Neoliberal Nomads: Housing Insecurity and the Revival of Private Renting in the UK

By John Bone, University of Aberdeen

The emergence of a so-called 'Generation Rent' is a phenomenon that is gaining increasing prominence in political and media discourse, in recognition of the growing numbers of, in particular, young UK citizens who cannot gain access to the fabled 'property ladder'. This growing constituency are depicted as the main casualties of a UK housing crisis; victims of a combination of mushrooming house prices and undersupply which have conspired to freeze them out of owner occupation, while the level of disaffection being generated by this scenario was most recently illustrated by London’s ‘March for Homes’. The roots of this housing crisis have been exhaustively analysed, by a broad range of academic and other commentators, while many of these accounts suggest that it has largely arisen as much by design as via the caprice of markets.

A raft of interventions by successive UK governments have facilitated and supported the increasing marketisation and financialisation of the UK housing sector. In short, the late 1970s and early ‘80s 'free market' shift in political and economic policy has had a profound effect on housing. In the first instance, a newly deregulated and expanded financial sector targeted residential property as a highly convenient vehicle for the expansion of consumer credit. Consequently, extended mortgage lending in a competitive market saw home ownership grow; a process accelerated by the Thatcher government’s sell-off of council housing. In turn, expanded mortgage lending was followed by rising house prices as private sector supply failed to match rising demand. Against this background, potential gains from rising prices also began to shift public perceptions, from viewing housing as an essential utility to regarding residential 'property' as a lucrative personal investment vehicle.

This metamorphosis of the housing market was consolidated by the revival of the private rented sector, as both investment class and mainstream tenure. The latter was also facilitated by UK government policy (introduced through Housing Acts of 1988 and 1996), that radically reduced security of tenure, and by the financial sector's offering of new Buy to Let mortgage products aimed at amateur investors. As we know, these developments taken together have seen a great expansion of private renting, while the investment activities of a million or so private landlords has been a significant factor in driving prices ever higher and squeezing out many potential first time buyers, who have now become private sector tenants. Government support for this scenario has also extended to providing advantageous tax arrangements for landlords over owner occupiers.

In addition to ideological motivations, UK governments have also become ever more reliant on the residential property sector as an engine of economic growth, as rising house prices have boosted consumer confidence and activity in an expanded service sector by providing collateral for consumer credit in what has become a substantially debt-fuelled economy.

In a number of senses the revival of private renting has re-established some of the characteristics of the sector that prevailed in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, with the caveat that the new class of landlords are drawn from a much broader base than the small exclusive elite who rented property to around 90 per cent of the UK's population at that time. What is returning, however, is the spectre of sub-standard, prohibitively expensive and, critically, insecure housing that motivated a groundswell of political unrest in the past; the scenario that mobilised the mid 20^th century's progressive reform of UK housing towards a mixed private/public and highly regulated form of provision. While there has been a good deal of attention paid to rising costs and declining standards affecting contemporary tenants, perhaps lesser attention has been paid to the consequences of long term insecurity.

It is clear that tenancies covered by the Assured Shorthold Tenancy (the majority in the sector) are wholly inconsistent with tenants’ capacity to establish a stable and secure home, given that after an initial 6 month term tenants can be arbitrarily evicted at two months notice. Evidently, this has practical implications in terms of access to workplaces, and for children of the growing number of families housed in the sector to rely on continuity with respect to schooling, where the latter can be disrupted at the whim of the landlord.

Arguably, however, less well understood are the subtler and deeper effects of the lack of control and predictability experienced by private sector tenants, where again the implications for families are perhaps particularly acute. In such conditions, maintaining friendships and community engagement can be increasingly difficult, while there are related implications for mental health and well-being.

Psychologists have long understood that some of the most stressful aspects of experience are founded on our limited capacity to deal with onerous demands and complexity as well as unpredictable and uncontrolled change. Sociologists have also long recognised the ill effects of such conditions on the psyche and, indeed, in terms of collective well-being. Recent discoveries of how the human brain functions are now offering evidence that underscores these widely recognised observations. For example, it has been demonstrated that we have a highly limited capacity to deal with information at a conscious level while, where we are overburdened, the consequences are experienced as significant arousal of the 'fear system'. In terms of ’real world’ implications, this may explain why we are prone to routinising and simplifying much of what we encounter, attempting to impose a significant degree of control, consistency and stability in our lives. It may even be the case that modern urban living of itself, as Georg Simmel notably observed, challenges us in this respect. Following from this, it may be reasonable to suggest that chronic insecurity regarding something so fundamental as one’s home (as with employment) is liable to critically undermine the conditions conducive to emotional stability and well-being, while a growing body of empirical evidence also supports this perspective.  In addition, once more drawing on neuroscientific findings, it appears that there may also be a relationship between the formation of long term memories, that are integral to the construction of our personal biographies, and the neural processes that orient us in geographical space. Simply put, it may be that spatial relocation, particularly where this is also involuntary and uncontrolled, may have a subtle but profound negative effect on our capacity to readily sustain a coherent and consistent biography; a stable self identity.

For the reasons outlined above, a reappraisal of the social and psychological effects as well as the more evident practical and economic ramifications of marketised housing is perhaps long overdue.

Read the full article in Sociological Research Online on which this blog post is based.

 

The Labour Market Mobility of Migrants

By: Julie Knight, Towson University

What are the experiences of post-2004 Polish migrants in the UK labour market?  How have these experiences evolved since 2004? Are there any migrants that have experiences that are uncharacteristic of the wider group of Poles?  These questions have influenced my research since 2005.  In addition, many personal and professional factors have contributed to my interest in the labor market mobility of Polish migrants over time, including: my own migrant status in the UK; my understanding of migrant labour market mobility through working for migrants and with migrants; and my interaction with the wider literature that quickly formed on this topic.  These factors were all accounted for in my PhD thesis, which served as the foundation for an article recently published in SociologicalResearch Online.

I migrated from the US to the UK in 2004 to complete my Master’s degree at Cardiff University.  Shortly after migrating, I worked part-time as a bartender at a local pub.  The unsociable hours, unruly patrons and lack of tipping did not bother me as I converted the hourly rate (minimum wage) from GBP to USD and realised that I was making substantially more in the UK being a bartender than I would for the same job in the US.  As time moved on, I gathered more experience and knowledge about the local area, moved on to other jobs, graduated from the Master’s program, and eventually, in 2006, after starting my PhD, started working as a researcher at Cardiff University.  While this seems like a great story unrelated to Polish migrants, this journey through the labour market of a destination country is very similar for other groups of migrants, regardless of their language skills, previous employment or education level. 

For example, using longitudinal data gathered from high-skilled migrants in Australia, Chiswick et al.’s (2005) U-shaped pattern of occupational mobility highlights the exact same movement where high-skilled migrants enter a country, take any job regardless of previous employment, gain location-based knowledge, and ascend in the labour market.  In addition, the economic motivations of migrants to stay in low-skilled jobs, particularly when initially migrating, are commonly addressed in research on economic migrants (Anderson et al. 2006).  There are commonalities between my story and the literature highlighted here, where migrants are well-educated and take low-skilled jobs for a short-term when initially migrating.  These commonalities also extend to post-2004 Polish migrants in the UK if using the characteristics –young, economically-motivated, well-educated, short-term, willing to take low-skilled jobs—ascribed by academics, policymakers and the media immediately after enlargement (Home Office 2008; Pollard et al. 2008; Anderson et al. 2006). 

However, after interviewing Polish migrants in Cardiff in 2008 and 2011, it became clear that the characteristics of migrants in terms of education level and expected time in the UK in the sample were not uniform.  The lack of uniformity existed both amongst the participants in the sample as well as between the sample and the characteristics listed in the existing literature at that time.  The increasing complexity of the migrants’ characteristics was also noticed by other academics in the field, most notably in Kathy Burrell’s edited book (2009) PolishMigration to the UK in the “New” European Union: After 2004.  Furthermore, from the sample in Cardiff, the experiences of the migrants in the labour market in Britain also varied.  Those migrants that were low-skilled upon entering the UK were not confined to low-skilled jobs throughout their migration period, nor was their labour mobility confined to the ethnic economy. 

Using the information gathered from the interviews, I created trajectories to explain the migrants’ experiences and ascent in the labour market.  I contrasted the Linguists, who fit into the migrant paradox in the short-term but moved up the labour market in the long-term, with the Careerists, who ascended the labour market despite their low- education and skill levels.  Both trajectories highlighted the experiences of the migrants in the labour market, which along with the length of time that the migrants spent in the UK, was unplanned.

Beyond challenging the initial characteristics and experiences of migrants, the novelty of these trajectories lies in the timing of the fieldwork (2008 and 2011).  The timing is significant as the migrants that I interviewed in 2008 could have stayed longer than expected in the UK because of the onset of the recession and concern that conditions were worse in Poland.  However, in 2011, the migrants had stayed beyond what they initially expected and continued to be upwardly mobile in the labour market in the UK, despite the failure of many other workers during the recessionary period.  I would not have been able to capture this labour market mobility without going back out into the field in 2011, seven years after enlargement.   The ability of the migrants to stay in the UK indefinitely has been paramount to this study, but it is increasingly a cause for concern amongst policymakers in light of these findings.  Further research will also focus on how the Polish migrants are living in the UK as they are not settling with mortgages and loans but, in many cases, are not planning to return.

Read the full article in the November 2015 issue of Sociological Research Online.