Older generations don’t understand the emotional toll lack of housing is taking on young people who are having to postpone adult milestones, says Emma Revell
In an ironic turn of events, I may have become one of the first home-owners of the Starmer era. On 5th July, having been awake for well over 24 hours watching the election results trickle in, I picked up the keys to my new house – something I do not recommend repeating when the next general election rolls around.
In fairness, the Conservatives may be able to stake a claim to helping me onto the housing ladder, given the exchange was done weeks ago, but in reality no political party has done anything near enough to make things easier for me or my generation to buy homes.
All parties share responsibility for the country’s failure to build anywhere near enough homes, whether its scrapping national house building targets while in government, running overtly anti-building campaigns to win rural by-elections, or heading up any of the dozens of local authorities that consistently block new development
At last though, the Labour Party – from the Prime Minister and Chancellor down – does actually seem determined not only to build more houses, but to explain to the country why doing so is so integral to the nation’s economic success.
Rachel Reeves’ first speech as Chancellor focused heavily on both and included much needed reforms such as measures to speed up infrastructure delivery – not just of houses, but transport and energy infrastructure too – and measures to hold local councils’ feet to the fire on delivery. In a positive move, she also reiterated a firm commitment Keir Starmer had already made to review green belt land. Countless developments are held up or outright refused because they concern land which technically falls within the green belt but is far from green, such as car parks and wasteland. Labour plan to identify this land and prioritise it for regeneration.
“The question is not whether we want growth”, Rachel Reeves said in her first speech as Chancellor, “but how strong is our resolve? How prepared are we to make the hard choices and face down the vested interests?”
In some ways these shouldn’t be hard choices at all. Reeves has been very clear she understands the link between a lack of housing and stunted economic growth.
Without the ability to move to higher-paying jobs, workers can get stuck in low-pay, low-productivity roles. Without affordable housing nearby, Britain’s supposedly world-beating universities are losing out on the best and brightest researchers and academics we rely on to make breakthroughs in medicine, AI, and other R&D-intensive industries. Without the option to move into a place on their own, young people are increasingly delaying starting a family because they don’t have the space or security to have children and declining birth rates affect us all.
Pro-housing building activists John Myers, Sam Bowman and Ben Southwood christened this phenomenon ‘The Housing Theory of Everything’ in a seminal essay of the same name. They make the case that such is the importance of a functioning housing system, the impact of failure to address under-supply permeates and undermines almost every facet of society.
It will not be news to readers but it is worth spelling out just how bad things are. The average house price in the UK in December 2023 was over £100,000 higher than a decade previously. In the year to March 2023, 45 per cent of first-time buyers used inheritance or help from their families to get on the housing ladder, almost double the 23 per cent in 2003. One in ten 30- to 34-year olds lives with their parents, in large part due to the rising cost of housing.
It is hard to quantify or explain to those older generations who never experienced it what the emotional toll of constantly postponing these adult milestones. I bought my house having spent the previous seven and a half years renting one room in a six-bedroom house on the edge of Zone 2. Lack of housing in major cities sees people like me and my former housemates, in our late 20s and 30s living a sort of perpetual university experience – arguing over whose turn it is to take out the bins or why you’ve tripped over someone else’s bike abandoned in the hallway.
I’ve been surprised how much of the joy of owning my own place has been in the little things: knowing if I was coming home to dirty dishes it was because I, not someone else, had left them in the sink or the hours I’ve already spent going back and forth to Ikea Greenwich is search of a forgotten kitchen utensil.
A few weeks ago, I wrote that Keir Starmer needed to be prepared to be unpopular. On housing more than almost anything else, Labour will have to face down opposition from within its own party and electorate; from Conservatives who think the right way to respond to a crushing defeat is to embody only the desires of its older, home owning voter base, however dwindling; and from organisations like the Environment Agency and Natural England who cannot or will not consider the impact of prioritising often spurious environmental measures above all else.
Let us hope that, as Reeves said in her speech, the Labour Party “will not succumb to a status quo which responds to the existence of trade-offs by always saying no.” The country can’t afford for them to fail.
Emma Revell is external affairs director at the Centre for Policy Studies