When Charlie, 32, was growing up in a small town in Lincolnshire in the 1990s, she dreamed of success, of moving away, of what politicians called “social mobility”. She is an archetypal middle-class “zillennial”, on the cusp between millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, and Gen Z, 1997 and 2012. She was 15 at the time of the 2008 global financial crash that would go on to shape her adult life. Since then, Britain has changed for young adults in ways that Westminster has failed to address in any meaningful way.
Charlie’s adult life illustrates how surreal and defeating the post-2008 socio-economic order has felt for so many. She grew up in a working-class family in a council house. Her dad worked as a shopfitter, but became a stay-at-home dad after he was injured at work. Her mum worked in factory or retail jobs.
Charlie “pushed really hard” to create a “better life” for herself than the one her parents had. By some measures, she achieved that. In 2012 she became the first person in her family to go to university, studying for a BA in fine art in Norwich, and later qualified as a teacher. She was part of the first cohort to pay £9,000 a year in tuition fees. Including loans for living costs, her first degree cost £35,719; her teaching qualification, £12,827. She owes the Student Loans Company £76,765.23 – £28,219 of which is interest. More than a decade since she started her first degree, despite repaying £95 a month, her debt continues to rise by £400 a month.
Charlie realised she would never be able to save a deposit while renting in Norwich. So, in 2021, she moved back home to Lincolnshire to do her PGCE. She works as a secondary-school art teacher, earning £42,057, just above the national average. Five years after moving home, Charlie is a homeowner – but not in the way she might have hoped. In 2024, she and her dad bought her childhood home together through Right to Buy. “If I’d stayed living independently,” she says, “I would have been living pay cheque to pay cheque, which is crazy because it’s a professional job with what people consider a good salary.”
She might be the most educated person in her family, but Charlie says she can’t afford to do much more than her parents could at her age. At 32, she still walks the same streets she walked as a teenager, now with her dog and her nieces and nephews. She feels she has “worked so hard” to get to a place she is “disappointed with”. She wonders whether she’ll ever be able to afford to buy a house independently, or have the children she’s always wanted. “In theory, I moved up the class ladder by going to uni, but I’ve moved back to the council house I grew up in,” she says. “I’m middle class on my CV, but not in the way I live.”
Unintentionally, Charlie speaks for an entire generation. If the 1980s and 1990s spawned Yuppies – young, “upwardly mobile” professionals with university degrees, well-paid jobs and disposable incomes – the 2010s and 2020s belong to the “Dumpys”: the Downwardly and Unhappily Mobile Professional Young. The Dumpys have some of the trappings of a middle-class existence – a degree, a professional job – but lack its foundations: a secure home of their own, financial freedom.
For the first time since industrialisation, huge numbers of young adults are no better off than their parents were at the same age. The comfortable, educated, professional middle class is collapsing, and with it the aspirations of many who wish to join it. Class war is not over, but the battle lines are being redrawn. Far from being a Blairite meritocracy, Britain is now an inheritocracy: a place where a young person’s life chances are defined not by their hard work, but by their access to family wealth.
Today, there is no single, widely agreed definition of what it means to be “middle class” or “working class”. Where once it may have been as simple as those who owned property, it is now more complicated – not least because Right to Buy meant council tenants could enter the property-owning classes. A person’s profession is no longer a clear guide to their class either, because thousands of people with apparently middle-class jobs and the historically middle-class credential of a degree rent and live from one payday to the next.
Intergenerational inequity is a problem for most Western economies, but it is particularly acute in Britain due to expensive housing, stagnant graduate wages, a fraying social safety net and extortionate childcare costs. Young adults everywhere are angrier than older people, and Britain is no exception. This, perhaps, is due to the gap between aspiration and reality: the chasm between what they were told life could be and what it is.
Charlie, like anyone born in the late 1980s or 1990s, grew up in an optimistic decade. The years between the end of the Cold War and the global financial crisis felt – in the West, anyway – like the beginning of a new world of peace and prosperity. British politicians made big promises about the future. When John Major became prime minister in 1990, he pledged to make Britain a “classless” society. During the campaign ahead of Labour’s 1997 landslide, the future deputy prime minister John Prescott declared, “We’re all middle class now.” In 1999 Tony Blair went further, saying the UK’s class war was “over”. He wanted 50 per cent of young people to go into higher education and 80 per cent of Britons to own their home. He pledged to turn Britain into a meritocracy, and for young people to be rewarded for their talent and hard work with financial success and security. For a while, it worked. The number of first-time buyers surged, and more people (particularly women) went to university to enter professions that their grandparents would never have considered. But then, in the immortal words of the Britpop band Pulp, something changed.
The 2008 financial crash created a new economic reality that shaped what was possible. Government debt soared, living standards stagnated, and the coalition government cut public spending. Tuition fees went up. The future a generation had been promised via education, and the cost of the homes it would need in that future, rose further out of reach. In 1997, the most common living arrangement for people aged 18 to 34 was with a partner and one or more children; by 2017, this group were more likely to be living with their parents.
Since 1997 the average property price in England has risen by 173 per cent after adjusting for inflation, and by 253 per cent in London, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Real rents, meanwhile, have risen by 38 per cent. This compares with increases in real incomes of 25- to 34-year-olds of only 19 per cent. As a result, in 2017, just 35 per cent of 25- to 34-year-olds across the UK were homeowners, down from 55 per cent in 1997. The biggest drops have been among middle-income young adults. Despite holding professional jobs, in terms of housing tenure, their lives now look more like those of their working-class peers. Meanwhile, 74 per cent of people aged 65 and over own their own home outright – up from 56 per cent in 1993.
The economic “recovery” that followed the financial crisis relied heavily on asset price inflation (monetary policy nailed interest rates to the floor to coax Brits into spending, causing house prices to soar) and on encouraging school-leavers to borrow against their future earnings to fund universities. Today, those young adults carry more debt than their parents’ generation did: on top of student loans and higher levels of consumer credit, the size and length of mortgages for those who do buy are increasing. It is now not unusual for people in their mid-to-late thirties to be granted a mortgage on the proviso that they sign a contract promising to work beyond the state retirement. It’s thought that close to a million young mortgage-holders could still be repaying loans into their official retirement years.
This generalised insecurity is one of the reasons young people are having fewer children and, if they do become parents, they do so later in life. In 1997 the average age of a first-time mother in the UK was 26.1; today it is 30.9. In London and the south-east, it is higher. Only my wealthiest friends have more than one child; siblings are becoming the new status symbol. According to the Office for National Statistics, women born in 1969 had an average of 1.91 children. For their daughters’ generation, born in the late 1980s, it’s 1.01. In 2025 there were 3.7 million one-child families in the UK – just over 45 per cent of the total.
At 38 years old, I know this story only too well. A few years ago, I finally paid off my student loan (which was, by the end, costing me almost £500 a month). I have a “good” job, earning far above the national average wage. And, yet, what I can borrow in relation to my income and the amount I have for a deposit (just over £50,000, partly accrued in savings and capital payments on the mortgage of my one-bedroom flat bought with Help to Buy), is not enough for me to buy a family home anywhere near where I want to be. I never questioned whether I would have children, but now it’s likely that, if I am able to, I will be 40 when I have my first. Yet I’m one of the lucky ones. I am solvent, I own a bit of something, and I’ll figure it all out – if a fair bit later than I, or the limits of my fertility, are comfortable with.
Go to university, get a job, buy a house, have a family – that was the New Labour teleology of higher education. But today, many young people are stuck partway through that progression. Work no longer pays what it once did, and – despite the rising price of obtaining one – neither does a degree.
In 2019, Britain met Blair’s goal of half of all young people going to university. Figures from the Department for Education show that England’s graduates still enjoy higher rates of employment and pay than non-graduates. But the reality is that the real earnings of younger graduates have been stagnant for the past decade, if you adjust for the inflation of their other costs. The minimum wage, on the other hand, has consistently gone up.
The number of graduates who remain unemployed for a year or more after leaving university has risen to nearly 60,000. This year, the number of young people who are Neets – not in education, employment or training – surpassed one million for the first time since the early 2010s. I travel across Britain on a weekly basis as a reporter and I increasingly hear the same thing from young people: “What’s the point of getting a job if it won’t pay me enough to pay my rent or buy a house?”
“My generation was sold the idea that university would help you be successful… but it wasn’t realistic,” Charlie says. “I remember being told not to worry about student loans at school, but nobody factored in what would happen to wages and then inflation.”
Graduates with salaries above £30,000 pay a 37 per cent marginal tax rate (basic rate income tax 20 per cent, National Insurance 8 per cent, plus 9 per cent student loan repayment). For those with salaries high enough to push them into the higher tax bracket (40 per cent on earnings over £50,270), it’s 57 per cent. Under Keir Starmer, Labour froze tax and student loan repayment thresholds, so more young adults will effectively pay more in tax and student loan charges in years to come.
When I recently interviewed David Willetts, who was the Tory universities minister in the early 2010s when the coalition government raised tuition fees from £3,290 to £9,000, he maintained that this was the fairest way at the time to finance higher education. However, according to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, between 2007 and 2024, the graduate premium for young workers fell from around 35 per cent to 24 per cent. Graduates still earn more on average over the course of a lifetime, but the relative financial advantage of higher education is narrowing.
At 26, Luke Robinson feels stuck. Like many young people, he is downwardly mobile in comparison to his parents. He was “definitely raised middle class”, even though his parents were once what he considers “working class”. His mum was a housewife, his dad did “lots of cash-in-hand jobs – everything from a bouncer to a builder”. Luke grew up in a three-bedroom house his parents bought for around £130,000 in 2003. Now, he works as a video editor and rents a two-bedroom flat with his wife on the outskirts of Ipswich for £950 a month. He says the idea of owning a property like his childhood home is “a distant dream”.
Luke studied Japanese and economics at Soas in London, and is indebted to Student Finance by more than £50,000. He was the first person in his family to go to university. His parents believed this would mean their son would have an “even better life” than they did. But this hasn’t happened. Luke admits he imagined the opportunities available to him as a graduate would be “much more lucrative”. As Luke is self-employed his income varies, but since 2022 he’s earned somewhere between £30,000 and £34,000 a year, which is £2,000 to £2,300 a month after tax. “I can’t even imagine having a mortgage and trying to look after children, which my mum and dad managed to do on just one income,” he says.
Does Luke still think of himself as “middle class”? He isn’t sure. With the self-awareness characteristic of Gen Z, he says he is acutely “aware” of his “privilege” as someone who grew up as a white man in the south of England, in a home his family owned. But, in light of what he knows now about student debt, wages and the cost of housing, he jokes that he views his early life as “less silver spoon” and “more wooden spoon wrapped in foil”.
While young middle-class men like Luke are confounded by being unable to provide for a partner and children in the way their fathers did, young women face an intriguing parallel problem. On paper, they may be the most economically and socially liberated generation in history, with reproductive autonomy, equal pay and access to credit without a male guarantor. They go to university in far higher numbers and get far higher marks than their male peers. But, in practice, their freedom is limited by economic reality.
Sarah Donley Black, 36, grew up in a four-bedroom detached home outside Belfast and now finds herself “in debt, living pay cheque to pay cheque and still renting”. After studying at Dundee University in Scotland, Sarah graduated into the post-crash job market in 2012; she worked first in publishing, before moving into photo editing. Between them, she and her partner, a freelance graphic designer, earn around £3,500 per month after tax.
“The only way I will ever have a similar standard of living to the one I grew up with is if my parents die and I inherit,” Sarah tells me, “but even then, it will be split four ways [between her and her siblings].” Her biggest problem, as she sees it, is that while the cost of housing has risen, her income “has barely increased in the last eight years”. She faces the prospect of “being replaced by AI” at work.
Sarah recently became a parent for the first time. The experience has made her notice “the stark difference” between the living standards she grew up with – “cruise holidays once a year as a family, clothing from decent brands and money never seeming to be a major worry” – and those she can give her daughter.
“I benefited from my parents’ social mobility,” Sarah says, “but now… financial security feels a long way off.” Trying to achieve that stability, which for Sarah involves “what most boomer families had – a house, a car and the means to support a family”, feels Sisyphean, “an endless mountain to climb”. As a result, Sarah and her partner decided to relocate from London, where their rent and bills were around £2,500 a month, to Seville, Spain, where their rent is €700 a month.
The gender pay gap may have closed to around 13 per cent, but this measure does not account for lower lifetime earnings due to maternity leave, career breaks for childcare, or part-time work. Meanwhile, the gender wealth gap has widened to 21 per cent, primarily because men accrue more pension wealth.
The median home in England costs more than 11 times women’s median wages; for men, the figure is eight times, because women still earn less than men on average, due, in part, to caring responsibilities. According to the Women’s Budget Group, there is no region in England where it is affordable for a single woman to rent a home; the average home is affordable for men on median earnings everywhere except London and the south-east. For this reason, lower-income women, and single mothers in particular, find it harder – if not impossible – to progress economically. It may have been 200 years since Jane Austen was writing novels about women who feared destitution if they did not marry. But getting married to a man on at least a median male wage may still be a better economic prospect for a woman than educating herself.
The gap in income between Britain’s middle-class young professionals and formerly low-paid jobs such as hospitality and retail has closed. In 1997, a person on a median income took home almost double the amount of money as someone on the lowest rung of the income ladder, according to the Resolution Foundation. In 2023 it was only 50 per cent more.
This breakdown between educational attainment, social progression and financial reward raises an awkward question: what happens when indebted young people graduate into middle-class jobs that don’t pay much more than the working-class labour of their peers who did not go to university? A successful self-employed plumber may now earn more and have less debt than a mid-level solicitor, who feels the threat of being replaced by AI.
Mike Savage is an emeritus professor of sociology at the London School of Economics and author of Social Class in the 21st Century. Among today’s working classes he observes a group that might once have been the upwardly mobile middle class: the “emerging service-class workers”. This group has “little economic capital but good cultural and social capital”. Emerging service-class workers, he says, are “mostly younger people who can’t build wealth or get a secure career position”.
One of the biggest shifts to occur in British society since the early 2000s, Savage says, is that “a university degree and/or a good job no longer translate straightforwardly into a secure career”. “Today, the key question is whether people are getting help from their parents,” he says. “This may not make them super-rich, but they’re getting money – whether that’s for a house deposit or to fund an unpaid internship. The Bank of Mum and Dad enables people to progress in life.” (Numbers from the estate agents Savills suggest that more than half of first-time buyers had family help in 2025, to a total of £8.3bn.)
One day, many more people will inherit money from their parents and grandparents in what has been dubbed “the great wealth transfer”. But the reality is that, assuming this inheritance hasn’t been swallowed by care costs or inheritance tax changes, it will come too late to help them when they want to buy a home and start a family. In any case, the average expected inheritance for millennials is £130,000, which won’t buy a house without a substantial mortgage in many places in Britain.
The decoupling of work and financial stability for the middle classes has already reshaped British society. Dan Evans is a sociologist at Swansea University and the author of a book about the increasing instability of the educated middle class, A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petite Bourgeoisie. “I don’t think enough research has been done on downward mobility in the educated middle classes because it’s relatively new,” he tells me. When Dan and I first met, he had just had a baby with his partner. Now, at 40, he is raising his child in a one-bedroom flat – despite being a successful academic who, like Luke, believes he has “done everything right”.
“The professional class is shrinking,” Dan reflects. “We know that many graduate jobs are being lost to AI, and there’s a growing body of research that debunks the idea of a graduate pay premium. But I think when we talk about downward mobility in purely economic terms, we lose something of the brutality of it, the toll it is taking on these young people who have worked hard and done as they were told, often [on the understanding that they would] become socially mobile and progress beyond their parents’ standing in the world.”
In some ways, the young workers of the modern middle classes have much in common with Marx’s proletariat: they work to live, don’t own assets and sell their labour power to the bourgeoisie – many of whom are working-class landlords who bought property before Britain’s house price boom.
Inequality in Britain is intergenerational, but also intragenerational and interclass. Not everyone will be concerned by the closing gap between the fortunes of middle- and working-class young people. Indeed, why should progression and prosperity be reserved, as they once were, for those people lucky enough to be born into home-owning, university-educated households? But, tantalising as it may be to regard these shifts as a sign that British society is equalising, the dissolution of the middle class as New Labour understood it has completely changed the social contract.
In 2014, the then Labour leader, Ed Miliband, was ridiculed for addressing what he described as a “crisis of confidence” for middle-class families who were worried about their finances and those of their children. Aside from the right lamenting the “narcissism” of young people, Westminster barely seems to have registered this total reshaping of the British class system – perhaps until now.
“Things have changed a lot over the last few decades,” the Green MP Hannah Spencer said in her victory speech in Gorton and Denton – the by-election the UK’s new Prime Minister had hoped to win himself. “Working hard used to get you something. It got you a house, a nice life, holidays; it got you somewhere… Now, working hard, what does that get you?” When I posted her words on X, several advisers to Labour ministers texted me, lamenting that Starmer was not speaking to this issue.
Andy Burnham, by contrast, is passionate about youth employment, is focusing on the housing crisis, and his Education Secretary, Lucy Powell, is driving reforms to vocational education. But a challenge lies ahead – one that may not yet be electoral, but is certainly fiscal: young adults having fewer babies means there will be fewer workers to pay for the ageing population in years to come.
The Oxford professor Ben Ansell has warned that by 2075, more than 80 per cent of the UK’s rising costs will come from an ageing population, eclipsing the pressures of defence spending and net zero. The proportion of Britain’s population aged over 65 is expected to rise from 18 per cent in 2024 to 27 per cent by 2075. According to the IPPR think tank, the cost of the state pension and higher health and social care costs could result in ageing adding almost 10 per cent of GDP to fiscal pressures by 2075.
Burnham has committed to Starmer’s manifesto pledge to keep the triple lock on state pensions. But, as the former chancellor Jeremy Hunt has admitted, it is not only “immoral” but also “an anchor drag on economic growth” because above-inflation rises to the state pension are being funded “by more debt” on future generations.
For years, while politicians looked elsewhere, aspirational young adults, whose ascension of the social ladder was once presented as inevitable, slowly slipped downwards in a perverse game of snakes and too few ladders. The result is a confused generation of indebted young people, left without the rewards they were once promised in return for hard work, and with little to show for their efforts other than disappointment and dissatisfaction. This is new territory, and there is little from the past that can help predict what happens next.
Vicky Spratt is housing and society correspondent at the i Paper. Her latest book, We Were Promised the Moon, will be published by HarperCollins in 2027
[Further reading: This was the summer that optimisation died]
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This article appears in the 02 Sep 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Meet Generation Screwed
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Subscribe here to commentThe fact that this tale of woe is not new doesn’t make it any less difficult for those involved. Way back in 2016, the IFS published ‘What and where you study matter for graduate earnings – but so does parents’ income.’ Some degrees and institutions have always led to low employment and wage prospects. Studying creative writing may be great fun but, on average, will not result in much income, especially if you are a bloke. The 2008 financial crash led to 13 years of UK interest rates at 1% or below. Great for those buying a home, not so good for those with savings. Life isn’t fair; sometimes you are on the winning side, sometimes you’re not.
Going back to the late 1960s and mid 70s it is a myth that this was an era of working class social mobility when the first wave of post war university expansion took place. Rather the universities were full of students from the middle classes. I know because when I went to the Univeristy of Bath in 1975 it was wall to wall middle class and I felt i because I was from a lower woking class background. Back then working class kids thought they could earn more than enough by going to work in factories. Thatcher soon put them in their place. Fast forward to the 2000s and the next wave of university expansion tried to favour working class kids but debt was a big negative for anyone from a working class background. Back in the 1970s I was on a full grant and paid tuition fees but there were far fewer degree places available. Now as good jobs disappear a degree comes with debt unless your parents can pay off the loans. Now that well paid jobs are hard to come by the universities are in a mess because they cannot subsidise homegrown students with the expensive fees charged to foreign students as the visa ar drying up. In the end a Swiss system where 10% of school leavers go to university and 75% go to vocational apprenticeships is probably the best system but how could you graft that onto UK society?
‘Britain is now an inheritocracy: a place where a young person’s life chances are defined not by their hard work, but by their access to family wealth.’ Of course. That’s what happens when any political opinion significantly to the left of New Labour is de facto illegitimate. 1945-1979 will be viewed as a mere hiatus – a time for Capital to regroup before reimposing its hegemony