10 January 2003
According to research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, schemes such as housing benefit wrongly assume that all poor people live in social housing or are tenants of private landlords.
Poverty and home ownership in contemporary Britain, published by the foundation on January 8, reveals that 92% of assistance with housing costs goes to tenants and just 8% to homeowners.
But 15% of people who own their homes outright and a further 17% with mortgages are on incomes that mean they can be classified as 'poor', compared with 61% of tenants in social housing.
Professor Roger Burrows, the report's author, said programmes to tackle social exclusion that target social housing estates were not necessarily the best way to combat poverty.
'Homeowners who are poor tend not to be concentrated in particular estates, with the result that current initiatives mostly fail to reach them,' he added.
PFjan2003
