At least if Akshata Murty is annoyed by Sunak’s domestic peculiarities, they are sharing a life – and a kitchen – through choice. Not because they are utterly unable to afford a home of their own, says Emma Revell
‘Rishi Sunak is right,’ I messaged a friend last week, accompanied by a photograph of my unemptied dishwasher.
Earlier this month, to mark International Women’s Day, and presumably in an attempt to humanise the part-billionaire couple ahead of an election campaign, the Prime Minister and his wife sat down with Grazia magazine to discuss how they divide their household chores. Sunak, it seems, is a little fastidious when it comes to maintaining a tidy home – always making the bed and, entirely correctly in my view, rearranging the dishwasher to ensure it is stacked in the most efficient manner.
Unlike most of the country ( judging by the state of the polls at the moment) I happen to agree with the PM on more than a few issues but I didn’t expect kitchen standards to be one of them.
Not only does lining up all the plates and bowls properly mean the water can get to each item, it also makes it easier to take everything out again at the end. Not that my housemates ever seem in a rush to empty the dishwasher. But crockery-based complaints aside, I don’t think I’m a total monster to live with, and nor are my housemates. For six strangers thrown together by a nationwide inability to build houses and the luck of the draw when it comes to using SpareRoom, we get on incredibly well. Whether it’s how best to line up plates and bowls in the dishwasher, the acceptable length of time one should leave laundry drying in the living room, or how much space in the freezer can reasonably be taken up by one person’s meal prepping, there are bound to be differences in opinion – but we get by, finding the tolerable middle ground out of necessity.
But here’s where we differ from the Sunaks. At least if Akshata Murty is annoyed by Sunak’s domestic peculiarities, they are sharing a life – and a kitchen – through choice. Not because they are utterly unable to afford homes of their own.
Yet for many others like me, through necessity rather than preference, it’s not uncommon to be sharing a house with five other grown adults. We are trapped in an extended adolescence – a never-ended university experience, forever divvying up fridge space and moaning about how no-one ever empties the bins.
And we’re the ones who were able to move out. The number of adult children living with their parents increased by 14.7 per cent in the decade to 2021. According to the most recent census, more than one in 10 30- to 34-year olds lives with their parents. The same survey showed that in London, more than one in four families had at least one adult child in the home. When it comes to help with housing, we’ve moved from the Bank of Mum and Dad, to the Hotel of Mum and Dad.
City A.M. readers will be well aware of the scale of the challenges facing the country, and especially London, when it comes to housing. But it is worth spelling out exactly what that means in practice: People unable to get jobs which could boost their income and social mobility. Businesses struggling to attract the employees they need because homes within commuting distance are unaffordable. People delaying having children until they are secure on the housing ladder, meaning they have fewer children, if any at all, with all the knock on implications that a declining birthrate has on the size of the future workforce, public spending, and taxation. We have already seen school closures in several London boroughs, but some areas are projected to see the number of primary school-aged children fall by 10 per cent or more by 2028.
Politicians and policymakers should not underestimate the growing disillusionment this is causing. We have an ever-increasing body of young and middle-aged people who feel that no matter what they do, how much they earn, or how much they save, homeownership, parenthood, and even proper adulthood are not within their reach.
The solutions are simple, perhaps frighteningly so. Build more, build better, build higher, build denser, build beautiful, build social, build an extension or an extra floor – but for the sake of an entire generation, just build something. And maybe that way, I’ll finally have a dishwasher of my own to stack as I please.
Emma Revell is external affairs director at the Centre for Policy Studies