Why young couples are delaying the decision to start a family for long periods of time - Andy Brown

The first problem for many couples is saving up a sufficiently large deposit. With average homes in Yorkshire costing around £223,000 it is necessary to save up a significant deposit even to buy a small cheap end property in a less attractive area.

For those who can live with their parents for years, saving that may not be too difficult. It is a lot harder for someone who has only themselves to rely on and has to pay rent. Saving a deposit to buy is really challenging at a time when rentals are extraordinarily expensive.

The next challenge is finding a way of covering sky high mortgage costs. Taking out a mortgage on a £100,000 loan will typically cost around £760 a month at first. Which is barely possible for quite a number of people to cope with. It is, however, an artificially low start out rate which hides the true cost of the borrowing. At the end of a fixed five year cheap start out rate of around 4.3 per cent many building societies impose a jump to 7.99 per cent which almost doubles the outgoings to very challenging levels. £1,400 a month going out is a huge slice of almost any young couple’s earnings. The most recent figures from the Financial Conduct Authority indicate that around 1.54 million fixed rate mortgage deals will expire in 2024 with an average increased cost of £405.

Those are challenging increases for anyone to cope with. If you happen to have just started a family, or to be considering it, the numbers become truly daunting. Few couples can take the hit of losing one of their two incomes whilst paying for all the extra costs associated with baby supplies even if their mortgage stays stable. When it jumps by savage amounts and those hefty payments go out relentlessly every single month the pressures are on if there is only one earner.

Nor is it easy to find the money by shouldering all the pressures of both people working as soon as is physically possible. Child care costs have now mounted to such a level that they are often higher than what can be earned. Jobs like teaching assistants, hospital porters or care workers no longer pay enough to cover the cost of the childcare bill and the travel to work.

All those pressures have resulted in many young couples delaying the decision to start a family for long periods of time. The average age of a mother giving birth for the first time is now 29.1.

That is five years older than it was fifty years ago. Which is fine if it is the product of free choice about when a couple wants to start a family but is a brutally hard imposition if it is something they want to do but simply can’t financially afford to do until they are five years older. Those extra years bring increased risk of failing to conceive or of health difficulties for the mother or the child.

All of which means that an increasing number of young people are looking to the older generation for financial support to enable them to make the choices that they wish to make. Something that is only possible if you happen to be fortunate enough to have well off parents who can afford to support you.

Instead of living in a meritocracy where a bit of good hard work and self-reliance will enable any young couple to make the decisions that are right for them, we are now living in a time that has similarities with the world of Jane Austin. What matters for many people is not so much their own efforts as what your “expectations” are of family support or inherited money.

This is a problem that has taken decades to develop so fixing it is unlikely to be quick or easy. Subsidising first time buyers simply puts house prices up and wastes government money on subsidising building developers. Increasing supply is also problematic. Left to its own devices, the building industry will rarely find it sufficiently profitable to respond to the needs of those who want modestly affordable homes.

It needs planned government intervention to stop available green field land being used to build large executive properties and start using them for reasonably affordable homes. We need to convert disused shops and offices in town centres into attractive starter homes. We need financial support for landlords and developers to turn disused housing in run down areas of our cities into well insulated homes in areas where schools, parks and employment prospects are also being rapidly improved. And we need more council houses.

Andy Brown is the Green Party councillor for Aire Valley in North Yorkshire.