Jayne Dowle: Generation shut out from owning their homes

The National Housing Federation says that only 63.8 per cent of adults now own their home, compared to 72.5 per cent in 2001. Unless she comes into a significant amount of money, I despair of how my five-year-old daughter will ever afford to buy, not just the house of her dreams, but a house full stop. Even if she stays here in Barnsley, and prices remained static, she would need access to at least £60,000 to buy the smallest terrace house, assuming she wants one with a roof, and neighbours she might like to speak to.

If you live in Harrogate, that might sound like a steal. But by my rough calculations, she would have to find at least £10,000 for even a basic deposit, and then a mortgage company willing to give her a mortgage, which would mean a steady job that paid her upwards of £15,000 a year. And she might have university debts of anything up to thirty-odd grand to pay off on top of that.

I get so cross with the “in-my-day brigade”. Yes, I know that 50 years ago, you lived with your parents and worked all hours God sent so you could afford the down-payment. That’s what my parents did, and they had their names on the mortgage papers by the time they were 21. And so it followed with my generation. Amazing to think now that in the early 1990s, when I lived in London, every young couple we knew was also buying their own starter flat, and fully expecting to move every couple of years in that quaint old-fashioned upwardly mobile way. How can we have stood by and watched as the clock turned back to before the Second World War?

If you think that young people today make a tremendous fuss about “not getting on the housing ladder”, you have to understand that their circumstances are like nothing we have ever seen before. What we have is a perfect housing storm. High house prices, still inflated from the bubble of the buy-now, buy-to-let, buy-to-finance-your-pension years, low salaries – I was shocked to find one of my young graduates proudly starting work on just £12,000 a year – and hardly any finance, borrowing having been curtailed by financial institutions.

And, in many areas, especially rural districts and cities, there is a distinct shortage of homes. House-building rates are at their lowest since the 1920s. Not only does this create the immediate problem of stagnation, it also pushes up prices. Housing Minister Grant Shapps is very proud of his government’s pledge to deliver 170,000 new homes over the next four years. But you don’t even need to do the maths to work out that this represents a tiny impact. It’s not just about roofs over heads. It’s about our younger generations totally altering the paths of their lives because they have nowhere of their own to live.

Nearly one third of adults under 34 still live with their parents, and the housing charity Shelter estimates that 2.8m people are delaying having children because they can’t afford a home.

No quick fix is going to solve the depth of this crisis. No special government Homebuy scheme or whatever it is called this month will tackle the culture which has allowed speculators to come in for years, buy up housing stock with no controls in place whatsoever, and push ordinary first-time buyers firmly off the edge of the cliff. And now those first-time buyers have disappeared, there is no-one to shore up the bottom of the market. Ergo, no-one to move up the chain. No-one to buy your house. Or your parents’ house, the modest profit from which they hoped would set their grandchildren up for life. Everybody is stuck.

Can anything be done? Well, I hear lots of clever ideas of how foreign investors can be made to pay specific property taxes, and how planning regulations can be relaxed to free up more development land, but as a country, we have simply got to come out of denial. I want to hear Grant Shapps saying that he has worked tirelessly with the banks to create viable and permanent solutions to give first-time buyers the help the need to buy the house they want, not the house the government thinks they want. And I want the Prime Minister to remember that speech he made in 2006, shortly after he became party leader; “Home ownership for our young people threatens to become the preserve of the lucky few. I passionately believe that everyone should have the right to buy their own home.” It was his dream then. What has he done to make it come true?