Reductions in housing benefit increases symptoms of depression in low-income UK households

Housing security is an important determinant of mental ill health. We use a quasi-natural experiment to evaluate the mental health effects of the UK government’s April 2011 reduction in financial support to help low-income persons rent private-sector housing (mean reduction ~ £1,220 per year ($2,315)) to compare the prevalence of mental ill health before and after these changes. Data come from the UK Annual Population Survey, a repeated quarterly cross-sectional survey, and we focus our analysis on renters in the private sector, disaggregating between an intervention group receiving housing benefit (n = 36,859) and control group not receiving housing benefit (n = 142,205). The main outcome was a binary measure of self-reported mental health problems. After controlling for pre-existing time trends, we observed that, between April 2011 and March 2013, the prevalence of depressive symptoms in private renters receiving housing benefit increased by 1.8 percentage points (95% CI: 1.0 to 2.7) compared with those not receiving housing benefit. Our models estimate approximately 26,000 (95% CI: 14,000 to 38,000) people newly experiencing depressive symptoms in association with the cuts to housing benefit. Reducing housing support to lowincome persons in the private rental sector increases the prevalence of depressive symptoms