Moving back to Mum?
Nigel Williams, 23 May 2013
Universal Credit is hoped to reduce both the benefit bill and levels of dependency from 2013. If it has an effect on people’s behaviour, then we can hope for it to show up in the household statistics. Before then, it is worth having a look to see what is happening already.
The Working and Workless Households figures from the Labour Force Survey for 4th Quarter 2012 came out in May 2013. They come with estimates of how many households are working, jobless or a mixture of the two, and whether they comprise singles, couples, children or other arrangements.
The most remarkable feature is that the estimate of the overall number of households fell over the year. This is unusual. A first guess is that people with neither work nor benefits are moving back in with parents but that needs testing. This household survey is large enough to offer small margins of error but is not designed to be longitudinal. It does not permit individual cases to be traced to see what changes. Rather, we must rely on aggregates.
There were a third of a million fewer workless households, of which most were formerly inactive economically. By the fourth quarter of 2012, there were one hundred thousand more mixed households, a similar number of new working households and the rest had merged with other households, working, workless or mixed, to reduce the number overall.
Changes in university tuition fees led to tens of thousands fewer taking places in 2012.
The fall amounted to 27,000 places, enough to mask a considerable change caused by other factors but not accounting for the whole story. Add to that number the possibility that more students are living at home to save money and also taking work to help pay the fees.
Among lone parents, there was a net movement from all workless to mixed, meaning that either the parent or a non-dependent child had work. Among couples with children, there was a net movement from having one parent working to having both, but also a recovery, after a dip, in the number of couples with dependent children. Other household types, not falling easily into categories of singles or couples, showed a net movement from workless to mixed.
In broad terms, these movements are in line with headline changes in employment (up), unemployment (also up) and economic inactivity (down). Does it also fit the picture of children staying with or moving back in with parents? In a high proportion (22 per cent of the 2011 number) of workless ‘other household types’, one at least one member was in work by 2012, with only small movements the other way. In workless lone parent households, mixed status meant that either the parent or a non-dependent child had found work.
From 2011 to 2012, the estimate of single people dropped by 157,000. People in couples increased by 173,000. This is not just coupling up, but also fits with non-dependent children moving or staying home. See table G of the release. The big net increase among couples was where all in the household were working. The number of working couples without dependent children increased by only seven thousand. The number of people in such households rose by 93,000. So one story consistent with the change in this year’s statistics, with many minor changes taking place around it, is for singles without work (offspring) to move in with working couples (parents) and, encouragingly, to find work themselves. If many of the 27,000 not choosing to pay to enter university are still staying with their parents, at least they are finding paid work instead.