Abstract

The housing market in Britain is dominated by two very distinct tenure types, conferring differing degrees of security, opportunities for mobility, direct and indirect subsidization and potential for capital gain. Despite apparent convergence between privately (owner-occupied) and publicly (local authority or 'council') owned homes in terms of physical amenities and space provision, marked differences exist in other respects, and current trends represent an increasing polarization of the housing market between those families who own their homes and those who rent them from the council. Currently, 56 per cent of British households are owner-occupiers, while 31 per cent are local authority tenants (1981 Census figures). Local authority housing was introduced on a significant scale just after the end of the First World War, and since that time the state has been involved (with greater or lesser degrees of political commitment) in the provision of large-scale public housing. Home ownership has also been encouraged by all governments, largely through indirect financial incentives, such as tax relief on mortgage interest repayments. The development of the building societies as mortgage brokers provided a means of purchasing, over a long period of time with security and at a reasonable cost. The most striking trend in British housing over the twentieth century has been the increase in the proportion of the housing stock either owner-occupied or rented from local authorities, at the expense of the proportion of privately-rented housing which, at the turn of the century, housed the vast majority of British households. Much attention has been devoted in the sociological and economic literature to the structure of the British housing market, but housing tenure has only recently been recognized as a useful discriminatory variable in the description and analysis of differentials in British demography. I one of the first systematic pieces o work to focus specifically on demographic differen ls between housing tenures, Fox and Goldblatt (1982) showed that the association between tenure category and mortality from the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys Longitudinal Study was strong (with owner-occupiers having the lowest overall level of mortality and local authority tenants the highest), and that, although there was an association between tenure and social class, the relationship existed independently of social class effects; for example, mortality for owner-occupiers aged between 15 and 64 was lower than that for any grouping of social classes of comparable size. Given that physical housing conditions are broadly similar for the two major British tenure categories, it would seem that tenure is acting as an indicator for some other set of relationships not directly associated with physical housing conditions. Owner-occupation is the form of tenure preferred by the great majority of young married couples for reasons not only associated with housing conditions per se. For example, couples moving from the local authority sector to the owner-occupied sector were often found to have moved into inferior accommodation in terms of amenities (Jones, 1976). Moreover, the costs of owner-occupation are usually much higher in the arly years of house purchase than the costs associated with local authority tenancies of comparable quality (OPCS, 1981). This suggests that owning one's own home has a status value which is more important to many couples than the physical conditions of housing. Murie has commented that: 'tenure status itself may be taken

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