Louise Overton

Asset-based Welfare, Equity Release and the Meaning of the Owned Home

The advantages of ownership—both financial and personal—were a prominent theme in UK government policies promoting owner-occupation in the latter half of the twentieth century. More recently, the liberal discourses of the ‘ownership society’ have been conflated with the neo-liberalisation of welfare to restructure the socio-political ideology of ownership around accumulation and decumulation of housing wealth. This paper analyses findings from a new qualitative study to explore the tensions that this shift has created for owner-identities. Equity release transactions provide a prime context to explore the role of homeownership ideologies on participation in asset-based welfare: these are conceived as products that enable older owners to de-cumulate housing equity while continuing to occupy their homes and retaining the ‘badge’ of ownership. This paper focuses on the impact of housing wealth decumulation through equity release on the meanings of the owned home and to reflect on the role of feelings about ownership on participation in asset-based welfare.

Understanding Attitudes to Paying for Care amongst Equity Release Consumers: citizenship, solidarity and the ‘hardworking homeowner’

The importance of developing a system that is perceived to be ‘fair’ is a central element in debates about long-term care funding in the UK. It is therefore surprising that while previous research has established that older people tend to resent the idea of using housing equity, and other personal assets, it has often revealed little about the factors underpinning these attitudes or reflected on how they sit within a wider frame of social and political norms. Drawing on 60 semi-structured in-depth interviews with older home owners who have released equity from their homes, this paper explores why people feel that it is fair, or unfair, to require owners to use their housing equity to fund long-term care needs, once factors like reluctance to trade on the home, and mistrust of equity release products, have been excluded. While a small majority of our participants considered it unfair, a substantial minority thought it fair that they were required to use their accumulated housing equity to meet care needs. This distribution of attitudes enabled us to explore the reasons why participants held each view, and so reflect on the impact of pro-social and pro-individual norms in shaping attitudes towards intra-generational fairness and ideas about ‘responsible citizenship’. Our analysis posits that the factors that shape attitudes toward using housing assets to pay for care, and their relationship to the wider rhetorical framework of asset accumulation, management and decumulation, have been misunderstood by policy makers. We discuss the implications of our findings for policies that seek to promote the development of a housing-asset based care funding system capable of attracting widespread support.

The Impacts of, and Motivations for, Lifetime Gifts

We saw in Chap. 4 that some families give substantial lifetime gifts to help with things like housing and education. But even a small gift could potentially make a big difference to someone with very little. So how much difference do lifetime gifts make to people, and in what ways? What would people have done if they had not received these gifts? Such hypothetical counter-factuals have their limitations, as it is impossible to know for sure what would have happened if a gift had not been received, but it is interesting nevertheless to see how people responded to this question in our interviews. As well as considering the impact on the recipient, this chapter also explores, quite uniquely in studies of this kind, the impact on the donor of the gift. How difficult was it for the donor to find the money and how did they do so? And, finally in terms of impact, this chapter provides, for the first time in the UK, both quantitative and qualitative evidence of the reported difference gifts (and loans) made to the relationships between the donor and recipient/lender and borrower.

The Nature of ‘the Family’ and Family Obligations in the Twenty-First Century

This chapter begins with an analysis of the arguments and evidence about the apparent ‘decline of the family’. The issues raised here have focused largely on changing family structures and have, at times, achieved a very high public profile not least in the 1980s and 1990s with the rise in lone parenthood seen as a particular challenge to the nuclear family. The particular focus on family structures, however, provides only a partial picture of the state of family life, and the chapter therefore moves on to more academic debates about the nature of relationships between family members in terms of solidarity, conflict and ambivalence. We then turn to existing data on inter-generational financial exchanges to illustrate one particular dimension of family relationships: functional exchange. This data is interesting in itself but has also been used to explore the relationship between the provision of welfare within families and that provided by more formal structures of the state. In particular, there has been concern that welfare states have ‘crowded out’ family support and thus undermined the role of the family. This apparent ‘crowding out’ has also been seen, along with the concerns about the ‘decline of the family’, as part of a more general process of de-familialisation. We discuss this in part by reviewing the arguments and evidence around actual levels of financial exchange within families. Finally, we turn to another relevant strand of this debate: the role of values and social norms in relation to family life.

Public Attitudes to Different Generations

In this chapter, we continue with our analysis of attitudes to supporting different generations but, this time, rather than focus on views and norms in relation to private inter-generational financial transfers (within families), we consider attitudes of different generations to public intergenerational transfers via the welfare state (within society) more generally. The first part of this chapter therefore reviews existing data on public attitudes towards supporting different generations through the welfare state. The second part then reviews the quantitative and qualitative data from our Leverhulme Trust study on people’s views about which generations have had the better deal, financially, in life. Our analysis sheds light on whether or not there is generational tension or conflict at the macro (societal) level to complement our previous findings on the nature of intergenerational relationships at the micro (family) level.

The Extent and Nature of Lifetime Gifts

Chapter 3 reviewed a range of studies, including those using international data on lifetime gifts within families. We argued that there has been no decline in the strength of family relationships but that there have certainly been many changes in the structure of families and the nature of relationships between family members. The evidence also suggests that, within families, support is related to a range of factors not least the perceived need of those requiring support and the available resources of the potential donors. However, there are a number of limitations with the data on lifetime gifts and therefore gaps in our understanding of inter-generational transfers and relationships, particularly in relation to the UK. First of all, much of this international evidence excludes the UK because the data sets (primarily the European SHARE data) do not include the British population. Even where some data sets do include the British population (e.g. ELSA), these data sets are typically focused on samples of older people (aged 50 plus) and do not therefore represent the full adult population. Also, these data sets contain quantitative data on a range of issues and are not focused particularly on inter-generational transfers so while they are very helpful in gaining a broad picture of lifetime gifts in families, the range of issues covered is limited and they cannot provide a more in-depth account of why people engage in gift-giving and how this impacts on family relationships. As discussed in Chap. 1, our Leverhulme Trust study of inter-generational lifetime transfers used a mixed methods approach (survey research with a cross-section of the adult British population combined with in-depth interviews with 42 people within 15 families). This, and the following two chapters, now turns to this new quantitative and qualitative evidence to explore inter-generational exchanges and relationships in Britain.

The Baby Boomers and the Potential for Inter-Generational Conflict

Chapter 1 briefly outlined two key debates that our research on inter-generational financial gifts seeks to make a major contribution to. These were the potential for inter-generational conflict between the ‘baby boom’ generation and younger generations, and the nature of ‘family’ and family obligations. This chapter analyses, in greater detail, the arguments and existing evidence in relation to the first of those debates which rests on the idea that there is a powerful generation of baby boomers with both political and economic strength compared with other generations. This generation is also seen by some as a ‘lucky’ generation which has benefitted from the introduction of the welfare state and other favourable conditions, such as the expansion of free higher education, a buoyant labour market and increasing house prices.