By Peter Matthews, Professor of Social Policy and LGBTQ+ Studies, University of Stirling
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One of the challenges of housing policy is that the decisions we make today have repercussions for decades, or even centuries, to come. As is widely reported in the media, across the UK we are experiencing a housing crisis: rising numbers of people sleeping rough; increases in statutory homelessness; a decline in affordability of rented and owned housing; and the age at which most people buy their own home increasing. The most common living arrangement now for all people between 18 and 24 in the UK is living with their parents.
In our recently published paper in Social Policy and Society we have sought to understand what these broader changes might mean for lesbians, gays and bisexuals. For this, we analysed data from Understanding Society, the UK Longitudinal Household Survey. This follows a representative sample of households across the UK, surveying them at regular intervals, with regular recruitment to ensure that it remains representative of the UK population. Unfortunately, the survey does not yet collect data on trans identities.
Where do LGB people live?
When we consider descriptive statistics (just counting people) from our initial analysis we find that LGB people are more likely to rent in the PRS than non-LGB people, and gay men and bisexual women are more likely to rent from a social landlord than other groups.
However, young people are much more likely to live in the PRS and we know that LGB people are also more likely to be young – about six per cent of the population under 25 identify as LGB, compared to less than one per cent of over-70s. Therefore, the descriptive statistics could just be an artefact of these LGB people still settling down, or like many younger people, being unable to afford to purchase their first home.
For this reason, we produced a series of regression models. In our first model, we put all lesbian, gay and bisexual people together to see if there was a difference with heterosexuals. Initially this suggests there is a negative impact on rates of homeownership for LGB people because they are LGB (i.e. they are less likely to own their own home) even though they are younger, or might share other characteristics that make them less likely to be homeowners.
However, an issue with this approach is women are very different from men, and so lesbians and bisexual women are likely to have very different outcomes from gay men and bisexual men. To deal with this, in the first modelling approach we can include a variable that intersects non-heterosexuality and female gender. When we do this, our results become statistically insignificant. This suggests there is something about gender and sexual identity that has an impact on homeownership, but the sample size is insufficient in this dataset for us to identify what is really happening.
Understanding Society also asks people the value of their home. This is where we do get some interesting findings with this modelling approach. In our analysis this suggests that lesbian homeowners own lower-value homes than their heterosexual counterparts. This is slightly counter-intuitive as other analysis (including of Understanding Society) suggests lesbians, on average, earn more so should be able to afford a more expensive home.
Conversely, we find that while gay men are less likely to own their own home than heterosexual men, if they do own their own home, it is likely to be worth more than a home owned by a heterosexual man. This does suggest that, when gay men do get on the property ladder, the “double-income-no-kids” stereotype might be true.
From this complex picture, we might conclude that in terms of housing, there is nothing for us to be concerned about in terms of LGB people and their access to housing.
However, we would argue there are two practical policy concerns we must consider. Firstly, housing benefit (or the housing portion of Universal Credit) has been substantially reduced for people under-35. While it seems that the higher proportion of LGB people renting in the private-rented sector might be a product of their lower-than-average age, this still means that this group, along with all younger populations, have been disproportionally affected by this cut in welfare benefits.
In practice, this means in the qualitative interviews we have carried out, that young people are being forced to live with their parents until aged-35 because they simply cannot afford to move out. Some of these people are concerned about their safety sharing a home with strangers.
Secondly, this could also mean there is “trouble ahead”. As we mentioned at the start of this post, we are experiencing a housing crisis and home-ownership rates are falling. If these young LGB people do not manage to get on the property ladder now, then they could miss the opportunity to own an asset that is very important for individual welfare in later life.
We can already suggest that this may be the case with lesbians. That they own properties that are worth less than heterosexual women, means they will have fewer assets to draw upon when they are older, which could impact on their quality of life.
To prevent this situation getting worse, and the outcomes and inequalities experienced by LGB people getting worse, does not require specific LGB housing policy. It requires good housing policy, that delivers affordable and accessible housing for all.
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Peter Matthews is Professor of Social Policy and LGBTQ+ Studies at the University of Stirling. He is currently leading the Nuffield funded LGBT+ Welfare and Assets in Great Britain study, and is a member of the SPA Housing Policy Group.
Image credit: Peter Matthews.