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Closer to Home explores how the concept of home shapes our understanding of the world. Through personal insight, critical reflection, and guest conversations, we examine the forces that affect our sense of belonging, and ask whether the housing crisis is really a crisis of home, connection, and rootedness.
Hannah (00:00)
Hello, hello, hello and welcome to another episode of Closer to Home. The podcast where we talk about the relationship between home and housing and ask the question, are we in a home crisis as much as we are a housing crisis? Today, we're going to be exploring the relationship between wellbeing and tenure, and we have a fantastic guest with us today, Dr. James Gregory, who is a teacher and researcher in social policy at the University of Birmingham. And I think before we start, I just really want to know what is that relationship between well-being and home for us before we get going. So, over to you James, can you tell us about what well-being and home means for you?
James (00:48)
Yeah, I'll try. Firstly, thank you for inviting me. It's really nice to be doing this. So, home for me, well-being. Well, I share my home with my wife and my cats, all of whom are very important to me. I am currently looking out of a window onto quite a pleasant garden, which I'm very lucky to have. And again, that's important really more for my cats than for me that's very much part of our lives and I'm lucky enough to have quite good peace and quiet not everyone is lucky enough to have that very important to me. Sometimes broken by one of my cats, Biggles, who's not a great respecter of boundaries in the morning. But yeah that's that's yeah that's kind of how I feel about my home I think
Hannah (01:41)
I love that with cats, isn't it? It's that 4am, pour on the face, wakeup call that makes you regret your cat related life choices at times and then when it's time to get up they're all there like super cute like I hate you at 4am, I love you at 8am. Stephen, Stephen over to you, well-being and home, what did I mean to you?
Stephen (02:01)
Yeah, well, it's interesting to hear both of your kind of accounts of that. And I was particularly interested in James immediately being drawn to look out of the window. Because I know for me, the idea of home has always been more than just the dwelling and what goes on within it. Although I think there's a common thread here because my experience of home within the dwelling is very much dictated by cats as well. I think that's about the fact that it's not a purely individual kind of internal thing, is it? know, it is about sharing, it is community both within the building and outside the building. And it was an interesting weekend for me because we had a street party and it's the third street party that we've had in the 20 odd years that we've lived here. And I the first one happened really six, eight weeks after we moved in and really helped us settle and feel part of something bigger than just our own house. And it was really lovely at the weekend to see families who've only very recently moved into the street have the same experience and just feel that the, feel like the boundaries of what they count as their home perhaps were just slightly expanded by it.
Hannah (03:08)
I have to say I did enjoy our conversation on Friday where you were talking about cooking for your street get-together and were rather obsessed by the heavy vegetables you had to carry home from the supermarket, so I have to say I'm somebody who will just buy a cake from the supermarket when those get-togethers happen but I think for me this weekend the first recording of the podcast got me thinking quite a lot about feeling at home in my body as well as feeling at home in the place of home and that relationship. So, I've been experimenting a little bit more with that notion of belonging in space and I made the absolute mistake of attempting to do a vogue dancing workshop. Tell you now at 44 years old with the back I've got, not something you really want to be doing but I had fun anyway. But anyway, let's get into this topic. I think before we get into tenure, it's going to be really important for us to define exactly what it is we mean by well-being as it's being used in James's book, Social Housing, Wellbeing and Welfare. So, James, over to you. Can you tell us how you define well-being in that work?
James (04:21)
Okay, so no surprises here. It's only one way of looking at well-being. Maybe later we'll talk about particularly why I've chosen it. Key characteristic is it's subjective. So, it's self-reported. And we contrast this to objective. So, external criteria of what a good life looks like or what a flourishing life looks like, and it tends to be asked in surveys often by the ONS office for national statistics. And, I�m going to close this by reading out the four questions but I'm going to distil it to this one thing basically. It's not perfect, in some ways very superficial but think very helpful used appropriately and the question is basically �are you happy?� It tends to be formed in, they're called Likert responses, scale of one to 10, agree, disagree. I'm going to read out the four that I take from the Office for National Statistics, which they�ve kind of rolled out over last 10 - 15 years. Now each of these captures a slightly different element of subjective wellbeing. It's not just happy, it's how you feel about life, but I think reading that will give you a very good idea of subjective well-being and yeah we'll maybe unpack it a bit more later but here we go. So, the four questions are �Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?�, �Overall to what extent do feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?�, �Overall how happy did you feel yesterday?� and, �Overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday?� So those are the four questions.
Hannah (06:12)
I have to say that question about worthwhileness is making me flash back to that vogue workshop. I'm really questioning the time I used that weekend but anyway and also I have to say, Likkert, Likert scale I've been pronouncing it like the years so I'm not sure if I've got it wrong there or not. that's okay I think it well there's a whole generation of students who are now calling it a Likert scale.
James (06:30)
I was probably incorrect. I have no idea to be honest.
Hannah (06:39)
But no, that's great. think it's just really important for our listeners to understand that the way we talk about wellbeing and home is very different to how the concept is deployed in James's book and also how it's deployed in political settings. So, thank you very much for unpacking that technical definition of wellbeing. I will avoid asking you too many questions because James was my thesis supervisor at PhD and we could go on for hours about wellbeing. So, for the wellbeing of our listeners, I'm not going to ask any follow-on questions.
Stephen (07:17)
Ok, well I�ll ask a follow-on question then. James - in your book, you specifically examine the relationship between wellbeing and housing tenure. In the case of wellbeing, we�re talking about people�s own assessment of their satisfaction with life and how happy they are. The research is about how people�s wellbeing might be linked specifically to housing tenure, so could you just explain what we mean by tenure?
James (07:40)
Yeah, mean tenure has quite a technical definition but it's kind of in a way pretty simple. So I'm to start with the technical and that is it really describes the legal status under which you occupy your home. So a contract really ? and the much simpler way of looking at it is you ask yourself how do I live in my home? If I rent privately my tenure is private rental, socially tenure is social if I own my home my tenure is owner occupation that last bit really needs a bit of differentiation because and this is not done nearly enough there's obviously a distinction between owned outright and owned with a mortgage now normally until relatively recently people didn't really distinguish the two in the data clearly enough
But my argument would be that they should actually be two different tenures. Because as we'll probably go on to see, the circumstances and in particular the wellbeing issues between outright ownership and owner-occupation can be very different.
Stephen (08:53)
So, in your book you do kind of draw out the fact that the subjective reporting of well-being that you told us about earlier varies between different tenures and the reasons for that are not necessarily straightforward. So how does that manifest itself broadly speaking?
James (09:11)
So, I'm going to start first with a very, important point, which is that If you're to take a pool of people that say all the social tenants in Britain or in England, because housing policy is devolved.
If we were to take each individual and sort of tally up their characteristics, that would be descriptive, right? So, we might say X number or X proportion are not working, X proportion of a mental health difficulty, X proportion of single mothers, right? X proportion report low levels of subjective wellbeing. Now, on the last point, you will find lower levels of well-being in social housing. You will find higher prevalence of mental ill health. But that's descriptive right? So, here's the big question. What is the relationship of social housing to that?
Stephen (10:06)
I mean, there's obviously been lot of focus over recent years on the physical material condition of social housing as being and clearly it can be a major driver of the presence or absence of wellbeing. But I think you also found that perhaps the relationship is not as clear as that. It's not as clear cut as that as a way of explaining why levels of reported wellbeing might be lower.
James (10:31)
So, here's the another important thing in this country England, actually across the UK, particularly in England, you are much more likely to live in social housing if you have a mental health condition. For example, you're much more likely to be allocated given access to social housing. If you report low subjective well-being, right? So that in large part will explain why we find such high levels of mental ill health and low subjective well-being in social housing. But again, it comes back to this question, is it the social housing itself that is suppressing those results or driving mental ill health? That is the crucial question. And it's crucial in part because discourses and discussions of social housing in this country are so negative that one might expect it to play a negative role in mental health. Equally, and I'll just sort of close this point quickly, is that we have a really strong discourse that owner-occupation is, to put it bluntly, the route to happiness, right? And again, we need to ask that question. Does the tenure, does the fact that you are an owner-occupier, actually have a positive impact on your mental health and on your subjective well-being. And these are the things that we're going to unpack.
Stephen (12:01)
Playing that back to you, my understanding of the core point you're making there is that it's very easy potentially to neglect someone's starting point. So, if somebody has gone through a needs-based allocation system in order to enter social housing, that means kind of de facto there's been some form of need and possibly quite acute need actually given the shortage of supply and the level of demand for social housing. Equally, if somebody has been able to access owner occupation, that may imply that they had the means and the economic security to do that in the first place, which potentially could have contributed to higher reported levels of wellbeing.
James (12:42)
Later we'll probably go on to find a very surprising result that actually owner-occupiers do not have higher levels of well-being. But I think we're jumping the gun a bit and we'll get to that later. So, I want to give you one result here and then I'm going to talk about broader results. One result is from a research project I was involved in and developed which designed a bespoke survey to look at well-being amongst a group of mostly social tenants, but also a reasonable amount of shared owners. Now, again, we do find much higher levels of anxiety amongst the social tenants. But when we controlled for these background characteristics, what I'm talking about, unemployment, mental health, et cetera, we actually found that the social tenancy reduced the probability of being anxious quite significantly, right? So yes, the population was more likely to be anxious. But when we took into account all those considerations, it played a protective role in actually reduced anxiety.
Stephen (13:48)
So let me just check my understanding of that. So essentially what you've done in your research is controlled for the fact that the starting point of people being allocated social housing is likely to contain adverse factors which would depress the result that they reported in terms of their self-perception of wellbeing. And if you were just for that, I think what you were saying or certainly what I heard was the relative security of social housing as a tenure may have been a positive factor in fact.
James (14:21)
We do go on to find that. I think it's a bit premature to conclude that from what I've just said, but we do go on to find that. But I want to clarify further when I say control. What we mean is we want to go on and say, well, we've got this population. They might have a number of things in their life that cause anxiety, right? So, we know that low income is associated with anxiety. We know actually that single households tend to have lower well-being, well the people who are not in a relationship tend to have lower well-being on aggregate you know. We know that poor housing quality will reduce well-being and increase anxiety. So, we take as far as possible all those types of information, and we throw that into the mix. And I don't do it, colleagues do it. I'm not a statistician. Go away and say, to the best of our ability, we have ruled those alternative explanations out.
Stephen (15:22)
So, you're effectively seeking as far as you can to address the fact that every individual person's starting frame of reference in answering those subjective questions is different. So, you're trying to make those results as comparable, as directly comparable as you possibly can, obviously within the limits of what's�
James (15:38)
We're comparing like with like. Yeah. So, let's say you could take someone, they've got the same income, the same job, the same family status. One lives in social housing; one lives in owner-occupation. If you take two sort of ideal types, as it were, a bit cartoonish, but you imagine that they�re alike in every single respect other than their tenure you know, social housing versus private versus owner-occupation. What is that doing? What role does that play?
Stephen (16:09)
Yeah, and I suppose the question is then what would you say is the underlying dynamic around well-being and tenure? Because as you mentioned earlier on, much of the discourse around social housing is quite negative and I think has been for very long time, certainly all through my professional career in varying ways. It's changed, it's waxed and waned, it's focused on different things. But I think in the popular imagination, it would be perceived as being something that was very bad for people.
James (16:38)
Yeah. So, in the study I just mentioned, we asked not just about wellbeing, but we also asked a question about is in essence, my home makes me feel I'm doing well in life alongside the question about how much they liked their home, right? So, we had that in addition to the wellbeing stuff. And here's a curious result. We found the same result that taking everything into consideration, social housing was in essence good for people�s happiness. We found those same people tended to like their home. Yet a large proportion said being in their home that social home did not make them feel they're doing well in life. So that does speak to that kind of stigma yet, and this surprised us, certainly surprised me, it didn't seem to suppress their wellbeing. So, I guess in summary, there is, to my mind, very strong evidence in that study of what you're saying, the stigma. But to my surprise, it didn't seem directly suppress well-being.
Stephen (17:45)
Yeah, and I'll be talking there, I mean, know, stigma isn't itself quite a complicated thing, but I'll be talking to some extent about, the social expectations that exist, you know, either within individuals or external to them around the shape of their lives and how that matches and how that kind of corresponds to tenure. Because it always seems to me when I make comparisons with the way things operate, particularly in other northern European contexts, that we have a particular fixation with tenure and its social role.
James (18:18)
Hmm. That's certainly my interpretation. I think that's probably born out. Technically a direct empirical answer to quote unquote academic standards is we're not quite there yet. But yes, in essence, that�s intuitively correct and overwhelmingly likely.
Stephen (18:38)
You kind of alluded to it earlier on but you do talk in the book about there being a hierarchy that being you know social renting at the bottom of the tree as it were and a transitional kind of liminal thing of private renting and then owner-occupation being the desired state as it were, which I think most people would recognise as being part of the dominant culture.
James (19:00)
Yeah. And that's particularly strong in the UK compared to other countries, particularly in Europe. It tends to be, you do tend to get that kind of pattern in English language countries, Australia, New Zealand to some degree, United States, which doesn't really have social housing. It has a large private rental sector, but it doesn't really have social housing as we understand it.
Stephen (19:26)
That does seem really persistent, doesn't it, James? I mean, it does seem a very stable idea, but I think what I find curious about that is that we are in a time when the accessibility of owner occupation probably has never been lower and people's realistic chances of accessing it have probably never been lower. So, what does that do to the stability of somebody's conception of home and the satisfaction that they get from it potentially, the fact that there is this kind of, this postulated utopian state of owner occupation, but it's forever retreating from people's ability to access it. What effect might that have?
James (20:11)
I've got some ideas, I don't quite know and I'll come back to them. But I think it's important to enter and kind of killer fact as it were. And in fact, two points I want to make. The one is, we know that there's still this aspiration because for decades, the English housing survey and also the British social attitude survey has asked what people want. And it's consistently been over 80% of people want to own their home, right, regardless of circumstances. I also want to make the other point. So, prior to 1979, you know, the size of the social housing sector in this country was far, far bigger. And arguably, we didn't have quite those same associations of stigma. Now, to get on to the effect of I guess we could talk about a broken dream as it were, and the hunch would be and it's my hunch and you brought it up as well is that actually because it's so hard to own now and so difficult it suppresses the measure I'm interested in, which is subjective well-being. Now, I don't know if this is causal, but I do know from our research I've done with a colleague of mine, Stefan Angle in Germany, using secondary data, that actually...those who are most likely, the tenure most likely to experience lower well-being attributable to the tenure, not to income or housing costs or housing unaffordability, are mortgage donors. And interestingly, we did that with European data, and we found that that relationship only obtained in the UK. We found that there was no country in Europe in which there was any statistically significant relationship between well-being and social housing. And in my book with the assistance of a colleague called Lynn Tian, I looked at understanding society in the Brisith household panel survey, longitudinal data in the UK, and again found that there was no relationship between well-being and tenure except for mortgaged owners, and they were doing badly across the board. They were much more likely than anyone in other 10 years to report low satisfaction with life, more likely to be depressed and less likely to be happy.
Stephen (22:44)
And that completely goes against the grain of what I think is popularly believed. And you have to wonder what some of the factors might be that contribute to that. And you'll tell me off for speculating, I'm sure, because it's only right that you should do that. But again, one of the things that differentiates the UK is the almost complete absence of a social security safety net for owner-occupation, because it's been systematically removed over a period of time. And that, one might argue, creates a sense of continuous precariousness, especially as the labour market has changed in the ways that we know that it has. So, actually the maintenance of that kind of idealised state of owner occupation becomes very, very stressful.
James (23:27)
I think that's my hunch too. And I don't know. And I'm trying to with colleagues develop research that looks at that. But again, that is my hunch that there's something kind of broken about the expectation. There are stresses we're not capturing the, the so-called flexible labour market. Childcare probably pays a role. We don't have a social safety net for owners. All of these we do not, I do not yet know and may never know but would like to know and I'm trying to know if that's what's going on. But I again want to stress the absolutely crucial point here this is not housing cost related. This is not affordability. It's not because mortgaged people have a huge debt because we control for that, right. These results would apply to someone - an affluent family who actually quite comfortably maintain their mortgage. Maybe not as comfortably as they want, but you know, they're not suffering, they're paying into a pension. They will also have these characteristics.
Stephen (24:32)
So potentially, it�s something intrinsic to that form of tenure or intrinsic to what surrounds that form of tenure? Because you could argue that this situation's got worse and I'm sure we'll probably cut this out because it's a bit daft, but people were writing about this cognitive dissonance, you know, in songs in the 1960s, you know, at a time when the availability of social housing as a kind of product, nominally a product for everyone and that level of security was available in a way that's not the case now, but there was a sense of anxiety conveyed � and the song I'm talking about is Shangri-La by the Kinks - a sense of real anxiety conveyed in that song in contrast to the popular mythology of owner-occupation which is that it's emancipating, that it's about self-actualisation, that it's about you know the Englishman's home is his castle and all of that stuff. But if the castle is contingent on every payment being made on time and navigating all kinds of other bizarre social requirements then it becomes less of a less of a utopia perhaps.
James (25:41)
That's totally my intuition. I also think there's an element of probably comparing to previous generations. So, baby boomers, right? So, okay, maybe the current generation goes through all the hoops, they get the home, but they're like, well, you know, it's not quite the same home, you know, as the parents had. They've had to, maybe they get it a bit later. Maybe the stress is a bit more, but not quite enough to pick up in the current techniques we're using. I think there's something about that. There's, it's also certainly part of the answer will be is that we haven't yet fully looked at things like location and neighbourhood. There's something, probably something going on about that, but we don't fully know.
Stephen (26:27)
James, ultimately then why would you say it is that we have this persistent idea that owner occupation is such a great thing?
James (26:35)
Okay, so we've had decades of an ideology that promotes In fact, if you go back and look at some government documents in the 1960s, both Labour and the Conservatives refer to ownership as the natural tenure of choice. I think you can always need to understand own occupation in contrast to what it isn't, and it's not social housing.
And social housing has been so demonized and stigmatized that, you know, it doesn't feel like it's a appropriate choice. And the fact is it's not a realistic choice because we have so little social housing nowadays compared to need. We can attribute it a lot to ideology, but I also think we need to take account that the so-called squeezed middle, their choices are�something we haven't particularly discussed, an often very poor quality private rental sector and they don't have a choice to go into social housing, so that's what's available.
Hannah (27:38)
I think that's a really interesting notion. ? For me, think it that notion of it being a ? natural tenure. ? That seems like a strong bit of ideological positioning. And I go back as well to thinking about the early days of social housing where the tenure did compete with the owner-occupier tenure.
You still have succession rights in many social tenancy agreements, which you don't have in an owner-occupier home. So there's benefits to that tenure, but you make a really good point there about how more and more people going into the PRS is maybe reinforcing that cultural dream that somehow owning a property is natural and successful. But it's pushing, is it pushing out that social need for more social housing.
James (02:10)
I do think in all of this, we do need to remember that for many people it is a good choice, financially and otherwise, right? So, my feeling is not that it's not a good choice, but the kind of debt shouldn't be so loaded that it's so supported by government and institutions. And people will want to own, but we need to change that institutional and economic and financial bias. Just so that there's more genuine choice.
Stephen (29:05)
So, there�s a sense of unease that you described earlier on that is linked to owner occupation. I wonder if that�s because people feel they have no choice other than to be an owner occupier if they are seeking a sense of agency and control over what they understand as their home, because they may feel that they can�t access that authentic sense of home if they are renting. And that seems to conflict with the findings that owner occupation actually doesn�t necessarily provide that satisfaction.
Hannah (29:36)
I'm just thinking as well, are we actually maybe talking about some sense of rootedness that's associated with the idea of owner occupation? So what do think of that James, that notion there?
James (29:49)
yeah, but we also can get that in social housing. Going back to the sort of research I talked about earlier, studies of social housing in the southeast and the southwest England. Once people have moved from a very unstable, insecure private rental sector, they talk in the social sector precisely about that rootedness. And that's what they really value about it, thhat degree of stability.
Stephen (30:17)
The Prime Minister recently said that there needs to be a wholesale cultural change in the social housing sector, and that it�s about more than regulation. That�s an important issue in and of itself�It�s also a different topic that we�ll cover another time.
But from what we've been discussing it does seem that some of the problems with the culture of housing are bigger than social housing. They seem to be about societal norms and expectations of housing tenure, and people feeling that their expectations are not being met. People aren�t getting what they expect from home � that sense of safety, security and psychological comfort.
Do you think we potentially have a bigger, less recognised problem in our culture around housing, home, and tenure?
James (31:07)
I certainly think there's a crisis of home. If we return to the results I discussed about the misery in our results of mortgaged owners, that's got to be related in some way to how they experience the home. That to me points to a neglected, misunderstood crisis. If we find that there is a statistically significant relationship between all those results between mortgage owing and occupation and low levels of happiness, high levels of anxiety and so forth, that's a crisis.
Hannah (31:39)
It comes in a little bit as well that that notion of anxiety and homeownership with that expansion of the private rented sector because I know where I live we have a mix of private rented flats, owner-occupier and I can tell you one of the neighbours with the mortgage is super anxious at the moment. I'm social and the private landlords seem also anxious about about owning the property and managing the property
James (32:09)
Yeah.
Hannah (32:10)
So I do think there's something there to unpack about, know, do we need to culturally be a little bit careful what we wish for? And is there a utility, I think, going back and these conversations we're having trying to unpack more broader ideas about home might actually work to unstabilise that idea of possession. So any thoughts on that, James?
James (32:35)
I mean, we haven't discussed private rental sector as much here. And I do want to comment on that instability, instability in private rental sector. What you're talking about there is something that we should unpack more. The fact that we did not find association between private renting and low levels of wellbeing continues to surprise me. And it's not just our studies; other studies have done it as well.
And that does seem quite counterintuitive considering what we know about the private rental sector in England in particular. It does also prompt the thought that perhaps we take very genuine problems in part of the private rental sector and catastrophise it. Maybe what the data is telling us is that actually there's a bit that's really desperately bad, but actually, maybe as a whole it's doing a reasonable job.
Stephen (33:29)
This might link into a topic that we're hoping to cover another time, which is whether some of the social and economic changes that have happened over time to what people can reasonably expect in life might have led to a kind of decoupling between wellbeing and housing. It's possible that people have reoriented their notion of home around different things.
We don't know, but that's something we certainly want to explore. If you're thinking about the case of young people, for example, is it worth the distress of emotionally investing in the idea of something that you might never be able to have? You might as well emotionally invest in something different. And I don't know what the answer to that is, but I am curious about whether home can be located in, if you like, non-traditional places as a response to that.
James (34:20)
Yes, there's very briefly there is a small body of research that looks at whether or not there's lifestyle choices and different values amongst millennials who are owning less and it's not just a financial consideration. I am actually recently doing work with my Austrian colleague Stefan Engel on this. Yeah, and there's too much to tease out yet.
Hannah (34:43)
Well, I think that has been a really interesting tour of the notions of wellbeing and tenure. And for our listeners, if they'd like to find out more Dr. Gregory's on wellbeing and tenure, his book, Social Housing, Wellbeing and Welfare, is highly recommended by both me and Stephen. If working in the social housing sector in particular, you're definitely going to want to be reading that.
But James, thank you so, so much for coming on to our podcast and talking to us about your research. I think it's really, it's been great. And I think it's really important for our listeners to understand that relationship between research, tenure, and that experience of living in the home. And throughout the series, we're going to be exploring the notions of home in more detail and keeping that thread going and asking that question.
James (35:18)
Thank you.
Hannah (35:40)
Are we in a home crisis as much as we are a housing crisis? But we also want to hear from you. We know from conversations me and Stephen have had that whenever we mention we're doing this podcast, people just tell us the most fantastic, amazing, meaningful and deep stories. If you've got one of those, email us at hello at closertohome.org.uk. In case my Northern accent's a bit too much for you.
That's hello, H-E-L-L-O, at closer, C-L-O-S-E-R-T-O-H-O-M-E dot org dot UK. And that's it from me, Hannah Absalom.
Stephen (36:25)
And from me, Stephen Blundell.
Hannah (36:28)
We look forward to another podcast another time and thank you so much for listening.