Housing and Consumption
1. Introduction
1. A fundamental aspect of any housing system’s outcomes concerns the level and distribution of housing consumption by households and, by implication, policy measures required to address inadequacies in that pattern, be it insufficient or excess consumption. The key issues addressed in this paper involve:
· The co-existence of excessive consumption in some parts of the housing system and other households facing excessive and unaffordable housing cost burdens.
· The dynamic nature of housing consumption over the lifecycle and its relationship with housing need.
· The relationship at the aggregate level between housing equity, debt and economy-wide consumption.
· The importance of housing consumption at the core of the Commission’s remit and indeed to society and the economy.
· The scope for policy reform on both an incremental and a more radical scale to improve affordability and the sustainability of housing consumption.
2. This short paper is organised around four elements:
I. A conceptual discussion of these interlinking points above.
II. A descriptive account of the stylised facts of housing consumption, affordability, housing wealth, debt, the importance of benefits-funded housing consumption.
III. A short review of what we know about a select set of key issues that are problematized and have policy relevance to the Commission (defining, measuring and bounding the issue of need; identifying key problems for the most vulnerable to under-consumption; incentivising efficient consumption levels; reforming housing benefit and tax systems, etc.) .
IV. An overview of the key policy challenges arising from the housing consumption debate e.g. the long term impacts of unaffordable private housing and its impact inter alia on the cost of new affordable housing and land.
2. Background
3. A first point to stress is that while an important dimension, consumption is not just about household expenditure but it is about opportunity cost in the basic sense of the consuming of housing services, depreciation of existing housing and the use of energy and other resources. Because it is such a fundamental aspect of the housing problem, it is highly interdependent with other major concerns of the Commission.
4. Second, and while there is every reason to look closely at affordability and unaffordability in the housing system, it should also be clear that at the same time as some households face excessive housing cost burdens and cannot access housing in the appropriate or required levels, other households are influenced by other f incentives which encourage excess consumption, particularly of second hand (non-productive) housing. It is well known for instance that most under-occupation occurs in the home ownership sector. Excess consumption would on the face of it raise worries about inefficiency, inequality and sustainability. An assessment of disequilibrium consumption patterns needs to address both of these sorts of problems.
5. Third, housing consumption is dynamic and reflects life course stages in terms of demand but also results in changing demand for types of consumption, obsolescence and again via policy incentives such as welfare benefit reform. Preferences for housing type, neighbourhoods, location and tenure – evolve and not just because of changing relative prices. New supply only changes the stock very slowly with the result that the existing built environment and housing stock dominate both the housing system and individual preferences and opportunities (social scientists talk usefully here about path dependencies – historical initial conditions that continue to shape contemporary outcomes and for which policy has only a partial impact before for example these conditions reassert themselves).
6. Fourth, there are contrasting views about how best to understand affordability: as a housing cost to income question, in terms of residual income after housing costs (appropriately adjusting for household type, size and circumstance), or assessing when households have enough income to no longer require housing benefit support. More fundamentally, other commentators such as Duncan Maclennan, in criticising the vagueness and imprecision of affordability, question the validity of the concept; others like Glen Bramley want an explicit element of minimum housing standards added to the concept. Others have asked whether the problem is inherently about income distributional issues or/and housing market failure? Do housing markets work tolerably well but are swamped by problems caused by low income and income inequality? Or, is it that housing markets do not work well enough? Or, might both sets of problems apply? The point here is that different policy responses are suggested depending on the source of the affordability problem. Affordability therefore has to be defined and empirically understood before it can be used to evaluate whether various housing policy generate affordable outcomes.
7. Fifth, when we consider housing consumption and what we mean by it, there is a tricky market versus non-market issue concerning the relative merits of market based measures of consumption and housing needs assessments (contrasting the overlapping relationships between housing demand, aspirations and housing need). A market based measure of consumption, which is the basis of demand analysis, is usually based on the annual rental value of a given asset and can be thought of in terms of the housing services produced by that stock – statistical techniques can isolate and quantify these concepts (e.g. hedonic regression). Housing need on the other hand is a quantity that drops out of a series of accounting calculations that seek to estimate the sum of number of households captured by a range of housing deprivation measures (e.g. homeless, overcrowded, unable to afford market housing, etc.)[i]. This is more than a technical matter of definition in that it has implications for policymaking and prioritisation.
8. Sixth, since mortgage deregulation in the 1980s (and thereafter), there has been an acute awareness that rising house prices (actual and anticipated) has via additional borrowing and spending based on rising housing equity, been associated with volatile increase in aggregate consumption and debt. This has made it harder to on the one hand forecast the shape and level of aggregate demand in the economy but at the same time it has also arguably helped to unbalance the economy and make it less manageable. This is a controversial area of monetary economics[ii] but it undoubtedly points to the importance of housing as a key source of personal sector wealth, mortgage lending and volatile prices as key variables in the macro-economy. The policy issue here is that the volatile deregulated housing market is distorting non-housing consumption and that this is to the detriment of the wider economy
9. Finally, there is the question of housing equity and its uses for consumption. This might be about providing resources across generations, or paying for old age or care or for maintaining or extending standards of living through using up free housing equity. There is clearly a wider set of questions relating to older households and inter generational transfers of wealth (see the Mind the (Housing Wealth) Gap project for Leverhulme run by Beverly Searle[iii]). This also speaks across the theme to affordability problems where the young cannot access home ownership and to other questions of under-occupation, housing-household mismatch and housing debt.
3. Key Facts
10. Looking at data for 2010, Wilcox and Pawson (2013)[iv] suggest the value of aggregate UK housing wealth (i.e. gross housing assets equal to mortgage debt plus housing equity) was £4,036 billion (£2,797 billion of which was equity). In real terms gross housing assets have grown from an index of 100 in 1970 to 947 in 2010. In contrast, in the same year (2010), total aggregate consumption, ie all spending by households and the personal sector was worth just £904 billion. This means that relatively small proportional injections of borrowing based on withdrawing housing equity can have large spending implications. Equity withdrawal is highly pro-cyclical and therefore it is not surprising that it has been negative during the recession and market downturn (in other words people are repaying debt not adding to it) but prior to the bust in 2006, Wilcox and Pawson calculated aggregate equity withdrawal from the housing market at £53.566 billion or 6.55% of all consumer spending in the economy. This borrowing/consumption channel is one reason why the housing market is so important to the wider economy. Equivalent figures are not calculated for Scotland but similar trends are anticipated (the mortgage market is a UK rather a regional market).
11. Housing consumption is fundamentally about what we consume and important dimensions of that are housing tenure and property type. Wilcox and Pawson (2013, Table 21) show that contrasting 1991 and 2011, the UK stock of swellings in home ownership grew by 14%, social renting fell by 15%, private renting grew by 116% and all dwellings grew by 16%. In Scotland, the respective figures were: 45% (owner occupied) 99% (private renting, -33% (social renting) and 16% for all dwellings. Thus, Scotland's home owning sector grew more, from a lower base, and the social sector fell more than for the UK as a whole, from a higher base. The big increase in private renting was substantial but less dramatic than for the UK. Scottish data from the House Condition Survey for 2011 suggests that 65% of Scottish households live in houses and 35% in flats. Although detached houses comprise 50% of the houses built since 1981 a large proportion of the remaining pre 1919 dwellings are tenement flats.. For the UK as whole, newer properties are either more likely to be found in the owner-occupied or housing association sectors with the private renting sector possessing the oldest dwellings (Wilcox and Pawson, 2013, Tables 30a and 30b).
12. Benefit help to support housing consumption was taken up by 484,000 Scottish tenants in 2012 (97,000 of whom were private tenants) receiving an average of £67.95 a week - the lowest of any region in Great Britain (Wilcox and Pawson, ibid, Table 118). This is generally attributed to lower social rents and a smaller private rental market. Recent figures for Housing Benefit spending in Scotland (IPPR 2014[v]) suggests for 2010-11 that HB cost £1,661 million in Scotland and was 10.61% of all regionally identified spending and compared with 12.6% for England and 9.07% in Wales. This does not include support for mortgage interest (for those qualifying on income support). Note that for the same year, council tax benefit was £387m (2.48% of the identifiable total, less than the 2.87% identified for England).
13. Housing affordability is, as we have seen, a tricky thing to measure. This has not stopped people trying. Wilcox and Pawson have constructed a regional affordability index over time using mix adjusted house prices for first time buyers and regional household earnings data (higher scores measure greater unaffordability). The model assumes an 82% loan to house price ratio and is based on average mortgage lender rates. A standard 25 year repayment mortgage is assumed. This synthetic index is set at 100 for 1994. The UK index peaked in 2007 at 200.9 and has since fallen back to 137.5 in 2011. Scotland's comparable figure peaked at 166.7 in 2007 before falling back to 105.7 in 2011.
14. The last national level analysis of housing needs in Scotland was carried out by Bramley and colleagues in 2006. This analysis suggested a central estimate of 10,000 between bounds of 8,000 and 13,000 households in unmet housing need, This was a desk-based modelled analysis of the problem. An update the following year of the same model suggested a figure of between 10,000 to14,000[vi]. Local analysis has been updated and guidance (2008) issued by the Scottish Government’s Centre for Housing Market Analysis as part of the Housing Needs and Demand Assessment (HNDA). This way of measuring housing need builds on structure planning infrastructure and geography[vii]. Note that there may be a discrepancy between needs estimates summed from individual local authorities and needs estimates calculated across functional housing market areas that straddle local authority boundaries. The latter are more robust but it is the former council level boundaries that matter (and are now used in sub-national resource planning work involving consistent estimates of housing need by COSLA and the Scottish Government).
15. Housing taxation is complex. Housing consumption is taxed via the council tax (net of means-tested benefits and discounts) - if you think that the council tax is a tax on the value of housing consumption rather than say a tax on housing wealth. VAT is exempt on new build properties but does apply to repair and improvements. Taxes on transactions are organised through Stamp Duty (to be replaced in Scotland by the proposed Land and Buildings Transaction Tax within the 2012 Scotland Act). Private landlords pay income tax and capital gains tax but also can deduct loan interest form their tax (and can claim on other limited tax breaks). Owners pay no investment taxation on their primary residences. The housing sector is thus a long way removed from either internal consistency between tenures let alone with respect to consumers or investors in general (cf the Mirlees Review). While we have seen the under-occupation charge (the bedroom tax) on social tenants with spare rooms and also tighter limits to the size criteria capping benefit in the private rented sector, there is no tax incentive other than the very blunt council tax, to encourage a more efficient use of the home ownership stock, a tenure where it is widely recognised that there is far more under-occupation than elsewhere in the UK sector.