6th September 2026
Why has buying a home become so difficult for young people in Britain?
In this Funding the Future podcast, I talk to my son James about the extraordinary generational divide in housing.
When I was 25, I bought a three-bedroom flat in London for £28,500 with a deposit of just £250. Young people today can face house prices approaching £300,000 or considerably more, while being expected to find deposits of many tens of thousands of pounds.
At the same time, high rents make saving increasingly difficult. Student loan repayments reduce disposable income and can also affect mortgage affordability, and for those without access to the bank of mum and dad, home ownership can seem impossibly distant.
But this is about much more than house prices.
James argues that young people need permanence, independence and somewhere they can genuinely call home. Housing insecurity affects relationships, decisions about having children, careers and people’s ability to build independent lives.
We discuss social housing, affordable rents, shared ownership, rent controls and whether government should help provide long-term, predictable housing finance.
The housing market my generation entered no longer exists. Telling young people simply to work harder and save more does not address that reality.
If the market cannot provide affordable, secure homes, government must act, and we discussed what it might do. We hope Andy Burnham is listening.