On your first paragraph - yes, if the market functioned efficiently and there weren't barriers to supply. The problem is there are barriers to supply eg through the planning permission process, NIMBYism.

I know the Conservative party is having a revival now on the back of Brexit but the housing situation is the biggest existential problem to the Conservative party's future. When the voting analysis comes out from this election and you see all the breakdowns of age, gender etc, the one to really look for is housing tenure. What is often seen as an 'age' story dividing Conservatives v Lab/Lib/Green is actually a correlation on housing tenure. In the old days it was social tenants vote Labour and home owners vote Conservative. Now you have a growing body of renters in the private sector and they hate the Conservatives.

A couple of years ago I went to a Resolution Foundation event looking at the policy future of the Conservative party. David Willetts and Nick Timothy (after his No.10 days) were making this point forcefully. Timothy had a bad media image as an aloof bully but he came across as an intelligent guy who understood the problem, as did Willetts. Their big concern was the Conservative party had built its election success in the 1980s on being the party that enabled a property dream for people who previously didn't think they could get one. Now its turning in to a party of pulling up the ladder and preserving established divides between those who have property and those who don't. They were saying, if a Conservative government doesn't do something to turn this around for the younger generation and enable them to get onto the ladder, how can we credibly appeal to them. There were a lot of people in the audience coming out with the old tropes 'nobody has a God given right to a house', 'the problem is with the young people today, they don't want to start at the bottom and work their way up like we did, they're lazy'. Sure...but don't expect that attitude to be one that wins young people over to the Conservatives. I got the feeling that Willetts and Timothy were fighting a losing battle. I expect both have been totally sidelined by the current leadership.

You may not have had a cash injection from your parents but you certainly benefited from living with them if I read your post correctly. That's not a criticism btw. You achieved what many simply don't have the willpower for - £250 a month saved is a decent deposit within a couple of years.

You also touch on a good point often mocked by many liberals: "no holidays/no wild night outs and the discipline to pay yourself first every month". It's packaged as 'avocado on toast' and sneered at, but there's a degree of truth there. You simply cannot afford to save for a deposit if you're paying £50 a month for the latest phone, have subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon Prime and whatever else, you want a couple of holidays a year, big nights out 3-4 times a month and get takeaways in most nights of the week.

However, it's simply not true a single person can't buy a house. There are plenty of properties for less than £100k available in loads of areas commutable to Manchester for example, and many other major cities. Some might not be in the most salubrious of areas, but that's kind of how it works, start on the bottom rung and work your way up. Right now within a 5 mile radius of Manchester city centre there are almost 3,000 properties for sale under £150k.

After uni I rented a very rough little 1-bed flat above a hairdressers for several years (£30 a week, no heating, icicles on the ceiling in winter). I then lived overseas for several years so I was well behind the curve when I came back. I eventually bought a little 2-bed in a dodgy area for £79k in the early 2000s, and being on the 'ladder', saving and career progression enabled me to buy a 4-bed detached in a cracking area a couple of years ago. All that with a family and basically on a single wage.

Quote ="wrencat1873"They still can on pay day loans, the Tory alternative to food banks: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/p ... 38076.html Force people to use food banks and then extort money from them through payday loan companies '" That isn't what he said at all though, is it. He's saying (clumsily to be fair) that some people struggle to manage their money (often true), and one of the things they sometimes do when struggling is look for a payday loan. He then says one of the things he wants to do if he's in Parliament is to "stop payday loan advertising because that just makes the whole problem worse." It's very clear - if you bother to take a moment to pay attention - he's against payday loans. Your blinkers skew your hearing it seems.

Quote ="wrencat1873"They still can on pay day loans, the Tory alternative to food banks: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/p ... 38076.html Force people to use food banks and then extort money from them through payday loan companies '" That isn't what he said at all though, is it. He's saying (clumsily to be fair) that some people struggle to manage their money (often true), and one of the things they sometimes do when struggling is look for a payday loan. He then says one of the things he wants to do if he's in Parliament is to "stop payday loan advertising because that just makes the whole problem worse." It's very clear - if you bother to take a moment to pay attention - he's against payday loans. Your blinkers skew your hearing it seems.

That’s not massively dissimilar to my own experience. However, I think we both ‘beat’ the banking crisis and our experiences are of limited relevance to those that did not. I came out of university owing only about £6k, and the deposit for our first house was just £7k. Speaking to a younger colleague, who’d followed a similar path, a couple of years or so after the crash and that deposit wouldn’t have got me and my wife anywhere by that point. And we (me, my wife and you) went to University - plenty of people don’t, so while they don’t have the huge debt associated with a degree nowadays, they [utypically[/u don’t earn as much as graduates either.

I went into academic research for some years, and occasionally we’d receive advice from senior tenured staff about how we could advance our careers as they had done. Work hard, publish in high impact journals etc. They had the experience, but it was of something that had by that point largely disappeared - well-funded and rapidly expanding higher education and basic science. It was still possible to advance, but much less likely. The advice was still basically sound, but was undermined sometimes by a lack of recognition of the extent of the change - whether from missing that point, or wanting to be positive, or not wanting their own achievements to seem diminished. I think telling the next generation that ‘well, we managed it’ on housing probably elicits similar feelings to those I felt back then.

Sorry Cronus, it wasn't supposed to be a serious reply.
My attempt at humour seems to have flown straight past. Never mind.

I do understand that being in London I am talking about a situation which is worse to that which people see in the north.

you have a seriously deluded view on life

Your school closed for polling today, is it?

A well considered thoughtful post.

Landlords invest in property and as such they need a return that justifies that investment. Rents have escalated as demand has grown - simple supply/demand proposition and this will continue whilst ever getting on the property ladder is so tricky.

Builders invest in new builds - limited mortgage availability - so they sell large chunks to investors who have access to funds.

Tory policy in a nutshell.

If you've got cash on the hip, you can make a lot more out of the people who haven't.

Seems like a big turnout at the polling stations but, I can't decide which party will benefit.
Have the younger generation finally got off their backsides and voted or, is it a pensioners revolt ?

Our polling station was the busiest that I've seen it in over 30 years !

Its Capitalism - you take a risk in the hope of that risk being rewarded - if its not you lose up to the value of your commitment

Better to risk and lose than to have never risked at all.

Ours is deathly - perhaps Hilary hasn't managed to get the young out of bed?

True: but the problem comes when the returns that can be made from owning property (not just renting, but holding for capital accumulation) exceed the returns on productive investment (starting businesses, providing capital for existing businesses to expand etc) then it becomes a drag on the economy.

Especially when the high returns from owning property come from the scarcity factor, and the property-owning section of society has a vested interest in continuing that scarcity and not enabling market forces to work better.

The situation is getting progressively worse for each successive generation of young people that enters the labour market (and starts to vote). It won't go away, and unless the government starts to do something about it they will just be breeding a bigger and bigger block of voters who are susceptible to 'radical politics'. Then when an electoral backlash hits them, there will be lots of handwringing and people saying 'how did we miss this?' like the 'liberal establishment' missed the Brexit vote coming. The answer will be, in every time they ignored the situation for young people and just said if they weren't eating avocado toast they'd have a mortgage.

Completely agree - low interest rates enables profits to be made from limited capital outlays. That is why greater access needs to made to enable young people to either buy properties or rent at more affordable levels i.e. council houses. If this happens rents will fall as options increase. An increase in interest rates will also take the heat out of the market too.

There is also the issue of land banks - companies buying up land and sitting on it, until they either decide to develop themselves or, sell it on for a fast buck - something that Labour has promised to deal with.
I realise that it isn't always a black and white issue but, in many cases, this practice can severely slow down development of new property, either residential or commercial.

I agree but as commercial organisations why would they invest in sites where they cannot develop them and make a return?

It will be a long time before Labour get to deal with this issue?

The investment to make a "return" isn't in question.
However, the validity of buying up land, to hoard it, rather than put it to use, isn't great for anyone - apart from the land owner.

Property is a long term investment so hoarding land fits perfectly with a long term investment strategy.

Apart from if you are a bank. In which case, you are too big to fail.

Completely agree - as a businessman banks inhibit business innovation - I have no truck with them at all

I work for a developer, if we own it and have planning permission we build on it. Sitting on a multi million pound investment is a crazy idea as the longer you wait to get the ROI, the smaller that will be.

Without wanting to seem like one of the women who thought Johnson might change, here's my slim hope...

Cameron's massive sense of entitlement seemed integral to his being, whereas Johnson has had to consciously adopt it - his arrogance to some degree reflects his insecurities. Now he has won what he always wanted, maybe that will fill the yawning hole in his soul and he can become a real boy...? Jeez, this is desperate. If not, there might be some vicarious pleasure to be had from his upcoming revenge on Michael Gove.

It'll be interesting to see where, if anywhere, he goes with his One Nation Conservative theme. Maybe just an attempt at a reassuring soundbite, after having sacked so many One Nation Conservatives. However, it'd be nice if Raab, Patel and Rees-Mogg got to spend more time with their families. Not for their families, obviously, just the rest of us.

After a competition for the role of Prime Minister between two Party leaders seemingly massively ill-suited to it, at least Labour can change theirs - though there's every chance they'll mess it up. And the Tories get to own their Brexit, whether it proves disastrous or merely hugely underwhelming for those pinning their hopes on it.

This is a once in a generation opportunity to set a centre-right agenda that encourages business but uses those benefits to ensure a better social infrastructure. A very soft Brexit wont cut it and the EU now realise they can't just push the UK around as they would have been able to do with Labour or a hung Parliament. Noises coming out of the EU suggest the penny has dropped.

The North can no longer be seen as a poor relative to the South - failure to address this will cause Boris significant pain in the future. It shouldn't take 1 hur to do a 30 mile journey between two of the biggest cities in the North

You're still clinging to the idea that "the EU" is some sort of amorphous blob. They are 27 individual member states who have given the negotiators instructions and red lines. But we've been through all this and you still think having red lines is bullying.

But I'm pleased you seem to be buying into some sort of socialist infrastructure spending for the north of England.