UK poll: Work and money worry young people more than culture wars or climate
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
If you are a high-earning knowledge worker - you will be taxed to the pips, pay some of the highest OECD childcare costs, pay >= 35% of your paycheck in rent alone. The median house to median earnings ratio in even second cities like Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle are comparable to San Francisco. The older generation living an index linked lifestyle are completely immune to seeing these effects.
I've lived in the US too - there is a huge cultural difference in how house prices are treated. Even home owners bemoan high house prices, because they increase their property taxes. This is a huge cultural blind spot in the UK. And a similar system would be enormously helpful (but not exhaustive) in terms of incentives.
I think older people might not be aware of how bad it is, as you are quite insulated from it if you are paying back a mortgage from a 10-20 years ago rather than renting at market rates.
If you have a good job you can get by, but with a significantly lower quality of life than a comparable job would have on much of the Continent, let alone in America.
That said, my experience is mostly limited to London and the South-East where I grew up, so perhaps it's better elsewhere but most of the jobs are in London, and anywhere even within commuting distance is ridiculously expensive. Getting a house like my parents or grandparents had would be impossible, and they weren't rich.
The new government has said they want to sort out the NIMBY stuff and get Britain building again, let's hope they do.
The two main factors for this are: two-person income households up-bidding, making it less affordable for single people/mums/dads, and an unsustainable level of immigration.
> The new government has said they want to sort out the NIMBY stuff and get Britain building again, let's hope they do.
The former factor is just a massive wealth transfer exercise to people who had a house in the 1980s, and is just what we have now - no building can help it any more. The latter is somewhat out-buildable, but our building is not going to hit housing 700k people/year levels. We can't build a city the size of Nottingham every year, and if we did, that would be to maintain the current prices, not to decrease them.
No, the one main factor is lack of new housing, mainly due to the green belt.
On the supply side, natural population growth due to reproduction is surely a bigger driver than immigration. Unless you want some sort of dystopian mass sterilisation policy, or simple a mass slaughter of young people, the only solution is to build more houses.
Government policy is unfortunately concentrated on giving first time buyers access to bigger mortgages, but of course this is just going to drive up prices. In a free market, that would incentivise house builders to build more houses, but with no land to build them on there's no way for that to happen.
This is from ONS[0]:
> Natural change has previously been the main driver of UK population growth. However, since the 1990s, the influence of net migration has increased, becoming the main source of growth.
The UK is not a devoping country. It would have a very stable population, or even a fractionally declining population, without net migration. And house prices for young people would look very different.
[0] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...
I do think there's a cause and effect reversal though: if housing supply was plentiful enough to allow young people to move out as early as boomers could, there would quite likely be much higher natural population growth. (i,e. it's hard for people in their twenties to have relationships when both sides are living at home)
Our house building has always kept up with our population growth before - immigration isn't a sudden surprise that nobody could have seen coming, it's literally business as usual, and the failure to build enough houses for the entire population is a failure.
If you want to be a bit higher-level about it, government has pursued mutually exclusive policies (underbuilding and high immigration) and now the consequences are starting to bite. But IMO, if immigration had been cut, housebuilding would have been cut even further - house price inflation has been popular with the electorate, historically.
I think if you look at Net Migration, the jump is very sudden:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/283287/net-migration-fig...
>> government has pursued mutually exclusive policies (underbuilding and high immigration)
Both policies are popular with the capital owning "rich" - it keeps the value of the property high, and it keeps employee wages low.
> I think if you look at Net Migration, the jump is very sudden:
That's the composition of the growth, not the population growth itself.
I'm saying that if population growth was 100% from local births, or if population growth was much lower, we'd still be in this situation. The source of the population growth is immaterial.
It's not immaterial. People often want their kids to have as good a life as they did. If there's something stopping that because there are too many kids nationally, that's very different to stopping that because the government allows giant numbers of extra people into the country.
775k in 2008, off a population of 62m.
I feel like you're bending over backwards to pretend you don't understand the point.
ONS[0] shows deaths of around 550k at the same time.
> 775k in 2008, off a population of 62m.
Same ONS chart shows more like 720k births, and 500k deaths as well.
> I feel like you're bending over backwards to pretend you don't understand the point.
Just as the 700k immigration figure I mentioned above I did so in good faith, making it net migration, I think you should operate in good faith as well and talk about net natural population change.
[0] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
I did, right at the top when I used this link:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/281296/uk-population/
The comment you originally replied to, I think?
No, it’s really not. When a citizen is born, they don’t need their own place to live until they’re 18-20 years old. There’s time for the housing supply to catch up. When a citizen is imported, they need housing TODAY.
No two ways about it, 1M births every year is a lot more sustainable from a new housing perspective than 1M immigrants every year (on top of births!).
Only if you put their bed in the cupboard under the staircase; normally they do need their own bedroom — even if a couple can squeeze into a one-bed flat, they can't really raise a family there, and need to get a bigger place when they do start one.
Second, if you started your family with a three bedroom house, kids 1 and 2 (or more, with sharing) are accounted for.
Third, you’re ignoring the “on top of births” point. Those immigrants who need housing TODAY are ON TOP of births, and the number never slows down. That absolutely creates massive additional housing pressure.
Sharing with their parents? Otherwise you still have this transition.
> Second, if you started your family with a three bedroom house, kids 1 and 2 (or more, with sharing) are accounted for.
If. Most people don't start at that rung of the housing ladder. My parents did… but they bought in the early 70s. I started on a one-bed apartment, which I let out when I emigrated.
> Third, you’re ignoring the “on top of births” point. Those immigrants who need housing TODAY are ON TOP of births, and the number never slows down. That absolutely creates massive additional housing pressure.
1M births + 1M immigrants is indeed more than just 1M births. It's also begging the question, by presuming that in the absence of immigration there's no change to births.
Or emigration, or house building, or a whole bunch of other things that influence all this — Indeed, one of the jobs immigrants can be found working at, is house building. Those kids who have yet to move out, occupy rooms, and yet can't immediately contribute to building more homes.
Why are you starting with the assumption that every family starts off as two parents living in a one bedroom apartment?
That's not to do with them needing their own place.
If there are some smaller dwellings and flats for singles, some family dwellings, and some dwellings for folk too old for their previous dwelling, a stable population will use that setup indefinitely with relatively few modifications.
The issue is more NIMBY's preventing supply from meeting demand and local government not using the increased revenue effectively enough to provide sufficient infrastructure and services.
But do they also consume less in social services than they contribute in taxes? Everyone has this romantic picture in their head that the never ending waves of immigrants to western countries are all doctors, lawyers, and nuclear physicists. In the US we seem fixated on bringing in poor, uneducated Central Americans. In Europe it’s a lot of poor, uneducated Africans. Perhaps through sheer numbers the GDP goes up, but the net value is debatable.
> The issue is more NIMBY's preventing supply
Wow, imagine that. People who bought a nice single family home don’t want a thirty story low income housing project plopped down next to them. There’s plenty of room on the outskirts of any given town to build the hundreds of skyscrapers needed annually to house these people, why not do that instead of trying to jam it all in existing areas and pissing off people who didn’t sign up for it?
GDP is going up, but GDP per capita is currently declining.
There is no natural population growth in the UK anymore. We have below replacement rate birth rates. Immigration is the only net driver of population growth today and immigration is currently growing the population at around 2% annually. We saw similar problems with housing affordability in Canada after their mass-migration experiment. It honestly surprises me that there are still people who deny that mass-immigration policy without a comparable mass-home-building policy would increase house prices. The UK would need to build something like 500,000 homes a year just to keep up with the current rate of immigration. This isn't feasible in any near-term time frame. As it stands, if you want mass-immigration to continue you must accept increased home unaffordability.
Obviously you can offset the impact of immigration by building more houses, and the UK should build more houses, but to say that you would need a sterilisation policy to fix is obviously wrong – you just need to slow the flow immigration and the growth of the population to levels which match the rate at which the UK can build homes and new infrastructure.
The bidding up of property prices in the UK is also an issue and the parent commenter is right to raise it. It's not just dual-income families responsible there though, but also wealthy, foreign and corporate buyers. In the UK property is seen more as an investment than somewhere to live. So here it's quite common for people to buy and hold property simply for the return. Often properties in the UK are brought by foreign investors and left unoccupied. We've tried to make changes to stop this in recent years, but it's a problem.
More than 50% of women aged 30 were child-free in 2022: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/jan/27/women-c...
Has reproduction increased a lot since then?
If we build houses everywhere where do we grow food? Where do we go to get some peace and quiet? We don't all want to live in a hell hole where the only chance of quiet is in a small sealed box.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/land-use-in-england...
(Edit: Israel has 2.9 TFR but that's an exceptional case, and Saudi has 2.3 but that's more of an emerging market)
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. There's lots of incentives from everyone involved (all the way up to the government itself) to ensure this bubble never collapses, bending the rules and everything else around it if necessary - not too dissimilar to how the speed of light remains a static constant regardless of an observer's own speed, with space and time adjusting around them as needed to ensure this.
Indeed.
But:
> There's lots of incentives from everyone involved (all the way up to the government itself) to ensure this bubble never collapses, bending the rules and everything else around it if necessary
The more this happens, the harder the resulting crash.
The same argument as the Laffer curve for taxes, but for rent: when it gets to 100% of income, there's no incentive to bother immigrating, and all the reason to emigrate.
I feel like you have at least missed two other very significant factors: low interest rates and increased borrowing limits for mortgages driving up the amount people are able to afford and the fact that councils almost completely stopped building houses since the 70s/80s.
Low interest rates will drive prices up, but not to the point we have now where nice-sized family houses are divided into multiple small residences and it's still not enough. I haven't tried it, but I suspect if you game-theoried it out with a stable population and low interest rates there would be up-bidding, but everyone would still end up with a house.
With a relatively stable population you don't particularly need many new houses to be built (and not by councils in particular).
We've done it before and we could do it again.
The problem is that it has opposition from the Right who wish to preserve small villages or simply increase property values and opposition from the Left who see economic growth as a dirty word and development as gentrification and environmentally destructive.
But if we want a better future for our children and grandchildren, it must be done.
It should also be noted that two-person incomes are much more tax efficient than single because the tax bands are per-person rather than per-couple. So two people each on median pay (37k) would take home 60k between them. A single earner would have to be on almost 90k to take home the same amount, which would make them a top 5% earner.
"Will not" != "can't".
While I agree it's unlikely that the UK government will, such a building policy absolutely can be made to happen.
> if we did, that would be to maintain the current prices, not to decrease them.
Depends on the policy. UK used to have local councils building and owning property specifically to be cheap enough for working people to afford. This has different incentives than getting the same number of units built by private investors.
As I have a young child, and perhaps more children in the future, having good restaurants isn't as important as being able to afford a 3 or 4 bedroom house. And this is pretty unaffordable not just in London (which probably isn't the best place to raise children anyway) but across the entire South East.
I agree that it has excellent work opportunities though, which is partly the problem - the best jobs in the UK are all concentrated there.
Tourists visit London because there are lots of interesting things to see and do. People who live in London also get to see and do those things.
But yes, personal taste etc etc.
There's decades of underbuilding to make up for, and the current government's house building targets are modest. I don't think we're going to see price inflation slow in this Parliament, or the next.
My generation, they need a down payment of 50k Euro, just for the banks to even talk to them. And to borrow for a decent house, within 50km of a job location, people need to deal with 30, 35+ year loans.
The problem as i see it:
* The older generation live longer and longer, and this combines with a generational change where people want to live by themselves (and not with the kids). This creates a issues where homes are off the market, for 80 a 90 years. Reducing supply.
* Ground prices have gone up because zoning laws made tons of buildable land, zoned differently. Speaking from experience as a large part of land that our family owned was altered into agricultural 50 years ago. Only for the government to disowned it (and pay out) as agricultural for their own building projects.
* What used to be a easy to build home, has now tons of regulations regarding isolation norms, what you can build, how it can be build, this increases the construction costs.
* Immigration / foreign capital. This is often also overlooked. Maybe this is only a local (my birth country) issue, but we had a strange situation of people from different countries immigrating here, and buying homes in the smack middle of the capital. How? Because the foreign banks of those immigrants considered owning the property as a investment, resulting in them easily giving loans. Much more easily then the local banks gave loans. This created a situation where entire areas turned into immigration zones, pushing out the locals, and reducing supply.
* Second part of the foreign capital is that large investment companies or oligarchs just buy up tons of homes, apartments etc. So we get insane tower projects with 100's of apartments that no local can affords but sold to foreign capital as "investment". What in turn drives up the prices all around the areas', creating a massive bubble effect that expands to all around the areas.
* Then we have the issue that if somebody wants to sell a home, they are going to charge the max they can. And with a more limited supply then demand, it keep driving up prices. To the point that we see absolute ruins being ask insane prices for. Because the owners think "we own XXXXX in value". No, you own a ruin that costs you nothing beyond the land tax, but forget about them dropping prices. The ironic part is, despite a lack in supply, its easy to find empty homes because of this investment/holding on issue.
Owning a property is cheap, so cheap that companies see it as landbanks, and the people who own one, are going to keep a occupied until their 80 or 90s. Combine that with a increased population in all countries in the world (beyond maybe russia etc), and the country flight (people moving to cities because the jobs are there).
The ironic part is, a lot of the home prices is because people need a home, to be within reason of a job location. They are the people earning money and spending it on a home. When you look more country side, you find TONS of cheap homes but no work.
THAT is the main issue in my mind. We allow too much companies to be placed in central spots, this means everybody want to live there for the work but that drives up ground/home prices (and infrastructure costs as roads get congested). The places where its cheaper, lack the investment from companies/population growth, so price are stable or drop.
We do not run out of land, we have tons, but so many villages in so many countries died out, because jobs are not there. Nobody invested in those smaller villages and put all the good infrastructure in those top10 cities, resulting in them ballooning even more and ... Now combine that with the other factors...
Ironically, the work from home/pandemic movement helped for a short time but it created such a rush, that we had not normal price increases but ballooning effects. Too much people buying country homes in a short time, again, sellers market. In a more normal society, we have work spread around. More cities, lower work density concentrated on specific spots. But that requires government involvement (good luck with that) and LONG term planning. Not a few years, no, 20, 30+ year plans.
But the work from home movement is already under pressure from so many companies, despite the clear benefits for employers and employees. Because how can you be a manager when you can not oversee people in person... There is something phycological in people with power position about them having fine control over their employees.
Anyway, its a mess everywhere, not just the UK. We are still renting here in our 50's. The only people benefiting is the people who owned the rental properties as their capital goes up and up (rental income + property value increases). But as a middleclass, it really starts to hurt them. And no right wing "we solve it with simple solutions or its the immigrants fault" type of stuff is going to solve that. But people are desperate and yea, then we have a increase in ultra left and ultra right parties.
Worst part is that a lot of politicians are personally invested into keeping higher property prices, and have no incentive to deal with the issue, as it hurt themselves.
In the seventies social housing programs gave an entire generation a chance, and now that same generation is scalping their own offspring with the very same properties.
Controversial opinion, but the pension system is even more problematic in this respect. Boomers are living longer and didn't have enough kids to maintain the affordability of the post-war pension system, but they don't seem willing to take any responsibility and instead have demanded my generation must accept mass-immigration and record high taxes instead of say pushing back the retirement age or requiring boomers who are sat on a large property wealth sell their home to fund their own retirements....
I've been alive a little over 30 years and I've seen my city completely change as a result of immigration. And everyone I know who is working complains endlessly about the amount the government is taking from them in taxation.
And of course some people would argue that this cultural change was a good thing, which is fair enough if they feel that way, but one can't help but be amazed at how keen boomers have been to make such significant and permanent changes to our nation's culture and demographics simply to ensure they get their pensions. And it's not like boomers as a generation don't have the wealth to chip in a little...
They all report more or less the same, hundreds of job applications going out, mostly zero, or only 1-2 responses (but for jobs that they have hundreds of candidates for).
Forget buying a house (which is totally unaffordable), even paying their monthly bills is a challenge.
Seems like with AI (for a lot of white collar jobs at least), this isn't going to get better. Governments might have to start thinking about UBI ...
A large portion of my salary goes toward rent and utilities. Fortunately, I work in tech, but I often wonder how others even manage.
Workplace conversations revolve around how expensive everything is and sharing tips on saving money. It’s definitely a source of anxiety.
"Work" and "money" are hard problems. Any meaningful solution is going to be difficult to understand, and I think people know it. The economy fluctuates regardless of who is in office, making past experiences murky. A politician is going to have a hard time convincing them that any of their policies will actually work.
It's easier to find a politician who agrees with you on the culture wars, and then assume that their economic policies will also work.
So I take it with a grain of salt when they say that they're picking based on a sound consideration of a politician's economic policy. They can say it, and maybe even believe it, but I bet you'll find that the correlation to culture is even more predictive of their vote.
A dearth of half-promises from startups without any clear mission other than AI salad in the hopes they can entice lost VC or paranoid big corps to buy them out, in the meantime hollowing out their shell as much as they can with the biggest manic grins you could possibly imagine as they dry out from the inside.
It's a shitshow.
Housing and employment are affected by the supply and demand. Housing is expensive because there are too many people for the number of homes. Jobs are poorly paid and rare because there are too many workers looking for jobs.
Why is the government flooding the market with people given the negative effects?
Housing is arguably expensive because it is being treated as an investment opportunity. I remember when the 2012 Olympic Villiage flats were put up for sale. Many locals were excited at the prospect. In the end most were snapped-up by firms buying 10s or hundreds of them
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin...