Housing tenure and voting behaviour

This article separates out voting behaviour by housing tenure using data from the latest IPOS-MORI poll. It seems that those who own their house outright break 53% for the Tories, 26% for Labour and 10% for the Lib-Dems. Those who are mortgage-payers, though, are more evenly divided. 39% say they would vote for Labour, 33% Conservative and 15% Lib-Dem.

For those who do not own a home (so council tenants, private tenants and those living with friends/relatives or in tied accommodation), the voting intention figures are - Labour with 41%, the Tories with 23% and the Lib-Dems with 22%.

So, as might be guessed, those who own their home outright - who are likely to be older and richer than the national average - tend to give overwhelming support to the Conservatives and little support to Labour or the Lib-Dems. Mortgage-payers tend to be more evenly divided. After all, this category covers a wide variety of people - from those living in very cheap homes to those living in expensive ones; and from those with huge mortgages and negative equity to those with small mortgages that they have almost paid off. Labour has a slight lead among this group according to IPOS-MORI. This could well be due to people feeling a bit better off due to cuts in mortgage rates.

Britain is a country where about 70% of the population are owner-occupiers. The remaining 30% of the population are not. The IPOS-MORI survey show higher Labour and Lib-Dem support in this group, which seems logical to me as they will disproportionately be on lower incomes and/or younger than the other categories. Given the increasing unaffordability of housing - previously due to rising prices and now due to tightening up of lenders' mortgage criteria - this category is likely to grow in size.

It does strike me that, with voting intention the way it is, Labour should consider doing more to assist tenants - after all, it makes sense for parties to try and help those who vote for them. Some form of rent control and security of tenure would be good. Also, they should concentrate of building more council housing - which would enable people who are in private rented accommodation to move to move to council housing if they wish. Not everyone lives in what Thatcher called a "property-owning democracy" and so government policy should reflect that fact.

technorati tags:
political news | news | world news
More at: News 2 Cromley