More homeowners join homeless

An increasing proportion of council and housing association tenants are former home owners who have fallen into arrears on their mortgages and had to sell up. Nearly two-thirds of householders offered accommodation by councils or housing associations after being homeowners were classified as homeless after defaulting on their mortgages.

A new survey of tenants by the University of York shows that those moving out of council housing are most often younger, better-off couples. They are being replaced by poor households, often headed by single parents. More than 70 per cent of households accepted as tenants by local authorities or housing associations were headed by people aged between 16 and 29. The study concludes that "a more mobile population and growing concentrations of low income tenants are making it harder to sustain stable communities on council and housing association estates"