Introduction

There is increasing interest in intergenerational transmissions of housing wealth, inheritance planning and how these reflect shifting patterns of intergenerational relations (Finch and Mason, 2000; Rowlingson and McKay, 2005). The proliferation in this literature in the UK context reflects the fact that greater numbers of households have assets to pass on to other family members during the giver's lifetime and in death, and that the values of these financial exchanges are much greater than for previous generations. A key source of this reciprocity is housing wealth. The UK housing market, since the postwar period, has experienced a number of key developments. These have included higher rates of homeownership, rising properties values, the dominance of homeownership ideology in successive government policies, the liberalisation of financial markets giving homeowners easier access to a wider range of financial products and services, higher levels of consumption and debt. The statistics alone give an indication of the scale and importance of homeownership to households and the national economy – it is by far the most popular form of housing tenure. In 2007 there were 14.7 million homeowners accounting for 70 per cent of all housing tenures in England. A recent report on the state of the homeownership market revealed that the average national house price between the period 1994 to 2007 rose by 230 per cent, from £60,000 to £200,000 (Hamnett, 2009). The total gross mortgage lending in the UK in 2007 stood at £364 billion, a threefold increase from 1999. An earlier report by Smith for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimated that the level of unmortgaged housing equity stood at £2.2 trillion (Smith, 2005). Much of these changes reflect the complex relationship between the home as the locus of kinship ties, as a source of financial well-being for households and their families, and as a major driver of the national economy.

This literature, which has charted the complexities of financial exchanges and reciprocity, has tended to neglect the diversity of the UK's homeownership community and the global nature of kinship and financial networks. Despite the wealth of quantitative and qualitative data on the socioeconomic profile of households engaging in transmissions of housing wealth through intergenerational loans and inheritance, there is little understanding of the position of minority ethnic homeowners, particularly those from a migration background.