Housing Market Restructuring and Inequalities in London and the UK

This paper aims to do two main things. Firstly it provides an overview of UK housing market restructuring which has occurred as a result of longer-term shifts in tenurial patterns, and shorter-term impacts of the 2008 credit crunch aftermath and the Coalition Government's welfare and housing policies. The impact of this restructuring is that the tenure boundary between social and private renting, in terms of rents and security, is becoming increasingly blurred, while homeownership is being transformed via shifts in mortgage finance availability. The result of these trends is the ‘end’ of both social renting and home ownership as we know it. Secondly, the paper focuses on London and it demonstrates how the national trends are exaggerated in the capital, partly as a result of the central London housing market providing a ‘safe haven’ in relation to global capital flows, and partly as a consequence of urban regeneration schemes which have had the net effect of reducing the proportion of social housing throughout much of London. The paper uses Census and other data to examine the dramatic rise private renting in London since 2001, a rise which is predicated on the buoyancy of the buy-to-let mortgage markets, foreign capital inflows which generate build-to-let developments, and also the increasing outflows of ex-public housing into the private rental market. The Coalition Government’s recent welfare and housing reforms, such as the ‘bedroom tax’, overlay these longer-term trends. The net result in London is a marked heightening of housing-related inequalities including increased insecurity that parallels and arguably reinforces the labour-market based ‘precariat’ identified by Guy Standing (2011) and Loic Wacquant (2008).