The number of households with children in the private rented sector has increased by 103 per cent in the past 10 years, according to a report from a research charity.

Families with children in higher income households were the group with the greatest proportional rise in the Building and Social Housing Foundation’s analysis of data from a variety of sources.

The report, Who lives in the private rented sector?, said: ‘The growth in higher income families [in the private rented sector] is indicative of the constrained access to homeownership.

‘As wealth constraints have an increasing impact on access to the tenure, having a higher income is no longer sufficient, and many remain in the private rented sector.’

The research found there were 588,016 households with children living in the private rented sector in 2000/01, but 1,196,142 in 2009/10. As a percentage of the total number of households in PRS, this group went up from 8 per cent in 2000/01 to 16 per cent in 2009/10.

The number of higher income households with children accounted for a 4.6 per cent rise as a proportion of the total number of households in the PRS, in the research released last month.

The charity also found the number of housing benefit claimants in the PRS had gone up by 54 per cent from 626,720 to 966,848 over the 10 years. Although, as a percentage of the total number of households in the PRS, this group remained fairly static, at 26 per cent in 2000/01 and 25 per cent in 2009/10.

BSHF set out to analyse the changing household characteristics in the private rented sector over the past 10 years. Researchers analysed data from a range of sources, including from the Department for Work and Pensions, the Communities and Local Government department and the Office for National Statistics.