Half of UK's poor own their homes

Poor homeowners are excluded from most help available

Half of adults in Britain who are "poor" are homeowners and receive little or no state help, new research has found.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation responsible for the survey said it challenged the fundamental belief that home ownership in the UK equated with wealth, and urged the government to rethink its benefits policy as a result of its findings.

Among homeowners, families with children living at home or university were most likely to be the poorest.

Homeowners often received little help, as they were often denied benefits or excluded from regeneration initiatives simply because they owned their own property.

Housing obsession backfires

Two-thirds of all homes in the UK are now owned by their occupants, following a dramatic explosion in home ownership over the last 20 years.

But according to the research, two-thirds of mortgage holders and 18% of home buyers who owned their property outright were classed as poor.

The research also found that mortgage holders were more likely to live in poverty if they were young, aged between 24 to 35, were manual workers, out of work, lone parents, or came from a black or ethnic minority group.

Poor people who owned their properties outright were most likely to be elderly.

'Crude discrimination'

Professor Roger Burrows, who conducted the survey, said that as homeowners did not tend to live in particular estates, they were excluded from many initiatives.

Existing state support for housing costs was heavily skewed in favour of private tenants, with 92% of help with housing costs going to tenants and only 8% to owners.

"It is hard to justify the crude discrimination whereby 50% of poor adults live in owner-occupied homes, yet receive only 8% state assistance with housing costs.

"We must also ask whether the area-based interventions designed to tackle social exclusion that are currently targeted on social housing estates are the best way of combating poverty."

Other findings

• Nearly half of all homeowners who were poor were couples with dependent children (48%) compared with 26% of tenants.

• Poor homeowners were more likely to be members of a black or ethnic minority group (14%) than poor people who were renting their homes (8%).

• Poor tenants were more likely to be single (40%) and less likely to be married (28%) than poor homeowners (15% and 60% respectively).

• Poor people who rented their homes were more likely to be dissatisfied with their neighbourhoods, while owners living in poverty were more likely to have problems with their properties.

Poverty was defined by the Poverty & Exclusion Survey measure, under which it is estimated that 25% of the UK's adult population is poor.