Laborers work on the roofing section of a new home a residential construction site in Ebbsfleet, U.K. - Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg
The term “housing crisis” has become so ubiquitous in our public conversation that it has lost all meaning. The fact that Britain suffers from a chronic shortage of housing stock is no longer met with outrage, but rather disgruntled acceptance.
Every political party makes noises about housebuilding and providing a pathway for younger people to get onto the housing ladder.
It’s increasingly something like drizzly weather: a fact of life here in Britain, a widely discussed topic we can do nothing about.
How, then, can we reignite the housing crisis debate to muster up the shock and horror that the topic deserves, and to see some action taken? Perhaps by pivoting away from talking about the crisis itself and looking instead at its consequences.
The effects aren’t mild inconveniences such as not being able to paint your bedroom, invest in a new bathroom mirror or commit to a pet that you feel confident you can take into a new apartment.
Of course, those things matter. But decades of failure to build more homes have created far worse problems.
We are now in the territory of people missing out on important, life-shaping opportunities because of the UK's housing shortage.
The number of adult children now living with their parents has reached 4.9 million in England and Wales, according to census data.
Some 51.2 per cent of adults aged between 20 and 24 were living with their parents in 2021, up from 44.5 per cent in 2011 – a side-effect of lockdowns, but also due in large part to the unaffordable cost of housing.
It’s thought that young people are moving out later than ever before.
This serious delay in moving out has serious economic repercussions, which includes the labour market by keeping people from moving where the best job opportunities are.
This in turn has the knock-on effect of stifling productivity and suppressing growth figures. But we are also bringing out massive culture and societal problems as well.
The normal timeline for having experiences independently, away from one’s family, is being substantially delayed.
Think about the importance of those years in your twenties.
Whether studying, working in an apprenticeship, or moving straight into the world of work, those years are critical for your development – not least because they are riddled with mistakes and hard lessons.
You're figuring things out on your own.
The longer we delay those silly, often misguided but vital experiences, the further we push back the more grown-up endeavours, too.
Plenty of people, young and old, complain about the “Peter Pan generation” – the millennials who seemingly can’t get their act together and tick the right boxes in a similar timeframe as their parents and grandparents did.
What’s so often left out of this narrative, however, is the extent to which it is being perpetuated by public policy.
There may not be an explicit attempt by politicians or officials to infantilise adults, but it is the unspoken trade-off taken to keep at bay a very uncomfortable debate over house prices and the need to build new homes.
Every time the Nimbys (Not-In-My-Back Yard) get their way, a loud and clear message is sent to younger generations: homes are for your parents, not for you.
You can see those messages everywhere.
In the last six months, we saw the battle in the Tory party over the Villiers Amendment, which ultimately saw housing targets watered down from the 300,000 annual target pledged by the party (which even at the height of ambitions was still too low given how much catching up there is to do).
Most recently, we saw the Housing Secretary reject 165 new homes on design grounds.
There’s always some reason concocted to stop any activity that would get people housing ladder at a more affordable price. It’s almost always political, and it stands in the way of doing the right thing for the next generation.
The problem is not simply that 25-year-olds can’t buy – or even rent – a home, but rather that they increasingly cannot imagine a time in the future when they might be able to do so.
The cost of buying a first home has increased by two-thirds over the past decade. With rents skyrocketing too, the average salary, after bills, leaves many people with very little scope to save.
In response to this obliteration of aspiration and ambition, all kinds of schemes are drawn up to lend a helping hand. But these so-called support schemes range from distortive to dangerous.
The Tories are considering rebooting the Help to Buy scheme as part of their manifesto pledge at the next election, which allows first-time buyers to put down a 5 per cent deposit on a home and take out an equity loan from the government to help with the financing.
While the policy once benefited some lucky people – who often already had a big deposit from the Bank of Mum and Dad – it actually led to house prices rising in areas like London, as the scheme boosted demand while doing nothing to address housing supply, putting the dream of home ownership further out of reach for many.
Meanwhile we got news this week that Skipton Building Society is going to be offering deposit-free mortgages to those who can show that they have paid their rent on time.
It’s hard to imagine a scheme that invokes the spirit of last decade’s housing market better than this one. As we’ve learned the hard way over the past year through rising interest rates, circumstances can change quickly and dramatically. Putting a new buyer in such a precarious situation risks failing them as much as it does harming the wider economy.
These kinds of showy policies shouldn’t be needed. It is the bare minimum to expect the British government to adapt its planning policy and regulations so enough homes can be built to house its population. Yet this very basic need – having a place to live – has become one of the most difficult and contentious areas of debate.
No doubt many will continue to complain about the infantilised generation – the ones who will never grow up. No lip service will be paid, however, to calling out those who are stunting that growth, not by months, but by years on end.
