Figures out today show 79% of 20 to 45-year-olds in the UK have now given up on owning their own home because they’re convinced banks do not want to lend to first-time buyers.
And after 5 years of Tory/Lib Dem government, 21% of young people* now think it will be“virtually impossible” for them to ever obtain a mortgage.
And a devastating 82% of 20 to 45-year-olds in London say they are worried they will never be able to buy a house:
Generation rent downbeat on buying outlook
That’s what 5 years of spiv economics – designed to benefit only the very very rich and create job insecurity and falling wages for the rest of us – does for you.
It’s not rocket science.
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* why do surveys like this always dismissively classify all people from 20 to 45 years old as ‘young’?
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Pride's Purge 
Reblogged this on Britain Isn't Eating.
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For the same reason people under 35 are considered minors for HB claims!!
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Reblogged this on TheCritique Archives and commented:
It’s more than just that banks are unwilling to lend to first-time buyers. It’s because there is a deliberate and very conscious decision on the part of successive Governments to hyper-inflate prices in the housing market, in order (ironically enough) to make banks more willing to lend to those who actually own a home to use as collateral.
The 2-Up-2-Down that my parents bought as their first house in the early-1970’s cost them around £9,000. Today, it would cost about £200,000, a total that most people haven’t a hope of making a down-payment on; indeed the £9,000 pricetag from the early-70’s wouldn’t even come close to covering the down-payment alone today. Owning a house has therefore now become a near-exclusive luxury of the well-off.
It is just one more way that the rich are able to maintain a stranglehold over the poor, by reducing the security of their home lives.
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Yup..directly put!
More evidence of the conveniently assuaged, but undeniable, truth, that our government has supported the rich, and particularly landlords (over a quarter of Tory MP’s were private landlords in 2012), at the detriment of the society at large. NHS, social services, education, housing – it’s visible everywhere. what a kerfuffle.
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niemoller
1st they come for socialist, then i buy my council house….
now here we all are….welldone people…
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I’d like to emphasise that the age group 20 – 45 is not ‘the young’ any more, it’s half the working population.
The housing situation in Britain is horrendous and could be stopped tomorrow. It is buy-to-let that pushes prices up. Of course allowing 1 person to own 1000 homes – in London, at London prices for goodness sake – will push up demand in a small island where there are already not enough homes to go around, and of course that will push up prices.
I have heard so many excuses. It’s all feminism’s fault – feminism has been around since the suffragettes, has been powerful since the 60’s. It’s all women’s fault for daring to work, so that most households have two wages. No, that has been the case since the beginning of the 80’s. The current house price rise and rise has been going on since the late 1990’s only. Since buy-to-let’s started to be encouraged.
I have been watching prices rise and rise again through all that time. Only now that it has started to affect the middle classes has it been hitting the media. No one cared when it was just us poorer folks.
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There`s another aspect to the housing scandal. Elderly folks in need of care, who worked all their lives to pay off their mortgage and expected to pass the proceeds on to their off-spring, now have to sell their homes to pay for their care. Some of these elderly are forcibly moved into care homes using the Mental Capacity Act. Business is booming.
Those fooled into buying their council houses find that their wealth, originally taken out of the public housing stock, is being ploughed back into the private care home business.
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My first house in the 1970s cost about £10.5k. To pay for it we didn’t go out for nearly 5 years. Fun was watching TV at my parents house or his parents house. If we were lucky my mum and dad took us both on a caravan holiday with them – Scarborough since you are asking. We got 3 times my husbands salary for the mortgage (He was in computing) + once mine. We had saved up £4k so he must have been earning under £2.5k per year after 5 years with the company. The house was a 2 bedroom flat in a block of 4 flats that looked like a semi detached. We did well, as most started off in a one bedroom flat in a tenement. Our parents took no keep and all our money except that spent on clothes, travelling to work and lunch was saved. No phones, no gadgets, no designer clothes and no nights out. I can see that it still wouldn’t get a place in London (it wouldn’t have back then, and things are worse there now), but if people were prepared to make these kinds of sacrifices,in other parts of the country, there are affordable homes. For a few years in the 90s and early 21st century maybe people could think of starting off with a detached executive house in the most desirable area, but that is no longer possible especially if they still keep buying the latest iPads and smartphones, foreign holidays, nights out, expensive clothes etc. This short boom (for some) really wasn’t the norm, which is more Cathy Come Home for most of us. How many people now would start off with an old yellow cooker from the 1940’s – 30 years old even then – you had to light it with matches – donated by one of mum’s friends. We just couldn’t stretch to a new one. The same friend donated our only cupboard, which was from the same era.
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A major problem is the lending policy of the banks. They will lend literally millions to buy-to-let landlords, some of whom skate on very thin ice as they try to avoid becoming over-leveraged bankrupts rather than property tycoons. If you are a person with an average salary borrowing £150,000 is out of the question, even if the amount of rent you are currently paying exceeds the cost of your mortgage repayments.
The benefits system is also involved. In the days when home ownership for all was bring promoted by the Thatcher government unemployed or sick people got the interest on their mortgage paid by the benefit system. Hence less risk to the lender and no private insurance for the buyer to pay.
Did it save money when the benefits system changed to not paying mortgage interest? It certainly meant that people who from a purely financial perspective could have contemplated a mortgage would be turned down as bad risks did to unstable employment.
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Reblogged this on Beastrabban’s Weblog and commented:
This marks the end of one of the planks of Thatcherism. She dreamed of transforming Britain into a home-owning capitalist society, unlike those benighted foreigners on the continent, where renting is the norm. Hence the sale of the council houses.
This has now gone, and as a result, Britain’s younger generation have no hope of owning their own homes.
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Buying houses never has been a sensible economic objective but to ensnare the populous into providing the financial sector with ready made debt obligations for their profit, at the expense of the economy at large; which is why Germany’s economy continued to grow whilst ours shrank.
The financial sector extracts spending power out of the economy and rising mortgages was the worst element of that.
In the sixties housing costs averaged one fifth of the average income, due to low council rents, how ironic that todays generation can’t afford a mortgage with one whole income let alone one fifth.
But then some of us had been saying how insane the property owning democracy philosophy was at the time when no one was listening.
That is still the same today, whilst Cameron is pledging the right to buy at massive discounts for the same political reasons, Bribery. Are people still daft enough to vote for it?
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