Poverty and poor housing in Scotland: The relationship between income and housing condition

The paper examines the relationship between income and poor housing conditions. It considers the role of housing outcome measures in relation to the different concepts of poverty, deprivation and social exclusion and examines the relationship between equivalised incomes, socio-economic household characteristics and a wide range of possible measures of housing deprivation. It concludes that income alone does not provide an adequate proxy for the quality of housing outcomes and that multiple housing measures are more satisfactory than the use of any single indicator. It also argues that such measures could be gathered in large-scale surveys but that many commonly used indicators in the UK (such as those derived from the census) would benefit from expansion and updating.