Do social housing residents really age slower?

Great news. Living in a damp home can help you live longer. Admittedly, I am not all that convinced, but it is no less valid a conclusion to draw from a paper in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health than the line that has been reported in the Guardian and elsewhere today: that living in private rented accommodation (but not social housing) can speed up the ageing process.

This feels like a peer-reviewed study which appears to confirm prejudices – in this case, social housing good, privately-rented housing bad. You can see it is going to be trotted out by Guardian journalists for years to come as ‘scientific evidence’ that private renting is killing people and that we need massive investment in social housing. But does it really tell us that? Dig down into the study and it all gets a bit nebulous. What the researchers have done is to take data on DNA methylation – that they use as a marker for the speed of the ageing process – from 1,420 people and cross-compare it with data on those people’s housing arrangements.