By Rob Gershon

I know what you’re thinking: “Great, another report on housing!” Who wouldn’t relish the prospect of reading 11 chapters on the wider issues around rent arrears and a set of conclusions and recommendations?

Just on the off chance you might not have time to read the report in its complete form, I thought I’d try and summarise why it’s important and look particularly at its focus on tenants. This took the form of surveying a total of 1,213 tenants across three of the four landlords who took part in the research, with a smaller group of 64 tenants interviewed in-depth.

As a quick disclaimer, I was supposed to be involved in the project, after helping with the scope at the very beginning, but as things turned out my other responsibilities meant I didn’t have the time to give it what it deserved. I had the pleasure of still being included in emails as the project group and tenants communicated throughout its 30-month duration, as HQN was involved in administering this aspect. This is how I know that tenants were centred in the work the team were doing.

It does take a little while for the tenant focus to come through in the final report. The first four chapters deal with the full scope of the project, and the kinds of approaches taken by landlords towards ‘tenancy sustainment’. This can often feel a bit dry, but the third and fourth chapters are the space where you’ll find the majority of the tables and graphs and quotes from staff. Handy if you’re coming to the report from a finance department or rent collection point of view.

One of the important points raised in Chapter 4 is that although landlords can easily identify tenants in arrears, and often act to try and support them, the data from the surveys shows that arrears can be a poor measure of tenancy sustainment risk, as many tenants are only meeting their rent by going into debt or cutting back elsewhere:

“Indeed ‘arrears’ may be the tip of an iceberg, wherein many more people are struggling to pay their rent and doing all they can to maintain their rent payments. Social landlords are easily able to identify tenants in arrears, but these findings suggest that there is a potentially large tenant population who are far less visible to their landlords, yet may be at risk of developing arrears and may benefit from support.”

Where this support might come from is unclear, as staff responses from Chapter 3 make it clear that landlords themselves are also undertaking levels of support that are potentially not sustainable in the long run. Problems recruiting and retaining staff and ongoing struggles collecting rent under universal credit featured amongst a host of issues landlords must now accommodate, often where the state itself has retreated.

The fifth, sixth and seventh chapters are those which most heavily use the information from tenants to inform the report. They cover tenants’ financial circumstances, approaches to money management, and other ways low-income households manage and supplement their incomes through strategies, support services and charities available.

It’s these chapters I’m going to focus briefly on here. The financial circumstances of tenants were marked by a number of identifying factors, including receipt of benefits, precarious and low-paid employment, limited or no savings and an unusually high prevalence of debt, with a quarter of respondents reporting they were behind with at least one bill outside of rent.

Around a third of respondents reported not running out of money from payment to payment, with a further 23% ‘hardly ever’ running out of money, but this left a big chunk of tenants (43%) ‘running out of money on a regular basis’. Chapter five features a lot of quotes from the direct experiences of tenants trying to balance how to meet multiple demands on their limited incomes – often making impossible decisions to underpay council tax and energy bills or to forego food to pay rent.

Section 5.3 deals with tenant indebtedness and are essential reading for anyone approaching the report – I won’t reproduce the quotes here, but the choices tenants are being forced to make as a result of irreconcilable poverty challenges many of the assumptions made about people living in poverty simply not trying hard enough to get out of it, something that a change in government has not addressed.

Chapter 5 also notes that people who encounter a sickness or live with disability are particularly badly served by the benefits system.

“As reported in the previous section, changes in circumstances such as sickness or disability were particularly worrying for tenants managing on low incomes. This was the case for tenants in work and for those in receipt of universal credit, where the benefit cap applies. These concerns drove one tenant to return to work before they had recovered from a succession of major surgeries.”

Chapter 6 is another essential read for landlords looking to behave proactively towards arrears and tenancy sustainment. It makes it clear that, contrary to often very public assumptions about people living in poverty, the vast majority of tenants do not need further education on finances or budgeting, but are predominantly simply not in receipt of enough money, whether through work or benefits, to meet all their costs.

As the report puts it “…the financial difficulties experienced by the social housing tenants participating in the study…cannot be explained primarily with reference to poor budgeting skills, disorganised management of money or a cavalier attitude to financial obligations”.

Chapter 7 focuses on the ways tenants interact with other services in order to meet their rent payments, and the sacrifices families are making in order to do so. It’s another slightly traumatic read but essential when faced with popular narratives about people living with the support of social security.

Food banks, pantries and other ‘free’ or subsidised food schemes feature highly here, as one of the most obvious ways that participants try to reduce the costs of other things to pay rent. What becomes apparent from the study is that while this can provide access to very basic foodstuffs, for many tenants this leads to eating less, with some families ‘choosing’ to eat once a day, and eat less healthily, with access to things like fruit replaced with processed or low-nutrition foods, purely because of costs.

Reiterating Chapter 5’s focus on the ‘cost-of-living crisis’, the seventh chapter also makes reference to families having to make sacrifices around not just heating but other energy use – “Tenants also reported using their electricity minimally, not watching television, ‘boiling the kettle if I need to do the washing up’ and sitting with the lights off”.

What might be considered ‘leisure, activities for children and treats’ have also been abandoned by many tenants. In addition, things many families would take for granted but social tenants now consider luxuries. In practical terms this means children are going without – not just for things like sweets but sometimes shoes. In particular families do not have money for holidays or leisure activities, with the risk of a generation of children growing up unable to travel anywhere or experience anything outside the home.

“I feel like [daughter] does miss out on a lot like that. My friends will go ‘we’re going Blackpool for the day, do you want to bring [daughter]?’ and I’m like ‘got no money, I can’t’.”

“Well, me and my son don’t really go anywhere. We don’t have family days out, I can’t take him to a play centre, we can’t go out for meals or go to a nice park by getting the bus, because we don’t have the funds to even get on the bus to go somewhere and I can’t drive because I can’t afford a car. So, we’re just very isolated at the moment.”

Chapters 8 and 9 offer insights into the causes of rent arrears, with an overriding factor being just how mean universal credit and other benefits are, with other legacy policies like the bedroom tax pushing people from just about affording rent into arrears, too.

Chapters 10 and 11 focus on interactions between landlords and tenants and offer some insight into practical ways of introducing ‘quality interactions’ for landlords. It’s not all bad news, with landlords and tenants both reporting what is effective, but there is an underlying recognition that often tenants can feel like it’s them against everyone else, with landlords arguably having chosen to act on behalf of the state and institutions rather than tenants, though this is very much my own interpretation of some fairly complex information.

Ultimately this report comes at a crucial time, where housing policy and politics have been experiencing friction with social security policy for a number of years. The report makes clear that unhelpful narratives about social housing tenants are not reflective of their lived experience. Knowledgeable tenants are reacting to a set of circumstances beyond their control, with rising rents, more punitive conditionality in the benefits system and disproportionately rising prices of essentials like food and energy underscoring the vast majority of arrears.

Coupled with the warnings about families not yet, or just about outside of rent arrears, this detailed report should form the basis for changes in both some landlord behaviours and in national housing and welfare policy.