title: Wellbeing in the UK PRS: a longitudinal analysis of outcomes for families and children
Creators: name: Brady, Ewan
Publisher: name: University of Glasgow
Year: 2025

description: The housing system in the United Kingdom has seen substantial shifts over the last century, with its position amongst the policy priorities of government remaining consistently prominent. However, government ambitions regarding housing have taken different shapes and are reflected in those changes to the housing landscape, whether that be the clearances of poor-quality housing or the sale of vast swathes of social housing. There have been concurrent shifts in the demography of the private rented sector (PRS), also. In contrast to the common conception of the sector as a home to young people saving for a mortgage deposit, or those seeking mobility to access employment opportunities, the PRS now houses many who would prefer to live in other tenures. This includes those priced out of home-ownership and those who would have, in the past, been housed in social housing (SH). Increasingly, families and children have come to represent larger proportion of private tenants, while many renters are staying in the sector further into their lives.

These changes represent a marked shift in the use of the PRS and one that is argued to have not been reflected in policy relating to it. This is of particular consequence for families, who lack the long-term security and agency in housing decisions that they need. Indeed, the UK’s lightly-regulated PRS is argued to be one that embodies insecurity. Alongside poor housing conditions and high housing costs, much qualitative research has found tenants face negative health effects owing to or exacerbated by the particular conditions of renting privately. This research does not show the scale of any effects, however. There is also little focus on families and children. While quantitative research on the effect of poor conditions on physical health has come to be well-represented in the literature, the impact on mental wellbeing remains little-studied in the UK context.

To meet these evidence needs, this thesis has sought to answer the following research questions: Do wellbeing outcomes differ between tenure groups across the life course? Does exposure to the UK PRS in childhood impact mental wellbeing in later life? Do PRS tenants with children exhibit different mental wellbeing outcomes than those without? To answer these questions, the thesis analyses data from two of the UK’s largest cohort surveys, the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) and the Millenium Cohort Study. Generalised Linear Mixed Models (GLMMs) are estimated on the BCS70 data in order to make robust estimates of effects over time. Generalised Linear Models (GLMs) and are also estimated to investigate effects in middle-age, while linear models are estimated on MCS data to investigate effects for a younger age cohort.

The research finds generalisable effects across the life-course of PRS tenants, adding important evidence to the literature. Controlling for a range of influential factors, tenure-wide disparities in wellbeing are found to persist and even grow as tenants age, while parents in the PRS facing significantly worse outcomes than owner-occupiers approaching middle-age. Importantly, the research finds significant negative effects across the life course for those who have early-life exposure to the PRS. Young people in the PRS are also estimated to have poorer wellbeing in the younger age cohort, implying that the negative effects of living in the sector are being replicated for a younger generation. In light of these results, recommendations are made to ameliorate the negative consequences of living in the PRS and to make it a more secure and livable sector, as well as for further research to explore the effects found.