The Duration of Bad Housing and Children's Well-being in Britain

Abstract

Improving children's living standards is a top priority for government policy makers. Whilst the presence of a link between bad housing and child outcomes has been acknowledged in a number of studies, there is little evidence on how long children live in bad housing for and whether the duration of living in bad housing is associated with other poor outcomes for children. This research uses five waves of data from the Families and Children Study, a representative longitudinal study of families with children in Britain, to show that the longer children live in bad housing the more vulnerable they are to a range of other poor outcomes included in the Government's Every Child Matters framework. The research implies that policy makers need to focus on reducing the substantial number of children who live in bad housing for long periods and that interventions in housing provision for families are likely to lead to improvements in many other aspects of children's lives.

Keywords:

• Property conditions
• housing policy
• overcrowding
• children
• panel data

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Eaga Partnership Charitable Trust (Eaga-PCT), a grant giving trust that focuses on issues of fuel poverty, and Shelter, the homelessness and bad housing charity. Preliminary findings from the research were discussed at a seminar at Shelter's head office in London. A summary of this research was previously made available on the NatCen website http://www.natcen.ac.uk/natcen/pages/op_natcen_research_findings.htm

The Families and Children Study (FACS) is managed and sponsored by the Department for Work and Pension, and co-sponsored by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, and the Department for Transport. FACS data are available from the UK Data Archive (www.data-archive.ac.uk)