The most common living arrangement for a young man in Britain used to be with his spouse, and maybe their children. In 2026, it’s with his own parents. Think about what that really means: about joy, about meaning, about self-esteem. Have you ever tried to bring a romantic interest back to your childhood bedroom? Have you ever thought of your mum and dad as not just parents but also your landlords? If an Englishman’s home is his castle, then, increasingly, modern men are peasants in someone else’s keep.
At its foundations, our housing crisis is an affordability crisis. The median average price of a British home in 2025 was 7.6 times the median annual average earnings of a full-time employee. The last time housing was this unaffordable it was the 19th century: children worked in mines, cholera cases were widespread, Thomas Carlyle was an influencer, and holidays were taken on trains all the way to Blackpool (the Wright brothers are working on it, all right?). Property ownership was largely the preserve of the gentry and aristocracy. In the 20th century, that ratio was, outside of a few short spikes, consistently around four times average earnings. It meant you could save a deposit with one income over a few years and then buy with a mortgage. Work hard, get on the ladder, start a family. Call it a social contract.
The rental market is no better. Rents have increased by 52 per cent since January 2015. Has your income increased by 52 per cent in that time? The typical private renter spends 36 per cent of their income on rent. In 1980, the figure was 10 per cent. Make a note of that date – we’ll come back to it.
There are several causes of this situation, which destroys the belief that hard work pays, and which has led Gen Z to prefer consumption and speculation over long-term saving (dubbed “financial nihilism”) by some. First is the increase in the UK’s population. Housing supply and housebuilding has not kept pace with that increase. The Centre of Cities calculated in 2023 that if the UK had simply built at the same rate as our European neighbours there would be an extra 4.3 million homes in the country. In order to catch up with the European average, we’d need to build more than 600,000 homes every year for the next decade. Doing so would go some way to addressing the problems above, or the fact that the UK tops the global league table for homelessness among developed nations.
Since Margaret Thatcher embarked on a journey to create a property-owning democracy by introducing Right to Buy in 1980, the proportion of people living in council housing has decreased from 30 per cent to 6 per cent today. Thatcher, in all her wisdom, described her approach in a Sunday Times interview in 1981 with the immortal line, “Economics are the method: the objective is to change the soul.” But the family silver can only be sold off once, and now your kids have got no cutlery. Have their “souls” been changed in the way she anticipated? I wonder if the immiseration of younger generations, locked in to parasitic rent extraction for the rest of their lives, would be proof enough of the Iron Lady’s misjudgement.
The loss of 2.4 million council houses, though, is only part of the story. Real housing-crisis heads know that 1947 is a totemic date, thanks to the Town and Planning Act. It is the piece of legislation that birthed a million Nimbys, codifying our current discretionary planning system. In simple terms, the act enshrined uncertain, case-by-case decision-making instead of a rules-based, flexible zoning system which would make development lawful so long as it follows predetermined criteria. You can see the results all over Britain today.
So we know what needs to be done: the construction of millions of homes, a great many of them owned by councils. But the radical overhaul of our planning system is only part of the “how”. There is still the small matter of actually building the homes, and paying for their construction. A productive state, of the kind theorised by a few thinkers in Andy Burnham’s orbit, would establish regional housing corporations, free from quarterly earnings pressure and able to plan for decades-long payback periods. They would be able to access cheaper cash, a significant catalyst in a capital-intensive sector like construction, borrowing without the risk premium of private lenders and the profit margins demanded by private equity investors. Or you could set up a national wealth fund for councils to borrow from.
All of which is to say, borrowing. Contrary to rag-press wisdom, there is little evidence to suggest that borrowing to reduce one of Britain’s core inflationary pressures – housing costs – would mean punishment by the bond markets. As Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, said in September last year: “There is a lot of dramatic commentary on this but I wouldn’t exaggerate the 30-year bond rate.”
Should the next Labour leader prefer to build houses and reduce wealth inequality at the same time, he might also consider a wealth tax of the kind forcefully advocated by the likes of Gary Stevenson and Gabriel Zucman: a 2 per cent minimum tax on the ultra-wealthy. But the point isn’t whether Britain can afford to build millions of homes. Build the homes, tax the billionaires, and maybe, just maybe, a generation of Englishmen can finally unlock their own front door.
[Further reading: Nigel Farage aims to scramble the narrative with his by-election gamble. It won’t work]
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This article appears in the 08 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Great Con
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Subscribe here to commentQuite an achievement to write 1,000 words on the housing crisis without once mentioning immigration.
You obliquely mention “the increase in the UK’s population” – as if it was something that has just sort of naturally happened and was out of anyone’s control, rather than a deliberate political choice.
Current estimates are that there are 13.1 million foreign-born people in the UK – 19% of the population (it is probably a lot higher). Does this have any impact on housing, Oli?