The most common living arrangement for a young man in Britain was with his wife and possibly their children. In 2026, he is with his parents. Think about what it really means: for joy, for meaning, for self-esteem. Have you ever tried to bring back a romantic interest in your childhood bedroom? Have you ever thought of your mom and dad not only as parents, but also as owners? If an Englishman’s home is his castle, then, more and more, modern men are peasants in someone else’s hideout.
At its core, our housing crisis is an affordability crisis. The median average price of a British house in 2025 was 7.6 times the average annual income of a full-time worker. The last time housing was this unaffordable was the 19th century: children worked in the mines, cases of cholera were rife, Thomas Carlyle was an influencer and holidays were taken by trains to Blackpool (the Wright brothers are working on that, okay?). Property ownership was primarily the property of the gentry and aristocracy. In the 20th century, this ratio was, outside of a few brief points, consistently about four times average income. This means you can save a deposit with an income over a number of years and then buy with a mortgage. Work hard, climb the ladder, raise a family. Call it a social contract.
The rental market is no better. Rents have increased by 52 percent since January 2015. Has your income increased by 52 percent in that time? The typical private renter spends 36 percent of their income on rent. In 1980, this figure was 10 percent. Make a note of that date – we’ll get back to it.
There are several reasons for this situation, which destroys the belief that hard work pays and which has led Gen Z to prefer consumption and speculation over long-term savings (called “financial nihilism” by some). First is the population growth of Great Britain. Housing supply and home construction have not kept pace with that growth. Cities Center calculated in 2023 that if the UK had simply built at the same rate as our European neighbours, there would have been an extra 4.3 million homes in the country. To reach the European average, we will need to build more than 600,000 homes every year for the next decade. Doing so would go some way to addressing the problems above, or the fact that the UK tops the global league table for homelessness among developed countries.
Since Margaret Thatcher began a journey to create a property democracy by introducing Right to Buy in 1980, the proportion of people living in council housing has fallen from 30 per cent to 6 per cent today. Thatcher, in all her wisdom, described her approach in a Sunday Times interview in 1981 with the immortal line, “Economics is the method: the objective is to change the soul.” But the family silver can only be sold once, and now your children have no cutlery. Have their “souls” been changed in the way she predicted? I wonder if the debasement of younger generations, locked into extracting parasitic rent for the rest of their lives, would be proof enough of the Iron Lady’s misjudgment.
The loss of 2.4 million council homes, however, is only part of the story. True heads of the housing crisis know that 1947 is a totemic date, thanks to the Town and Planning Act. It’s the piece of legislation that gave birth to a million Nimbys, codifying our current system of discretionary planning. Simply put, the act provided for uncertain, case-by-case decision-making, rather than a rules-based and flexible zoning system that would make development legal as long as it followed predetermined criteria. You can see the results across Britain today.
So we know what needs to be done: building millions of homes, many of them council-owned. But overhauling our planning system is only part of the “how”. There is still the small matter of actually building the houses and paying to build them. A productive state, of the kind theorized by some thinkers in Andy Burnham’s orbit, would create regional housing corporations, free from the pressure of quarterly revenues and able to plan for payback periods of decades. They would be able to access cheaper money, an important catalyst in a capital-intensive sector like construction, borrowing without the risk premium of private lenders and the profit margins demanded by private equity investors. Or you could create a national wealth fund for advice to borrow.
All this means, borrowing. Contrary to press wisdom, there is little evidence to suggest that borrowing to reduce one of Britain’s main inflationary pressures – housing costs – would mean punishment from bond markets. As Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, said in September last year: “There’s a lot of dramatic commentary on this, but I wouldn’t overstate the 30-year bond rate.”
If the next Labor leader prefers to build houses and reduce wealth inequality at the same time, he might also consider a wealth tax of the kind championed so vigorously by the likes of Gary Stevenson and Gabriel Zucman: a minimum tax of 2 per cent on the ultra-rich. But the question is not whether Britain can afford to build millions of homes. Build the houses, tax the billionaires and maybe, just maybe, a generation of English people can finally open their front door.
(Further reading: Nigel Farage aims to upend the narrative with his snap election game. It won’t work)
