Younger people are set to live at home longer as housing affordability shrinks
Homes England has warned that more younger people look set to live with their parents longer as the cost of buying a house isn’t due to decrease anytime soon.
The government’s housing accelerator, Homes England, has quoted Census statistics which forecast the UK population soaring to more than 60m by 2045. With affordable properties already hard to come by in England, the government body has predicted that younger people will be forced to live with their parents for longer as the cost of properties will continue to skyrocket as a result of high demand.
Against this backdrop, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) has recently revealed the cost of a home is rising quicker than earnings with affordability ratios increasing from 4.92 in 2002 to 8.28 in 2022.
In addition, Homes England has quoted ONS data exposing the cost of a home is increasing quicker than people’s earnings. Back in 2022 the average house price in England was £102,000 and the average salary was £20,739. However, if we skip to 2022, the price climbed to £275,000 with the average salary rising to £33,208.
London was the least affordable place to live with the average house price more than trebling to £525,000 in 2022 compared with an average house price of £174,000 in 2002.
In their latest factsheet for The Need for Homes, Homes England said: ‘Many young people cannot afford to buy homes in their local communities where they have grown-up, due to worsening affordability.’
Echoing a similar tone, Steve Turner, executive director of Home Builders Federation, stated: ‘Amidst an already acute housing shortage in this country, housing building is falling sharply. Whilst the government may say it wants to be building 300k homes a year, the policy environment is resulting in us getting further away from that target.’
The housing sector have previously criticised the government over an anti-development planning system, lack of support for house buyers and under-resourced council planning departments.
‘Planning for housing is just one part of the puzzle because we also need to infrastructure to support good placemaking, and this means greater land use,’ Rico Wojtulewicz, head of policy and market insight at the National Federation of Builders said. ‘Unfortunately, the government has played planning politics for far too long and this has cost the British public affordable and enough housing, better jobs, regional connectivity and levelled up places.’
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