High rents and benefit cuts push poorer renters out of UK’s cities, report finds

Rows of terrace houses in Bristol, where the number of low-income households living in privately rented homes in the inner city fell by 38%. Photograph: Charles Stirling/Alamy

The social fabric of the UK’s biggest cities is being transformed by sky-high rents and cuts to housing benefits as thousands of low-income private renters are pushed out of central areas, accelerating the “suburbanisation” of poverty, according to a study.

The trend – driven also by the gentrification of once largely working-class neighbourhoods and the selloff of social homes – is excluding poorer people from inner cities and deepening divisions between rich and poor, the study found.