Different types of housing tenure are associated with differing degrees of mental health. Mental distress has increased significantly across all tenure groups in the UK since 2015. Marco Felici looks at what has been happening and why.
Numerous studies have consistently shown that homeowners tend to report better mental health than renters. While this is a descriptive rather than a causal relationship, how it evolves can be a useful diagnostic tool for housing policy.
The mental health of the population matters not only because it is desirable in its own right but also because it affects participation in work and individuals’ productivity. The UK has an especially large proportion of people in its working age population who are inactive because of ill health, including mental ill health. A common measure of mental health used in the psychiatric literature is the 12-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ). As the name suggests, it is composed of the answers to 12 questions on recent experiences of psychological distress (or lack thereof). While the answers are qualitative, they are mapped onto a numerical indicator ranging from 0 (indicating the least distress) to 36 (maximum distress). For example, such questions include, Have you recently been feeling unhappy or depressed? or Have you recently lost much sleep over worry?
The GHQ-12 indicator is included in the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study, also known as Understanding Society, a large survey gauging many domains of households’ life. Using 13 waves of the survey, from which I can estimate yearly averages between 2010 and 2021, I study how the GHQ-12 has evolved over time across four housing tenure groups: outright homeowners, mortgagors, private renters and those renting from local authorities or housing associations (social housing).
Mental distress has increased across all tenure groups since 2015. Figure 1 shows how the mean (weighted to be representative of the UK population) and its 95% confidence interval (a measure of uncertainty around the estimate of the mean) move over time across the four tenure groups. First of all, the same relative ranking across housing tenure groups persists throughout the entire period, underscoring the strong association between housing tenure and mental health. Renters experience more mental distress than homeowners, and within each of those groups, social renters and mortgage holders score worse for mental health.
Moreover, while mental distress remains largely stable between 2010 and 2015 for all groups, after this point an upward trend is noticeable across all categories. More recent years, just before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, also show an acceleration in reported distress levels for private renters in 2019, and for homeowners (both outright and with a mortgage) in 2020 (even before mortgage rates started to rise in 2022).
Figure 1: Evolution over time of the weighted mean and 95% confidence intervals for the GHQ-12 indicator by housing tenure group
What does this mean for housing policy?
A recent paper by Zhang and co-authors (2023), using some of the same data as I did but focussing on pre-pandemic times and using a transformation of the GHQ-12 indicator, documented a similar overall pattern of increased psychological distress after 2015.
The authors, along with others (e.g., Wickham et al., 2020) point to the reduction in social security benefits during the 2010s as a significant contributor to this worsening trend. For instance, Universal Credit was introduced in 2013 to replace multiple existing benefit schemes, partly with the aim of reducing the benefits bill. Moreover, focussing specifically on the period of the pandemic and on housing tenure, Görtz and coauthors (2023) provided evidence that renters suffered higher financial distress than mortgagors when it came to housing payments: furloughed renters were found to be significantly more likely to fall behind with housing payments, while furloughed mortgagors were not. This difference is attributed to the so-called “mortgage holiday”, which allowed mortgagors to defer payments for up to six months.
The current welfare benefits system appears therefore incapable of sufficiently offsetting external shocks, that could prevent generalised increases in mental distress. Moreover, the problem is especially severe for renters, who show persistently higher distress. These results point to the need for policy decisions to take account of the differences between the groups, and to ensure housing, welfare and financial policies are joined up.
For more details on this work, including methodology and data analysis, read the working paper: The housing tenure gradient of mental health in the United Kingdom after the Global Financial Crisis
The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy.
