Background

Affordable housing is an important element of the financial wellbeing of the poorest families. Policy discussion on these issues has raised a number of potential routes to tackling this issue:

• Raising levels of housing support available through increasing Local Housing Allowances
• Moving people on low incomes towards the social rented sector, where rents are lower and where rents are always covered by social security.
• Constraining growth of rents in the private rented sector

These approaches may be taken in combination and interact with one another – for example constraining rent rises would reduce the costs to government arising from increasing LHAs.

At present there is limited evidence as to the likely effectiveness of what these approaches on household incomes and poverty and how they may compare, in part driven by data limitations and modelling challenges, which this research would seek to overcome.

Outcomes

This project will explore the relative effects of each each of three approaches to tackling housing shortfalls for low income households:

• increasing Local Housing Allowances
• expanding the Social Rented Sector
• constraining private rented sector rent increases

This project utilise the IPPR tax-benefit model to model the effects, at a household level, of changes to housing policy, accounting for the complexities in the benefit system. Due to the complexity of modelling Local Housing Allowances, we will need to use “special-license” Family Resources Survey data to accurately assess the impact of such changes.

Relevant Links

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