Poverty and Social Justice – Comment and analysis

New research shows impact of migration on home ownership

Posted on November 15, 2024November 15, 2024 by louis.stewart

Migrants who settled in their destination country are much less likely to be rent or mortgage free (48%) compared with those who returned to their origin country (84%), new research shows.

Findings from a first-of-its-kind study into migration and housing tenure indicate that settlers into multiple European countries are less likely to have a home of their own, both compared with the wider populations of the destination countries and those who never left (stayers) or who returned to their country of origin (returnees).

These findings are drawn from the pioneering 2000 Families Survey which conducted personal interviews with 5980 individuals nested within 1770 families who originated from Turkey.

The Survey located men who moved from Turkey to Europe as guestworkers and their comparators who stayed behind, and traced their families across Turkey and Europe up to the fourth generation.

Mortgage and rent-free living

The results show that 79% of the returnees, 56% of the stayers and 50% of the settlers own a house (with or without a mortgage) where they currently live.

Looking at those who have no mortgage on their property, or who live rent free, this applies to more than four fifths of the returnees (84%) and two thirds of the stayers (69%) but less than half (48%) of the settlers.

Mortgage holders in different housing markets

There are, however, tenure differences based on the housing market type of the destination country.

In countries with a regulated rental regime that places less emphasis on home ownership, such as Austria, Germany and Switzerland, the proportion of homeowner settlers (with or without a loan or mortgage) is, at 40%, not incomparable to the wider populations of these countries.

This is also true for countries with a regulated expansion regime, such as France and Belgium, that produce better homeownership outcomes for higher income groups. Here, 71% of settlers are homeowners, as compared with 63% and 73% of the wider populations in France and Belgium, respectively.

Strikingly, however, in countries with a liberal expansion regime that are renowned for their support of disadvantaged groups to buy their own homes, such as Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands, the proportion of homeowners is as low as 42% among the settlers while the figures for the wider national populations stand at 64% in Denmark, 83% in Norway, 70% in Sweden and 67% in the Netherlands.

Second homes

The research also shows that 51% of the settlers in Europe, mostly comprised of the first goers, possess a house in Turkey either jointly or individually. The analysis reveals that 64% of the settlers who own a house in Europe, and 42% of the settlers renting there, have part or full ownership of a house in Turkey.

Research implications

Lead author Dr Sebnem Eroglu, from the School for Policy Studies, said:

“Under the guest-worker agreements, labourers (typically men) from Turkey, and other Balkan and Southern European countries, were invited to contribute to the building of Northern and Western Europe. Despite their significant contributions to their economies and societies, the guestworkers and their descendants settled in Europe often find themselves disadvantaged against the destination country populations as well as their stayer and returnee counterparts.”

“We have found that returnees display the highest share of homeownership whereas the settlers’ share remains the lowest. This finding indicates the significance of migration in helping the returnees accumulate financial resources and convert them into housing assets in the country of origin whilst supporting the past research which documents the barriers faced by migrants in European housing markets – albeit to varying degrees.”

“It is striking that in the countries with a liberal expansion regime, where one would expect greater home ownership amongst the settlers, the figures remain significantly lower than the wider populations of the destination countries. A more positive picture emerges in the housing markets of other destinations, though still not as good as for those who returned to Turkey or never left.”

Co-authors

Eroglu, Sebnem
Bayrakdar, Sait (Dr, Warwick)
Guveli, Ayse (Prof, Warwick)

Additional information

See article published in Housing Studies journal: Full article: Understanding the consequences of international migration for housing tenure: evidence from a multi-site and intergenerational study

Photo by Wynand van Poortvliet on Unsplash

Enforcing the Code: Betting shop employees and the contradictions of gambling harm reduction

Posted on August 20, 2024September 3, 2024 by School for Policy Studies

By Dr Sam Kirwan and Dr Jo Large

One unmissable aspect of the post-Covid, cost-of-living crisis is the ongoing collapse of high-street retail. Yet, alongside the charity shops and vape sellers, one sector remains relatively intact; betting remains an integral part of the British high street, with a prevalence directly inverse to surrounding socio-economic indicators.

There has been no shortage of critique regarding the role played by high-street betting in contributing to conditions of poverty under austerity. When in 2014 Aditya Chakrabortty described the high-street betting sector as a form of ‘predatory capitalism’, he was highlighting the ways in which the liberalised gambling sector appears to reflect the very worst dynamics of neoliberal society. As Markham and Young and Banks and Waters have argued, the modern gambling industry, characterised by a concentration of power and expansion of influence, appears boundless in its will to extract maximum profit from its customers, with little regard for the ways in which its products amplify misery and inequality. Among the many critiques of the role of the Gambling Commission (the regulator created by the 2005 Gambling Act), the most damning is that it has enabled the proliferation of harm by emphasising ‘safer gambling’ frameworks without challenging these underlying logics of exploitation and extraction

Amidst these critiques of the high-street betting sector, there has been a lack of attention to the betting shop as a space of employment (Rebecca Cassidy’s fascinating ethnography of betting shops remains an outlier in this respect). This lack of interest is unusual given how the role of betting-shop employee has changed so drastically since the 2005 Gambling Act, and also given that much of the responsibility for reducing gambling harm in the premises-based sector falls upon the frontline employees who must implement the components of the ‘Social Responsibility Code’ (SRC) (part of the Licensing Conditions and Code of Practice). These include the need to intervene when there are indicators of ‘problem gambling’, to enforce self-exclusion schemes, and to carry out age-verification procedures.

Our research

Over the summer and autumn of 2023 we carried out semi-structured interviews with current and retired frontline employees in the sector. Whilst our focus was on the implementation of these ‘safer gambling’ approaches implemented in the SRC, these interviews covered a range of employment issues, often returning to issues of personal safety within an aggression-laden environment, and how betting practices and environments had changed in their time within the sector.

Most of our participants expressed a strong feeling that intervening in customers’ gambling habits, where there was a clear potential for harm, was something they felt staff should be doing. Many talked positively about when they had been able to encourage a customer to reflect upon their gambling and the harms it was creating. Despite the difficulties in implementing self-exclusion schemes they were seen to be a valuable tool that staff would always seek to enforce. Many of their reflections were in line with the underlying narratives of the SRC regarding the capacity for employees to prevent harm within the shop.

But participants also felt that the conditions for being able to carry out this harm-reduction work had significantly deteriorated in the era of Fixed Odds Betting Terminals (FOBTs), single-manning and multi-shop work (the mandating of staff running shops on their own and moving between shops without warning), and the profit-driven orientation of the modern gambling conglomerates. In these conditions, aspects of the SRC were experienced as factors that exacerbated the stresses and anxiety of work rather than reducing them. When participants were reflecting upon this most critically, these codes were seen as a way of shifting responsibility from operators onto frontline employees: making sure that it is staff that bear the risk and anxiety of reducing gambling harm.

An example of this raised in our interviews was the difficulty of acting on the back-office alerts created by FOBTs regarding excessive time or spend. Many noted the anxiety and fear of dismissal if they failed to act on these alerts and other potential indicators of ‘problem gambling’, despite the fact that coming out from behind the screen might itself be a disciplinary offence if it meant not being able to take bets. They could also put themselves in a potentially dangerous situation in the context of the customer aggression created by FOBTs.

There has been widespread criticism of the idea that a liberalised market, creating deliberately addictive and harmful products that enable the vast transfer of wealth from the most vulnerable in society to the most privileged, can be tamed or constrained by ‘safer gambling’ codes that rely on customers recognising their own ‘problem gambling’ and taking preventative action. We argue that what should be added to this critique are the ways in which this structure has shifted responsibility for gambling harm onto low-paid, precarious workers, who are balancing competing demands in the aggressive and stressful environment created by this industry approach. A desperate need for gambling reform has been eloquently articulated by Van Schalkwyk and Cassidy, among others. We argue that consideration of high-street gambling as a space of employment should be part of this reform. It should not remain possible for operators to continue to offer products that are intrinsically harmful, in spaces that are intrinsically unsafe, and be allowed to shift the responsibility and risk for any ensuing harms onto their lowest-paid employees.

This blog was originally published by the Bristol Hub for Gambling Harms Research. The original article can be viewed on their website. The research was funded by the Hub’s Research Innovation Fund.

Lockdown saw couples share housework and childcare more evenly – but these changes didn’t last

Posted on February 10, 2022May 2, 2023 by School for Policy Studies

Susan Harkness, University of Bristol

It may feel like a common occurrence today, but if you cast your mind back to the first COVID lockdown, having whole families working and studying from home was a very unfamiliar situation. And it was one that had unfamiliar consequences.

For opposite-sex couples, lockdown disrupted the traditional gender division of household chores. In research that my colleagues and I conducted, we found that having both partners at home saw men increase how much of the domestic burden they took on, so that women’s typically greater share decreased.

We discovered this by analysing data from Understanding Society, a big longitudinal household panel study – the largest of its kind. The study follows a sample of UK households, periodically asking them questions to see how their lives are changing. Between April 2020 and September 2021, its participants were asked to complete web surveys every few months specifically about the impact of the pandemic on their lives.

We looked at responses from people of working age who were in opposite-gender relationships that continued throughout this period of COVID surveying. This provided a final sample of just over 2,000 couples for us to analyse. Here’s what we discovered.

Lockdown shocks

The couples were asked about the gender division of housework during the first lockdown, and we then compared this with information collected from pre-lockdown surveys carried out during 2019. The couples were also asked whether those changes persisted when the first lockdown eased. On top of this, we also compared the changes experienced by those with no children at home and those with children of various ages.

What we saw was that overall, women’s share of housework fell from 65% pre-COVID to 60% during the first lockdown. So initially there was a moderate amount of gender rebalancing in the sharing of domestic work. However, by September 2020 the old gender divisions were being re-established. By this point, women were on average doing 62% of housework.

These changes coincided with changes in working behaviour. Overall, the findings showed that both men’s and women’s paid working hours reduced substantially in the spring of 2020 but had recovered by September.

A woman vacuuming a rug — Despite some rebalancing, on average a sizeable majority of the domestic burden still fell on women.
Olena Yakobchuk/Shutterstock

And during the spring lockdown, around a third of both male and female respondents were employed but working from home. However, this had fallen to just under a quarter by September. Similarly, around one in five women and one in seven men were furloughed in the spring, but this had dropped to fewer than one in 20 by September.

This seems to suggest that having both members of a couple at home, with less time committed to work, leads to the domestic burden being more evenly shared.

Having both family members spending more time at home also appears to have led to there being more housework to be done. Both men and women increased their weekly hours of domestic work during lockdown – from 12.5 to 15.5 for women and from 6.5 to 10 for men. Come September 2020, these figures had fallen again, though they remained above their pre-lockdown levels.

Childcare burdens

However, the rebalancing of work wasn’t consistent across the couples we looked at. The extent of the change depended on the number and age of the couple’s children.

When the respondents were split into three groups – those who had no children living at home, those who had children under the age of five and those who had older children – marked differences emerged.

For couples without children at home, women’s share of domestic labour fell during the spring and continued to fall after the summer. Though these women still did more domestic work than their partners, their input did not return to pre-COVID levels as 2020 progressed.

For those with children aged between six and 15, the drop in women’s share of housework had partially reversed by September, but it hadn’t fully bounced back. In the autumn they were still doing less than before the pandemic.

But for those with children under five, the drop in women’s share of housework had reversed completely by September. This was despite the initial drop in the spring having been greater for this group compared to the other two.

Family dynamics

So what do we make of this? In terms of family dynamics, the lockdown may have had more lasting effects for some families than for others. Fears that advances in gender equality could be reversed during the pandemic were more real for those with very young children, who were much less able to keep themselves busy with other tasks and whose children were not old enough to make use of online education.

One important reason for the division of labour changing during lockdown was men’s and women’s working hours. Women with young children tended to reduce their paid working hours more as the pandemic progressed in order to take on the increased burden of care that stemmed from schools and nurseries being closed.

A grandfather and grandson walking outside — Having family support nearby will have influenced how much childcare and housework couples did.
Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock

Our study shows that changes to family life during the pandemic were nuanced, with different family set-ups resulting in different changes to the balance of housework and the rebalancing of work changing over time. Indeed, there may be further nuances that we’re yet to fully identify.

In the future, it would be good to look at whether extended family networks were able to alleviate the increased care burden for some families. We could also look at how the pandemic affected the mental health of women with and without children, and it would be useful to see whether different countries’ lockdowns affected families differently as well.

Susan Harkness, Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Centre for Poverty and Social Justice, University of Bristol

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Collateral damage: the implications of border restrictions on practitioners working with refugee populations

Posted on December 17, 2021May 2, 2023 by School for Policy Studies

Blog by Dr Vicky Canning, Senior Lecturer, School for Policy Studies

The acknowledgement that asylum systems across Europe are “hostile environments” for migrant groups has increased in academic and practitioner consciousness, particularly in the aftermath of the 2015 refugee reception crisis. However, although the impacts of socio-political hostilities on migrants are well documented, little has been written about the implications of border restrictions on practitioners working with refugee populations. Research led by Vicky Canning, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the School for Policy Studies, expands the focus of hostilities to consider the variable impacts of intensified bordering practices on this group. (more…)