Don't bother asking people to move to smaller homes, says think tank

Most households in England today are ‘under-occupying’ their homes, according to the think tank the Resolution Foundation.

And it says there doesn’t seem much point trying to introduce incentives to reverse the trend.

The think tank claims that as many as three-in-four single pensioners now live in a home with a spare bedroom. Overall, 71% of households have at least one spare bedroom, 2% more than 30 years ago.

Although there are more than enough suitably-sized dwellings in England, the report notes that it is an implausible policy aim to encourage a sizeable chunk of the population to ‘right-size’. 

Stronger incentives are possible – such as removing the Council Tax discount for single people living alone – but it admits “this would likely be insufficient to outweigh the strong preferences people have for their homes and the space they provide.”

The foundation claims that England now has 13m more bedrooms than it did in the 1990s yet overall it suffers from no less overcrowding.

The think tank’s research claims that more than one-in-five homes now contain four or more bedrooms yet overall, overcrowding has increased slightly over the last three decades – from 3% of households in 1994-95 to 4% in 2022-23.

It says that’s the equivalent of 850,000 families living in overcrowded homes today.

The Foundation notes that the groups most likely to experience overcrowding in 1994-95 have almost all seen overcrowding rates increase – in particular renting, low-income, ethnic minority or single-parent households. 

The greatest rise has been for Black and single parent households, which have both seen a 6% increase in rates of overcrowding. Some historically- overcrowded groups have seen improvements, with Asian households seeing rates drop by 5% to reach 13%. 

This rise in overcrowding has happened concurrently with English homes having, on average, more bedrooms today than three decades ago. 

This increase has come about through a combination of new building and existing households reclassifying other rooms as bedrooms. There has been a 71% increase in households occupying four-bedroom properties from 2.4m in 1994-95, to 4.1m in 2022-23, resulting in 22% of households now living in homes with four or more bedrooms.

The foundation concludes that given the unfeasibility of ‘right-sizing’, the policy priority to address overcrowding should be to build more larger homes. 

This should be focused in the social rented sector, where 9% of households currently live in overcrowded conditions. It notes that in order to eliminate overcrowding in the social rented sector in England today, 8,000 more three bed homes would be required, 113,000 more four bed homes and 25,000 more homes with five or more bedrooms.

In addition, support for low-income renters through Local Housing Allowance should be unfrozen and re-pegged to local rents, so families in overcrowded private rented homes (where 7% are overcrowded) can move to properties that more accurately reflect their needs.

Finally, the foundation’s analysis suggests that the existing method for calculating sufficient floor space – the so-called ‘bedroom standard’ – may be due for revision, as shifts in working patterns and a growing acceptance that older children and sometimes older couples should have their own bedroom mean that additional rooms are increasingly becoming the norm. 

An updated bedroom standard which reflects these trends would mean that the overcrowding rate for single parent households would jump from 18 per cent to 30 per cent – reflecting the disproportionate impact that overcrowding has on vulnerable groups in England.