By Rory Coulter, University College London
One of the few things that Britain’s political parties agree is that the country faces a housing crisis. One sign of this is overcrowding, where people live in homes that do not have enough rooms for their household. Government estimates suggest that roughly 3% of English households (and a much larger share of individuals) live in overcrowded homes.
Concerns about overcrowded housing have run through British urban policy for nearly 200 years. In his landmark Sanitary Report, Edwin Chadwick documented the severity of overcrowding in the early Victorian period, arguing that this generated epidemics as well as moral decline. While we wouldn’t put it like that now he was, nevertheless, onto something: research shows that living in overcrowded homes can damage health and relationships, undermine educational success, and generate harmful feelings of stigma and shame.
Yet despite this evidence, in recent years housing policy has not directed much attention towards overcrowding, arguing instead that general efforts to boost housing supply will, in time, mean that enough larger homes become available to those who need them. While building more homes is probably necessary to alleviate overcrowding, whether boosting supply will be sufficient is a more open question that depends on factors including the types, tenures and location of new homes, as well on people’s preferences and resources. We thus need to know more about who experiences overcrowding today and where problems are concentrated.
What is overcrowding and what do we know about it?
Defining overcrowding is hard. This is because any definition needs a yardstick of how much dwelling space is ‘required’ by different types of household. In England and Wales, a statutory definition exists which uses space and room standards to identify overcrowding. This definition is very complex, dated and sets a low bar and so the more generous Bedroom Standard has become a de facto but non-statutory official measure. The Bedroom Standard works by calculating how many bedrooms a household needs based on the ages, sexes and relationships of its members. This number is then compared with the number of available bedrooms to determine whether the household is overcrowded. While critics argue that the Bedroom Standard is itself dated, it still provides a widely accepted method to define overcrowding.
Traditionally, overcrowding was experienced mostly by the urban working class and rural poor. As George Orwell observed in The Road to Wigan Pier¸ in hard times “the mere difficulty of getting hold of a house is one of the worst aggravations of poverty. It means that people will put up with anything”. There is much truth in this: today, lower income households and renters are disproportionately exposed to overcrowding, trends which have worsened as reduced housing benefits and weak wage growth have hit incomes, while rents have increased.
New vulnerabilities have, however, emerged since Orwell’s time as the composition of the population has changed. In particular, large ethnic disparities in overcrowding have emerged with some ethnic minority groups – for instance those identifying as Roma, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi— disproportionately likely to experience overcrowding, while rates are lower for those from other backgrounds. Multiple overlapping explanations for these disparities have been proposed including (1) direct discrimination (and/or fears of it) limiting minorities’ residential options; (2) minorities’ lower incomes; (3) immigration-related laws; (4) historic patterns of settlement in cities where housing costs have inflated and large homes are scarce plus (5) differentiated patterns of family size and preferences for multigenerational living.
Surprisingly little is known about these or about how ethnicity, class, place and other factorsmight interact to shape overcrowding risk. This is partly a data issue: most published overcrowding statistics are drawn from small surveys and so can only describe national patterns. We thus need to turn to other resources like the 2021 Census, which offers an unparalleled glimpse at overcrowding – as gauged using the Bedroom Standard – across contemporary Britain.
Social and spatial patterns of overcrowding
My study used 2021 Census microdata. This is a large sample of individuals’ census records which have been anonymised to protect confidentiality. Census microdata are very powerful as they allow us to use statistical models to disentangle how each different attribute people have (for example their age, class, ethnicity, location and so on) separately relates to the risk of overcrowding.
The results of this analysis were fascinating, but three are worth highlighting. First, the risk of overcrowding is higher for those with fewer qualifications, those working in routine/manual jobs or who are not in work, and for tenants as opposed to homeowners. This unsurprising classed pattern is one that Chadwick and Orwell might recognise; it indicates that while two centuries of effort have improved physical housing conditions, they have been less successful in eradicating class-based inequalities.
Second, there are stark ethnic disparities in overcrowding: although ethnic minorities comprise around 1/5 of the adult population, they account for half of all overcrowded adults. While the risk of overcrowding is higher for all minority groups than for White Britons, the disparity is greatest for the Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Black Africans and lowest for Indians and Chinese. Crucially, these disparities in overcrowding risk cannot be ‘explained away’ by the household types, education, occupations, housing tenures or location of minority groups. These factors are important, but even after adjusting for them most ethnic minority groups still have a higher risk of overcrowding than comparable White Britons.
Third, place matters for overcrowding. It is not, however, a simple dichotomous matter like ‘North v South’ or ‘urban v rural’. Rather, overcrowding is more likely in and around London and in some of the cities of the Midlands and Southern England (for example Birmingham, Luton and Southampton) and is less common in much of Northern England (both urban and rural), Wales and across the rural south and west. This signals that local housing constraints push up overcrowding. There is also some evidence for locally varied ethnic disparities which differ across groups in complex ways. We clearly need to devote more attention to monitoring, understanding and addressing ethnic disparities in overcrowding. Such disparities are long-standing but policy concern for them has waned in recent years.
Tackling overcrowding in the 21st century
Overcrowding remains a pressing policy challenge. While what this means and how we measure overcrowding have changed over time, in the 21st century many households still live in homes with fewer rooms than they need to meet social norms. Overcrowding is concentrated among those who are disproportionately disadvantaged in other ways (for example in terms of class, income and tenure) and to stop these hardships compounding one another it is these households that housing policy must target. We must ensure that a large share of the homes that are built are large enough and also are genuinely affordable: building greater numbers of bigger socially rented dwellings is thus an immediate priority.
Labour’s recent financial commitments to this are heartening but Housing Secretary Steve Reed would do well to temper ‘build, baby build’ with the words of a former Labour housing minister: “We shall be judged for a year or two by the number of houses we build. We shall be judged in ten years’ time by the type of houses we build” (Aneurin Bevan, 1947).
About the author: Rory Coulter is Associate Professor of Human Geography at University College London. His research examines housing decisions, neighbourhood change, and how where we live matters for the course of our lives. He has recently written a monograph on these topics, Housing and Life Course Dynamics (Policy Press, 2023).
Suggested further reading
Clark, S. D., Pontin, F. & Norman, P. (2025) Is the spatial persistence of deprivation dependent on neighbouring areas? Area. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/area.70015
Coulter, R. (2025) Ethnic disparities in overcrowding across England and Wales: Postracial patterns or persistent inequalities? The Geographical Journal. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.70049.
Lukes, S., de Noronha, N., & Finney, N. (2018). Slippery discrimination: A review of the drivers of migrant and minority housing disadvantage. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2018.1480996.
Robinson, D. (2025) Race equality in housing: Tracing the postracial turn in English housing policy. Housing Studies. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2024.2388189.
Wilson, W. (2023) Overcrowding housing (England). House of Commons Library. Available at: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN01013/SN01013.pdf.
How to cite
Coulter, R. (2025, October) Understanding social and spatial patterns of overcrowding in England and Wales. Geography Directions. https://doi.org/10.55203/GCYD6489
Geography Directions 