criteria… [6]
Overcrowding is growing in the social sector as other tenures become under-occupied…
Severe problems with damp in private rented dwellings rose from 7% to 9% between 2019 and 2022, and 21% fail to meet the Decent Homes Standard - a government measure for safety, thermal comfort, state of repair and facilities and services [7].
The supply problem in affordable and social housing has pushed renters to the brink, despite being well-flagged by consecutive governments and leaders in the sector. On Wednesday, we look at the roles the planning process and private housebuilders have played in the current housing shortage, before running the rule over the new government’s plan for change.
notes & sources
Local Authorities being given powers to set qualification criteria (Localism Act, 2011) caused a significant drop in social housing lists, but even though that remains in place the waiting lists are rising again to . Ironically, in 2023, there were 1.1m dwellings in England classed as ‘vacant’ - 262,474 of which were empty long-term, English Housing Survey, 2023.
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