A new Briefing Note using data from Understanding Society, the UK Household Longitudinal Study led by a team of scientific experts at ISER, explores how children are living in overcrowded homes and the impact that has on their lives.
The paper exploits the best available child measure available in Understanding Society of poor quality housing to explore trends in UK overcrowding, how this varies by tenure,
ethnicity and household size, and its associations with child well-being, and child health as reported by parents.
The research team found a relatively flat trend in children living in overcrowded households over waves 1 to 13 (2009 to 2022) with rates much higher in London and closely associated with household income and tenure.
Overcrowding was statistically significantly associated with poor child mental well-being after controlling for household structure, ethnicity, tenure, equivalised household income,
and the age and sex of children.
The Briefing Note was written by Sarah Taylor, from the Children’s Commissioner’s Office, Professor Kitty Stewart, from the London School of Economics, Fanny Kovesdi from the University of Oxford and Giacomo de Santis from the Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex as part of Understanding Society’s Research Springboard.
“The findings should be shared with housing authorities and housing associations, given the higher prevalence and risk of overcrowding in the social rented sector, and with local policy makers such as the Greater London Authority, as well as the West Midlands Combined Authority, given the perhaps unexpected finding for this region in the regional breakdown. The findings suggest attention should be paid to the housing needs of lone parent families as a particularly at-risk group who may be less visible than larger families in decision making on overcrowding.
“The findings on tenure may imply that private renting families, relative to social renting families, are spending more of their income on housing to avoid overcrowding, with implications for poverty measured after housing costs. Financial decision making such as this is an area of interest for further study.”