Who Are The Renters?

A study of occupations, rent and geography

By Ishan Khurana (data collation, processing and analysis), Phil Jones & Jack Kellam

May 7 2021

This study has utilised a data set comprising nearly 2 million entries, spanning 21 quarters of the Labour Force Survey, over the past five years in order to give a picture of the relationship between occupation and housing status (in particular rent) in the UK. Who are the renters? Which workers tend to rent more and which are more likely to own a home? How does London compare to the UK as a whole in this regard?

 

As the debate around class continues to develop, this interactive report intends to contribute to answering some of those questions. Inevitably, more data is required for a granular, comprehensive analysis, but the complex findings presented here provide a snapshot of the composition of the UK workforce and its material conditions today.

  • The churn of low-income work and expensive renting is worse in London than anywhere else in the UK.

 

  • The occupations in London with the highest prevalence of renters are:
    • Cleaners and domestics
    • Elementary construction occupations
    • Waiters and waitresses
    • Kitchen and catering assistants
    • Care workers and home carers

 

  • The jobs that compose these occupations are often poorly paid and insecure.

 

  • All of these occupations – except for ‘Elementary construction occupations’ – are composed of jobs disproportionately done by women.

 

  • All four of the occupations largely done by women are associated with wages below, or just above (care workers), the poverty line. The only occupation that pays above is the one dominated by men, ‘Elementary construction occupations’. 

 

  • All four of these occupations are associated with insecure work with volatile hours. ‘Waiters and waitresses’, Kitchen and catering assistants’ are in the hospitality sector, which has the highest degree of zero-hour contracts in any sector in the UK. ‘Care workers and home carers’ is one of the top occupations associated with zero-hour contracts. Workers in the ‘Cleaners and domestics’ category are often self-employed, a contractual arrangement that offers no rights or benefits to the worker.

 

  • These occupations are in some of the sectors that have felt the worst impacts of the Covid 19 pandemic. In particular, those in the hospitality sector – ‘Waiters and waitresses’ and ‘Kitchen and catering staff’ – are some of the occupations that saw the highest levels of redundancies and also the largest drops in pay in 2020.

Class in the twenty-first century has undergone a radical change. Less and less simply shaped by the kinds of work people do, class is now increasingly governed by the assets people own. Yet many remain wedded to an older model of class that privileges work and occupation. Though these remain important factors, alone they can no longer account for a class structure that has, to no small degree, shifted from worker and boss to renter and rentier.

 

Rent represents income created by virtue of owning a scarce asset, whether it be something solid like a house or a patch of land, or something intangible like a brand or a patent. Rentiers own the assets and renters make use of them at a cost. Driven by these logics, the UK economy today has often come to be described as “rentier capitalism”.[1] Rentier capitalism is an economic regime organised and driven by the profits gained from income-generating assets.[2] It is an economic order associated with growing inequality levels[3], widespread corruption[4] and ‘taking’ rather than ‘making’.[5]

 

These logics are no more apparent than in the UK’s housing market, which in recent years has become the crucible of a new logic of inequality. Indeed, in most of the Global North’s urban centres, property price values have appreciated to such a degree that homeownership is now out of reach for a growing number.[6] This phenomenon has been deepened by wage stagnation, which has remained recalcitrant since the 2008 financial crash. In the UK, house prices continued to rise during the pandemic, climbing by 6.5% on average between December 2019 and December 2020, the fastest rate for almost six years, while real term wages remain lower than before 2008.[7] This dynamic of rising asset prices alongside sluggish wages has meant that younger generations in particular tend to rent more and are renting for longer.[8] Left out of inflationary asset dynamics, the ‘churners’ – more often than not Millenials and Zoomers – are stuck in a perpetual stasis of insecure housing, precarious work and diminished opportunities.[9]

[1] Brett Christophers (2020), Rentier Capitalism: who owns the economy and who pays for it?. Verso.

 

[2] Brett Christophers (2020), Rentier Capitalism: who owns the economy and who pays for it?. Verso.

 

[3] Thomas Piketty (2013), Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Harvard University Press.

 

[4] Guy Standing (2016), The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay. Biteback Publishing.

 

[5] Mariana Mazzucato (2018), The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. Penguin.

 

[6] Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings (2020),The Asset Economy. Polity.

 

[7] BBC (2020), ‘UK house price growth fastest for almost six years’. BBC. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55143223

 

[8] ONS (2020), ‘Living longer: changes in housing tenure over time’. ONS. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/ageing/articles/livinglonger/changesinhousingtenureovertime

 

[9] Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings (2020),The Asset Economy. Polity.

Figure 1: Renters by occupation, gender and weekly income

Source: Autonomy analysis of ONS

Figure 1 plots over 200 occupations in the UK, the percentage of workers in those occupations that rent, and their median incomes in these roles.

 

The Theil-Sen regression lines show the relationship between income and rental status, for London and for the UK as a whole. As can be observed, there is a much stronger correlation between low-income occupations and the likelihood of renting (versus other forms of housing status) in London than in the rest of the country.

 

There is significant variation in rental rates for workers in similar income brackets. For instance, in the UK, the median weekly income for Library Clerks is £268, while the median income for Launderers, Dry Cleaners and Pressers is £270, but the rental rates for each are 51% and 20% respectively. This points to the fact that present income is far from the only factor that determines an individual’s housing tenure, which needs to be understood in terms of a longer timescale amongst other important additional factors.

The changing nature of class: the new dispossessed?

The findings of this study suggest that the new logics of asset-based wealth have impacted people commonly referred to as ‘working class’ to significantly different degrees. As such, they complicate the picture of who exactly composes the working class, and who is worst off in today’s economy, beyond the narrow parameters of a few occupations.

 

If we look at Figure 2, we can see that many of those in occupations usually associated with the ‘working class’ – those that broadly fall into the C2DE social grades – are in fact homeowners, i.e., those that stand to benefit from the reproduction of the asset economy. Significantly, most manual workers, including those in ‘skilled’, ‘semi-skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ professions, are more often than not homeowners with a mortgage rather than renters. This includes ‘Carpenters and joiners’, ‘Plasterers’, ‘Electricians and electrical fitters’, ‘Floorers and wall tilers’ as well as ‘Roofers, rooftilers and slaters’. Aside from ‘Elementary construction workers’ in London, the majority of manual workers own their home as opposed to rent.

 

Similarly, those who work in factories as ‘Assemblers’, ‘Mobile machine drivers and operatives’ and ‘Metal-working machine operatives’ tend to own their homes with a mortgage or outright.

 

This suggests that those at the sharpest end of the UK economy are not necessarily those who work in manufacturing and manual trades – as certain stereotypes of the working class might suggest. We should instead pay more attention to a ‘new dispossessed’, represented disproportionately by service sector workers such as waitresses, cleaners and care workers, whose low wage and insecure work has made it impossible to get on the property ladder, and are thus left to the caprices of a volatile and increasingly expensive rental sector. 

Figure 2: Housing situation by occupation across the UK

Source: Autonomy analysis of ONS

Figure 2 is an interactive bar chart that allows you to see differing housing situations for each selected occupation in the UK. It presents the data for 227 UK occupations across 21 quarters of the Labour Force Survey (from October 2014 until December 2019).

Use the small scroll bar next to the drop-down options to select an occupation you would like to display.

Regional differences

The intersections between class, occupation and rent are further complicated by regional differences. Renting is much more common in the capital across most occupations. Indeed, many of the occupations associated with homeownership in regions outside of London have a high association with renting in the capital. On a national scale, ‘Van drivers’, ‘Taxi and cab drivers’, ‘Hairdressers’,  tend to own their homes. But in London, these occupations are more likely to rent by a significant majority

 

Other typically ‘middle class’ occupations such as ‘Teaching and other educational professionals’, ‘Social workers’ and ‘Authors, writers and translators’ have much higher levels of renting in London than other areas of the country. The majority of ‘Web design and development professionals’ in London rent their homes.

 

Similarly, the occupations associated with the highest levels of renting on a national scale are even higher in the capital. On a national scale, a small majority of ‘Care workers and home carers’ rent their homes. In London, this figure jumps to nearly 70%. Similarly, just under half of all ‘Kitchen and catering assistants’ rent when we take the UK as a whole. But, in London, again this figure jumps to over 70%.

Figure 3: Housing situation by occupation in Manchester and the UK

Source: Autonomy analysis of ONS

Figure 3 is an interactive bar chart that visualises differing housing situations for each selected occupation in the UK, in comparison with the Manchester area.

 

It presents the data for 19 occupations across 21 quarters of the Labour Force Survey (from October 2014 until December 2019). There are fewer jobs plotted here because it was decided that there should be at least 300 entries for a specific occupation across the data sets in order for the results to be considered reliable. Some occupations did not have this data available.

Use the small scroll bar next to the drop-down options to select an occupation you would like to display.

Figure 4: Housing situation by occupation in London and the UK

Source: Autonomy analysis of ONS

Figure 4 is an interactive bar chart that allows you to see differing housing situations for each selected occupation in the UK, in comparison with the London area.

 

The occupations in London with the highest prevalence of renters are:

 

  • Cleaners and domestics (81% are women)
  • Waiters and waitresses (73% are women)
  • Kitchen and catering assistants (64% are women)
  • Care workers and home carers (84% are women)
  • Elementary construction occupations (98% are men)

 

Here we present the data for 55 occupations across 21 quarters of the Labour Force Survey (from October 2014 until December 2019). There are fewer jobs plotted here because it was decided that there should be at least 300 entries for a specific occupation across the data sets in order for the results to be considered reliable. Some occupations did not have this data available.

Use the small scroll bar next to the drop-down options to select an occupation you would like to display.

This study is supported by the Alex Ferry Foundation.

Note and data sources

Data collected:

 

  • 21 quarters of Labour Force Survey were analysed, starting Oct 2014 till December 2019 accessed via UK Data Service. https://www.ukdataservice.ac.uk/
  • 21 quarters of the LFS were combined to give a data set with 1,955,419 entries. 
  • Results for occupations are only presented if there are at least 300 entries. E.g. at least 300 accountants need to be in the combined data set for accountants to be included in the final results. Hence the need to combine multiple years. 
  • Income data is from Annual Survey of Hours and Earning (ASHE) accessed via NOMIS.

 

ONS data used for poverty line and working conditions analysis:

 

(ONS 2021), ‘Earnings and hours worked’. Available at:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/datasets/occupation4digitsoc2010ashetable14

 

ONS (2021), ‘Labour force survey: zero-hour contracts data tables’. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/datasets/emp17peopleinemploymentonzerohourscontracts

 

ONS (2020), ‘Coronavirus and self-employment in the UK’. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/articles/coronavirusandselfemploymentintheuk/2020-04-24

 

ONS (2020), ‘Coronavirus: COVID-19 roundup: economy, business and jobs’. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/coronaviruscovid19roundupeconomybusinessandjobs/2020-07-02#earnings