New research suggests that if recent trends continue:
This research highlights the urgent need to ensure that private renting is able to meet the requirements of the growing number of households that are living in this tenure but who would prefer to be owner occupiers or social renters.
The leading charitable housing think tank, the Building and Social Housing Foundation (BSHF), has launched new research about tenure change in the UK housing system - Tenure Trends in the UK Housing System: Will the private rented sector continue to grow?
The report's author, Ben Pattison, said:
"This research shows significant changes are taking place in the UK housing system. More and more of us are becoming private renters - one million households since 2005 - some of them through choice, but many because they have no other option.
"We need to ensure that private renting is not left to become a 'tenure of last resort', an unsatisfactory default option for households who do not have the choice to access social housing or owner occupation.
"We need to ensure that these new private renters have access to the same standards of decent and affordable housing that we rightly expect in social housing and owner occupation."
This new research highlights the fact that the proportion of households in different tenures - tenure mix - has changed significantly over the last one hundred years. Recent trends suggest that we may have reached another historic turning point in the tenure mix of the UK housing system.
For the first time in a century the relative size of the owner occupied sector has declined and the private rented sector has increased significantly. This trend is due to the number of households in the private rented sector increasing by one million households between 2005 and 2009.
If recent trends persist, the private rented sector would be larger than the social rented sector by 2013. By the end of the decade, one in five households could be private renters. This is dependent on the continuation of recent trends and does not constitute a prediction.
Whilst these figures highlight how quickly changes in tenure mix could occur they do not provide any understanding of how likely such changes are.
To answer this question the report reviews the key political, economic and social drivers behind recent changes in tenure mix. The report suggests that it is reasonable to assume that some of these likely drivers of recent changes in tenure mix will continue and, therefore, that the private rented sector will continue to grow.
Therefore, there is an urgent need to ensure that private renting is able to meet the requirements of the households who would prefer to be social renters or owner occupiers. Otherwise private renting is in danger of becoming the tenure of last resort, an unsatisfactory default option for households who do not have the choice to access social housing or owner occupation.
This research builds on a major report launched by BSHF last autumn - The Future of Housing: Rethinking the UK housing system for the twenty-first century.
Both reports are available to download from the BSHF website at www.bshf.org.