England, traditionally seen as a nation of homeowners, is experiencing significant change in the types of housing tenure in which people live. The Government has estimated that there are more than one million households who have been excluded from home ownership in recent years.1 This reflects the costs of housing and difficulties accessing mortgage finance as well as the impact of an ageing population and past housing policies. Taken together with cutbacks in funding for social housing and continued growth in household numbers, Britain is seeing an almost inevitable increase in private renting. This has been most apparent for the younger age group, with a threefold increase in private renting among the under 35 age group on below average incomes from the late 1980s to the late 2000s.

The first part of this report looks back at tenure change between 1993/94 and 2009/10, using the Government’s Survey of English Housing and its successor the English Housing Survey. This historical look breaks the data down by tenure, region, household type and income. The second part projects trends forward to 2025, and it explores how tenure structures may develop under different economic scenarios. Here we report on the core findings based on two scenarios – a continuing weak economy and a cautiously slow economic expansion from the current low base.

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