Harmful Gambling and Tenancy Loss

Working with the housing and letting teams of the Birmingham City Council (the Council), this project identifies factors around harmful gambling and personal financial risk/resilience reduction in Birmingham seeking expressly to reduce tenancy loss linked to harmful gambling behaviours.

It is widely recognised that gambling behaviours can lead to significant financial harm to both the victims themselves and to those who are economically linked to them. This harm can include, in extreme cases, of loss of tenancies for those living in rented accommodation where they are unable to pay their rents. The Council has identified this area of tenancy loss as one they wish to tackle more effectively. The Centre aided them in this objective to bring effective research to bear on how to determine the most effective improvements to make to process and procedure in how the frontline service provision is arranged and delivered.

The wider programme of work in which the Centre played a role include training of front-line officers in how to identify and support those at risk of tenancy impacts due to harmful gambling behaviour, create improved referral processes for supporting those so affected, and also evolve new ways to identify and challenge the development of these potentially harmful behaviours in their tenant population before they escalate to harmful stages.

The Centre’s work in this project included an assessment of the extent of harmful gambling’s impact across the city of Birmingham, undertake interviews of those who have experienced the effects of this behaviour first hand and test the effectiveness of different approaches explored by the Council’s frontline teams. The aim of this project is to provide a toolkit of tested ideas to the Council to support their focus on improving this area of how they support their tenants. We hope this toolkit will also be of use to other housing providers to help them better tackle this challenge in their tenant populations.
 

Outputs: Housing Studies Association 2024 Annual Conference presentation

CPFW final report: Harmful Gambling and Tenancy Security

CPFW final report: Harmful Gambling and Tenancy Security (Executive Summary)

CPFW initial report: HSE Data Analysis 

CPFW poster: Harmful Gambling and Council Tenancy Insecurity: Towards an Intervention Framework

Partners: Birmingham City Council

Team: Halima Sacranie, Kanimozhi Narayanan, Lin Tian and Andy Lymer in conjunction with staff from the Council on a co-design basis