Harmful Gambling and Housing Precarity

This seminar presentation is based on a 2-year CPFW (Aston University) research project with Birmingham City Council (BCC) which aimed to understand harmful gambling prevalence and to develop an intervention framework to help prevent council tenancy loss due to problem gambling.

The mixed-methods approach included focus groups, tenant interviews and a council tenant survey. Being in rent arrears was taken as the key variable to investigate the prevalence of harmful gambling linked to housing insecurity. Results revealed that 1 in 5 of BCC tenant respondents have been affected by harmful gambling, and that problem gamblers were twice as likely to be in rent arrears than other gamblers. Reinforcing previous studies which have shown a two-way relationship between harmful gambling and homelessness, this study extends that duality in the prevalence of harmful gambling. 

Dr Halima Sacranie is the Director of Housing Research at the regional thinktank The Centre for the New Midlands, and is also an Honorary Research Fellow at CHASM.

She completed her PhD in 2012 at the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies at the University of Birmingham, and went on to lead the Housing and Communities Research Group from 2018 to 2023.  Halima’s research is focussed on housing and communities - an important arena for current policy and practice challenges in relation to housing supply, quality, affordability and insecurity, as well as neighbourhoods and place-making, and the role of councils and third sector housing organisations in the provision of housing and related services.