What drives support for largescale housing reform? Mixed-methods survey data from the UK indicates importance of socioeconomic status over demographic characteristics

The UK housing system is in crisis. In 2021, 8.5 million people had unmet housing needs on account of affordability, accessibility and quality. While the Labour Government have placed emphasis on liberating private builders from red tape to build, evidence suggests a much more coordinated and ambitious state-led approach may be necessary. It is unclear, though, whether this is electorally feasible. We report qualitative and quantitative survey-based evidence (survey 1 n = 693; 2 n = 10; 3 n = 2,200), including adversarial co-production and evaluation of narratives, on drivers of support for an illustrative policy programme in the run up to the 2024 General Election. This unique examination of public preferences on housing finds high levels of support for an expansive programme of reform comparable to the post-War era. We find that higher risk of destitution, low socioeconomic status and lower health status predict higher levels of support and that adversarially co-produced narratives increase levels of support, particularly among firm opponents of the policy. We analyse these associations through Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) to identify pathways of impact and find moderately strong positive correlations with levels of support for tax and spend. These findings have clear implications for UK Government housing policy.