Thanks to the Office for National Statistics, we know that it is not a love of avo on toast and soy lattes that is keeping the young from buying a home.
The ONS regularly publishes data in a series called Housing Affordability, which tells you everything you need to know. And the headlines are stark.
Last year those with full-time jobs in England would have to spend 8.3 times their annual wages to buy a home. In Wales, the figure is 6.1 times.
The ONS also calculates what ratio of house prices to earnings would be “affordable”. The answer is five times your annual salary, which still seems very high to me.
In short, current house prices would have to fall by almost 40% to make them affordable, or average earnings would have to rise massively – from the current £35,000 a year to around £58,000.
The chancellor thinks that his constituents on £100,000 can’t cope, but think of those on the National Living wage, which is £20,000. Their wage-to-house-price ratio is a massive 14x. They can pretty much forget about buying a home. It is going to be beyond them forever.
And remember these are just average figures for the whole country. If you want to buy somewhere in London and the south east, the house prices and the multiples of average earnings soar. In Kensington and Chelsea, homes are 34x average earnings, even in Barking and Dagenham it is 11x.
The ONS even produces a lovely little interactive map, which allows you to see just how unaffordable homes are in your area, or where you can never afford to live.
This is why home ownership is falling and why rent is soaring. The cost of renting a property rose by 9% last year, homelessness is on the increase and local authorities are failing to cope with the demand from those thrown out by their landlords.
The answer to all this is obvious: We just have to build more homes. It is as simple as that, the laws of supply and demand do not lie.
We have to build so many houses that supply begins to exceed demand and house prices start falling. The way to do that quickly is to get local councils to start building homes again like they used to before the right-to-buy policies of the 1980s were introduced with disastrous results.
But at the moment the government’s policy of letting local councils block new housing developments is achieving the direct opposite and making this situation worse not better. Nimbys abound and the elderly and rich defend their unearned housing wealth to the death.
This is the reason we have some of the worst and most expensive homes in the developed world. It is a national scandal with dire economic and social consequences.
But Nimbys vote Tory, so let’s just blame it all on avo on toast.
You can read more from Jonty on Substack at Jonty’s Jottings
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