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Housing need – what is it and what should we include?

rpwills

Assessing what the level of housing need there is, is fraught with issues of definition and measurement. But there are data sets available which provide some idea of what need exists including hidden need.




The 2021 census gives us two categories of household where hidden need could be identified.

Multi-family households

In 2021 there were 500,412 Multi-family households in England, accounting for 2.1% of all households. [Cornwall = 4,638, 1.9% of the total]. If all of these resulted in a need for additional housing, that would require an extra 500k dwellings. However, not all of those in such households will require their own property. [5]

Concealed families

Concealed families are a sub-set within the multi-family household category. The census suggests a total of 353,127 concealed households in England or 2.2% of the total. [Cornwall: 3,279, 1.9%]. It is important to note that the definition of families includes couples and lone parents and not single adults.[5]].

The English Housing Survey has also explored the question of concealed households. They arrived at a total of 1.6 million households with a total of 2 million adults looking to rent or buy.

‘Concealed households’ In 2018-19, there were 1.6 million households containing an adult who would prefer to buy or rent their own accommodation but cannot afford to do so. This equates to 7% of all households. Within these households, there were 2 million adults living in these circumstances. [4]English Housing Survey 2018-19 ‘Sofa surfing’ and ‘concealed households’].

The figures have been questioned. “it seems that the concealed households argument for a shortage of houses — always somewhat tenuous because of its many possible causes — is actually an artefact of recent immigration." [Mulheirn]. There is also the issue of whether the figures mean people are looking for alternative accommodation now or at some stage in the future or does it include those who would like accommodation now or sometime in the future? How many of those single adults would transfer from single to couple households?

Waiting list’ or housing register

The 'waiting list' or housing register figure is often used to justify additional house building. Some reports have suggested that the total on the list should be 1.6 million households, higher than the official figure of 1.16 million. [3] National Housing Federation. But what does the figure actually tell us? Households can be on the register for a variety of reasons – poor quality housing, high cost of housing, overcrowding. These are real problems, seriously impacting on the quality of life of those affected. Yet not all of these problems require that a new dwelling be built. Poor quality dwellings should be upgraded to make them fit for purpose; high costs should be dealt with by setting appropriate rents and changing housing benefit levels. In some situations it is a case of swapping properties.

Suppressed households

“We will need to build so many houses that all 'suppressed' households are able to leave their current shared residence and form new households,” [1] Ant Breach. We can only assume that the suppressed households are included in the various definitions referred to previously.

Conclusion

We are left with several different definitions of need, with overlaps between the datasets. Determining how many in total require new housing is problematical.

Definitions and notes

Multi-family household

‘A multi-family household is a household that consists of two or more families. The families can be:

· unrelated (for example, two unrelated couples sharing a house)

· related and multi-generational (for example, cohabiting couple plus children and elderly parents, or married couple plus their teenage daughter and her child)

· related but not multi-generational (for example, cohabiting couple plus son and girlfriend, or two brothers and their partners sharing a house).’

Concealed family

Concealed families are couple or lone parent families living in multi-family households, where the FRP is not the Household Reference Person (HRP).

[6] ONS. Families and households statistics explained, 18 May 2023.

We don’t know why these families share households and there are no doubt many So it seems that the concealed households argument for a shortage of houses — always somewhat tenuous because of its many possible causes — is actually an artefact of recent immigration. There is no evidence, on this simple analysis at least, to suggest that anything has changed for the UK-born population. We don’t know why these families share households and there are no doubt many different reasons. Nor do higher rates of sharing among migrants mean that everything is fine. But what this compositional explanation does imply is that housing supply isn’t the cause of the growth in concealed households.”

[2] Concealed households — what’s the real story? Ian Mulheirn, 2018.

The real ‘social housing waiting list’ in England is 500,000 households bigger than official figures suggest, reveals our new data today. The findings are published in our annual People in Housing Need report, the most comprehensive report to date on the state of the nation’s housing crisis. It is the only research to analyse the true number of people in need of social housing in England, which has now hit 3.8m. This equates to 1.6m households – 500,000 more than the 1.16m households recorded on official waiting lists. [3] National Housing Federation.

Sources

[1] Breach Ant, Centre for Cities, 2023.

[2] Mulheirn, Ian., Concealed households — what’s the real story?, 2018.

[4] ONS, National statistics, English Housing Survey 2021 to 2022: headline report, Published 15 December 2022.

[5] ONS/NOMIS, Census 2021.

[6] ONS. Families and households statistics explained, 18 May 2023

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