There is a new study from the UK entitled: “Understanding the Legal Problems of Renters”. This report by Pascoe Pleasence, Nigel Balmer and Catrina Devnir is available here: http://www.thelegaleducationfoundation.org/report/understanding-the-legal-problems-of-renters . It is part of a broader study on “How People Understand and Interact with the Law”.
The webpage highlights the following key findings of the study:
- The latest figures show that over a third of all households in England and Wales were rented, which makes the ability of renters to resolve housing-related legal problems a major issue for society.
- Few renters realized that their housing difficulty was a legal problem, nearly half (47 per cent) put it down to bad luck.
- The renters most likely to experience housing-related legal problems are the young, single parents, and unmarried couples with children.
- Legal problems with rented housing take a long time to resolve: half lasted more than a year; a quarter were still unresolved after two years.
- Renters are more likely than those living in other types of accommodation to have higher levels of non-housing-related legal problems – such as with domestic violence, divorce, welfare benefits and personal injury.
- Those renting privately (rather than in the public sector) were the most likely to have non-housing-related legal problems; the least likely were those who owned their homes outright.
It is noted on the webpage that “people living in rented accommodation are twice as likely to experience some kinds of non-housing-related legal problems as those living in other types of housing”.
Additional research and reports by the Legal Education Foundation are available here: http://www.thelegaleducationfoundation.org/research.
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