Opinion  

A nation of renters

Hal Austin

It is open season once again on young people who want to get on the housing ladder and who face a barrage of negative reasons why the barrier to home ownership should be raised even higher.

Only at the top end, with the cash-rich oligarchs, the big bonus beneficiaries, the trustafarians and those who inherit homes that have been in families for generations should become the proud owners of some place to call their own.

The reality is that £43trn of Britain’s post-war wealth is tied up in residential property and, according to experts, that is by far the most money tied up in any single asset.

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The debate over whether a house is a home or an investment is tired and exhausted and not worthy of serious debate.

It is the accumulated wealth in bricks and mortar that now drives the equity release sector and provides social care funding for some home owners in their old age.

This is a social purpose that those who oppose the expansion of home ownership tend to ignore.

Post-war housing has delivered to the ordinary working man and woman a lifestyle that even young people of today cannot imagine.

If the problem in the 1950s and 60s was affordability, the current crisis is one of supply, both in terms of social housing and of entry-level homes, since the demand is obvious.

Throughout most urban areas, but particularly so in London, there is an acute shortage of homes to rent and an oversupply of people looking for homes.

It is in part to satisfy this need, along with the problems in the pensions sector, that the buy-to-let sector has been one of the fastest growing in housing. With the government spending £20bn a year on housing benefits and a growing list of people waiting for local authority and housing association homes, this figure does not look like reducing in the near future.

Further, the 1960s belief that people should not spend more than 10 per cent of their disposable pay in rent or mortgage, has been exposed for the myth it has always been.

What families decide to spend on providing a shelter for themselves and their dependants is one for that family and not the nanny state or its agents.

Having said this, I believe baby boomers have had it relatively good and must come to a settlement with the current generation of young men and women on a number of issues, including housing.

But this is far from kicking down the ladder as we climb on the roof of our own terrace homes.

Baby boomers have had the advantage of statutory local authority funded university grants and the best years of the defined benefits pensions.

Now we have seen the development of a gradual, but atavistic social policy regime in which young people are burdened with huge post-university debt, a struggle to get on the housing ladder and an even bigger one to get and hold down a decent job.