Please end Tory hell so I can buy a house, says Doncaster writer Lisa Fouweather

According to figures from the Office for National Statistics, there has been a significant increase in people in their early twenties still living at home with their parents, with the average age that people are moving out of their family home in the UK, as of 2023, being 25.

Whether they've never left home, or have left and come back (the 'boomerang' generation) people are staying at home far later than ever before.

A clear, long-term trend.

In 1997, more than half of 21-year-olds had already left home. At that time, the most common living arrangement for an 18–34-year-old was in a couple with one or more children.

However, fast forward two decades, and, by the time of the census in 2021, most people in their early 20s were still at home, living with their parents (56% of people aged 20 to 24, an 11% increase from the previous decade).

This begs the question: 'Why?'

We know that the cost of living crisis is influencing the ability of young people to seek independence and buy their own property, undoubtedly.

In 1997, the average house price in the UK was £60,000, whereas today you can add 200 to the front of that. The average price of housing in 2024 is £263,600.

Evidently, inflation has made it, and continues to make it, increasingly difficult for young people to get their foot on the property ladder. Even if people do manage to scrape a deposit for a house together (and it often is a 'scrape' too, when the average cost of a deposit in London is £144,500), how does one save up enough money to pay their mortgage back, whilst also affording to pay the record high bills for gas and electricity, food, all of the above?

The 'cost of living' is exactly what it says it is: What we have to expend at staggeringly high amounts 'just' to stay alive.

The average household's electricity bill is estimated to be just short of £1,200 annually. This is more than four times the annual cost of electricity 25 years ago when it was just £269. Similarly, the average household's gas bill has also shot up. What was £275 per year in 1997 is now over £1,000.

The average council tax bill has also increased, from £564 in 1997 to £1493 in 2022, a rise of 165%.

And food. We're now spending more than double the amount we spent on food in 1997.

In 1997, the average weekly food shop per person was just £16.71. But, by June 2022, the average price had risen to £36.43. That equates to spending £1,025 more on food, per person, per year.

Combined with rising gas and electricity bills, council tax, and increasing house prices, people are forced to choose between 'heating or eating” or food banks.

Thank God for food banks.

In 2021/22, a record number of 2.1 million people in the UK had used a food bank in the previous 12 months. And, one year on, in 2022/23, the Trussell Trust, a charity that works to end the need for food banks in the UK, supplied 2.99 million emergency food parcels to people living in poverty.

Inflation has seen everything rising, from house prices to food to council tax to gas and electricity, all of which contribute to the increasing age of people living at home with their parents, because, how else could they afford to live?

Many people wouldn't, can't, hence where the term 'generation rent' comes from.

Recent figures suggest that up to one-third of millennials (people aged 23–38 as of 2019) may never be able to own their own home, leaving them with no option aside from renting for the entirety of their entire lives.

Unfortunately, though, it's not just house prices/mortgages that have dramatically increased either, but so too has rent, with what affordable housing does still exist being snapped up by buy-to-let landlords who rent properties out to desperate tenants at extortionate* prices.

*Consistent with the theme of literally everything increasing in price, from 1989 to 2023, the average price for renting across the whole of the UK has increased by around 3.71% year on year.

If we use the stats from above and assume that rent will continue to increase by around 3.71% on average annually, then in 25 years we can expect that rent will be a staggering £3023 per month.

And so ultimately then, people have two choices.

They can either

1) Bankrupt themselves by paying rent for a home that they will never actually own, or 2) Well, the second option isn't really an option for most people, fork out an extortionate sum to secure a deposit for a house (which they will probably also never own considering the historically high mortgage rates in the UK).

For people who can't afford to do either, they're essentially stuck, hence why homelessness is such a big issue.

According to the homeless charity Shelter, at least 309,000 people are homeless in England today, with over 3,000 people reported as sleeping rough on any given night (a stark increase of 14% in one year).

And it's only going to get worse.

Despite bills increasing, how much money we have to pay them is not [increasing], with the average person in the UK being £10,200 poorer than they would've been had the economy continued to grow at pre-2010 rates (i.e. pre-Tory rates).

Although the Conservatives made a bid to level up the economy, it seems everywhere has been levelled down.

Fewer than 54,000 council homes have been built in England since 1990, yet 14.4 million people (one in five) live in poverty, with an income sitting far below the standard poverty line.

As this 2023 Guardian article comments: “Owners of private rental properties have seen their assets grow in value by £400 billion since 1990, equivalent to the amount needed to build more than 50 times the number of council homes that were actually built in England in that period.”

But, is the cost of living the only influencing factor in why young people are living with their parents for longer?

While it is certainly a major factor, if we look at trends in reaching 'milestones' in adulthood, everything is happening later.

First comes love, then comes marriage.

In the 70s, the average age of marriage for women was 22.8 (25.1 for men), with over a quarter of all women being married by the age of 20, over three-quarters by the age of 25, and 9 in 10 by the age of 30. The average age of marriage now, however, is 31, with only one in three women 'tying the knot' before the age of 30.

Then comes a baby in a baby carriage.

In 2021, the average age of mothers who gave birth in England and Wales was 30.9 years, an increase from the 70s when the average age of first-time mothers was 26.4.

Then comes the...snowflake?

Gen Z'ers, people born between 1997 and 2012, are told that they're the 'snowflake' generation, 'too soft, 'too sensitive', 'too emotional', 'too woke', 'too liberal', 'too progressive', 'too quick to take offence’ 'political correctness gone mad.'

Born in 2001, I sit firmly in the Gen Z, supposed 'snowflake' category.

In fact, only yesterday I had someone informing me that I am 'the worst type' and that I 'make them feel sick' for *daring* to call out racism.

As I replied to them, 'I'd much rather be a lightning-fast racist accuser than a lightning-fast racist.'

Perhaps rather surprisingly though, I do actually agree with many aspects of what boomers dub 'snowflake' characteristics.

Writing for myself, I am sensitive.

I am liberal.

Why?

Because I care.

And I do think that these characteristics lend some reason, alongside the housing crisis of course, as to why people are moving out later, getting married later, having kids later, doing everything 'later' because, again, writing for myself here as an angsty 22-year-old, ('angsty' because I don't really know what I'm doing here- does anyone?!), I cannot quite get my head around the fact that I am actually an adult, let alone an adult who is supposed to be doing 'adult' things like moving out.

What is that all about?

Still living at home, aside from the money-saving aspect, means that I can do work that I find meaningful, rather than taking on a job because I'm desperate for the money to pay the bills.

I am hoping to move out in the near future, but at the moment I'm grateful for the support I have in being able to do what I really want to do, (i.e., to keep living my anti-capitalist utopia as the snowflake that I am).

Although, dear God PLEASE can we end the fourteen-year Tory hellscape at the next general election?

I'd quite like to be able to afford to actually buy a house, one day.