Differential Accumulation: wealth, inheritance and housing policy reconsidered

As home ownership in the UK has grown and matured, aspects of wealth and inheritance have become an important dimension of housing debates. In political and policy discussion it has been claimed that a higher level of home ownership will produce a more democratic pattern of wealth holdings and will have significant intergenerational effects as regards wealth transfers. In sociological and social policy debates, wealth in the form of owner occupied dwellings is seen as a major developing social divide between the haves and have nots with important implications for the social structure of the UK. This paper reviews the available evidence and argues that the pattern of wealth accumulation and transfer is likely to be socially and spatially uneven, that the pattern will vary overtime and that eventual outcomes are more complex and less predictable than some previous analyses have allowed.