By Charlotte Rogers, Research Assistant, Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE), London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). See full list of contributing authors at bottom.
Keywords: housing, decarbonisation, sufficiency, housing crisis
How should we respond when life’s fundamental necessities become increasingly ecologically destructive? How do we define necessities in contrast to luxuries, and understand the trade-off between human and environmental well-being? These are the questions we begin to address in our forthcoming paper, concentrating on the unique consumption good of housing, conceptualised as a universal human need. Using a sufficiency approach, we demarcate a ‘housing corridor’ for the UK, identifying a sufficiency space between necessities and luxuries. This is the space we must collectively aim to occupy. Our strategy is informed not only by biophysical limits, but also by mutually enforcing ethico-social limits, manifest in vast levels of inequality.
Housing and sufficiency
Housing is a particularly crucial and complex need to tackle from an eco-social standpoint. The UK’s housing sector is constituted by extreme structural inequalities. While housing comprises the most dominant form of personal capital and savings in the UK, such capital is predicated on a lack of access to decent and affordable housing for millions of people. In the UK, housing is also a highly carbon intensive sector – in 2022, residential buildings accounted for 17% of all carbon emissions. Under current policy, housing alone would consume 104% of England’s cumulative carbon budget for 2050. Despite this, current cross-party policy seeks to build 300,000 new homes a year.
A sufficiency approach intends to address these symptoms in tandem – ensuring that decarbonisation strategies bolster, rather than further erode, the material foundations of social wellbeing. It draws from long-standing normative arguments which highlight the profound injustice of forcing the worst off to bear the brunt of decarbonisation by reducing their necessitous consumption, while luxurious consumption by the rich continues. Given the intricate link between personal wealth and carbon footprints, reducing emissions and compressing economic inequality must start at the top. The only fair approach is one which recognises limits to production and consumption.
Ian Gough has previously defined sufficiency as a conceptual space between a floor, to ensure a decent minimum standard for all, and a ceiling, above which lies unsustainable excess (see Figure 1). This framework can be aptly applied to the domain of housing in order to identify relevant and applicable ‘floors’ and ‘ceilings’. There are, of course, numerous characteristics of housing to consider when delimiting a sufficiency corridor. The most commonly identified dimensions of adequate housing are housing size relative to the number of occupants, housing quality, affordability, and security. All of these measures must be amply realised to achieve sufficiency in housing. Particularly paramount from an environmental perspective, however, is housing space, on account of the strong correlation between residential energy consumption and dwelling size per capita.
Figure 1 The Sufficiency Framework
| Wellbeing | Wealth/Income | Consumption | |
| Above ceiling | Excess | Riches | Luxuries |
| Ceiling | |||
| Sufficiency | Flourishing | Moderate incomes | Comfort goods |
| Needs met | Decent minimum | Necessities | |
| Floor | |||
| Below floor | Deprivation | Poverty | Lack of necessities |
A ‘housing corridor’
The legitimate identification of corridor thresholds ideally requires deliberative inquiry, drawing from both expert and lay knowledge. In lieu of such ‘dual strategy’ research, government-set standards can be utilised, which claim some degree of democratic credibility. To delineate minimum and maximum housing space standards, for example, the bedroom standard and floorspace standard can be employed. On the lower threshold, the standards require particular persons (or couples) to have their own bedroom[1], and for each person to have 40m2 of housing space, with 10m2 more for each additional person. Persons with less than this, or persons in a state of complete homelessness, thus fall into a category of deprivation below the floor threshold.
There is, unsurprisingly, no explicit policy in the UK on housing maxima, and very limited deliberation-based research on the subject. Drawing from the small pool of existing research, and a pertinent threshold in housing data, an upper space threshold can be admissibly proposed. This threshold constitutes having two or more bedrooms above the bedroom standard, and having double the space standard – 80m2 for the first person, and 20m2 more for each additional person. Numbers of long-term vacant homes and second or multiple homes should also be included as measures of excess.
In using these sufficiency categories to analyse the current distribution, and emissions, of existing housing space in England, numerous important insights can be fleshed out:
- Far more households enjoy excess space than those who lack sufficiency. This supports a pre-existing assertion that there is no gross shortage of housing in England.
- Emissions intensity per square metre of floorspace is higher among properties with excess floorspace.
- The major contributors to excess emissions as well as floorspace are elderly owner occupiers.
- Excess space and emissions are entirely absent in the social housing sector.
Policy proposals
These findings underscore the necessity of a sufficiency approach – one which requires fundamental shifts in social practice, rather than efficient ‘quick fixes’. It is inescapably true that the energy efficiency of the existing housing stock must be vastly increased. However, it is also evident that, in contrast to the UK government’s current Heat and Buildings Strategy, a more interventionist and place-based retrofitting strategy is needed with new modes of targeting, regulation, and subsidies. Technological efficiency must be informed by sufficiency principles, to ensure effective and fair distribution.
Policy options which would help catalyse such a shift include more progressive pricing and taxation, as well as the regulation of second homes and excess housing. Progressive property or land tax, for example, would exempt housing needs, while levying surcharges on excess housing. Since there is significant evidence that government regulation is effective in ensuring that minimal standards are met, outright bans of harmful activities such as second home ownership should also be considered. There is already a growing practice in imposing licensing requirements or bans in Cornwall, Wales, and various locales in Europe.
Further sufficiency-driven options include policies which better match housing stock to households. Facilitating downsizing to combat the ‘empty nest’ phenomenon, through price incentives, alternative housing provisions and the division of existing properties, is a key component of this. There is also a vital need to expand forms of tenure in ways which allow for greater democratic control over the use of housing space. The public acquisition of housing assets which staunchly conflict with sufficiency objectives, such as vacant and non-decent private rental homes, will be central to this endeavour. This should involve rights of first refusal, acquisitions on the open market, and, ultimately, compulsory purchase. Beyond this, all new building should be of social housing.
Maintaining and rebuilding the UK’s housing stock can simultaneously serve urgent environmental and social goals. To achieve fair decarbonisation, we must go beyond quick-fix efficiency measures, and adopt a novel housing sufficiency strategy. By envisaging and utilising a ‘housing corridor’ we can pave the way from where we are now to where we need to be.
Submitted as part of the SPA’s Climate Justice and Social Policy Group
For the full report see: ‘Fair decarbonising of housing in the UK: A sufficiency approach’ (Ian Gough, Stefan Horn, Charlotte Rogers, Rebecca Tunstall) (forthcoming CASE Paper)
Ian Gough is a CASE Visiting Professor and Associate of the Grantham Institute. He is the author of Heat, Greed and Human Need (2017) and several articles advocating eco-social policy.
Stefan Horn is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at UCL researching.
Charlotte Rogers is Research Assistant to Prof Gough at CASE.
Becky Tunstall is a CASE Visiting Professor and is Professor Emerita of Housing at the University of York.
[1] The Bedroom Standard requires that a separate bedroom should be provided to the following persons: 1) couples of adults, 2) a person aged 21 years or over; 3) pairs of same-sex persons aged between 10 to 20 years; 4) people aged 10 to 20 years who are paired with a person aged under 10 years of the same sex; 5) pairs of children aged under 10 years, regardless of their sex; and 6) people aged under 21 years who cannot be paired with someone in 3), 4) or 5)