Self-Employment and Home Ownership after the Enterprise Culture

This paper examines the relationship between patterns of self-employment and patterns of home ownership in England in the 1990s. It does this via a secondary analysis of the Survey of English Housing. It argues that for many of the self-employed both the housing boom and the economic boom of the 1980s and the housing and economic recessions of the 1990s have been mutually constitutive. The growth and sustainability of self-employment and of home ownership are two sides of the same socio-political coin. In the 1980s they both boomed and in the early 1990s they both bust. For the future, after the enterprise culture, the two forces are likely to pull in opposite directions, with increasing reliance on self-employment but with housing constituting both a constraint and a risk. Owner occupation is unlikely to offer the means for small business growth that it did in the 1980s, but equally, will make financial demands that the self-employed may find hard to meet. The extremes of boom and bust may be avoided towards 2000, but the livelihoods and homes of self-employed mortgagors are still likely to be precarious.