Let us Live: How Young People Lost the British Dream

Image - Phil Hearing

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We all know what the American Dream is. Stories of small-town Americans moving to the ‘big city’ in search of a new life characterised by opportunity, enterprise and the chance to become a somebody litter our screens. But what of the British dream? If what categorises fulfilment of Americanhood is achievement through opportunity, then what virtues make up Britishhood? Although the ability to achieve is a key part of British life, it can’t be said that there exists a similar, American-style bootstraps condition in the British psyche.

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Perhaps elements of the British dream can be found in the work of the great Victorian novelist Mary Ann Evans, or, as her pen name dictates, George Eliot. Credited with the transformation of the English novel from light entertainment into something more philosophical and serious, and that speaks to life itself, she combined such influences with deep and raw depictions of British life and added detail to that which populates Britishhood.

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Core to her works were the idealisation of the ordinary, and the idea that the fruits of life can be found in that which adds stability and certainty to it. Her most well-known novel, Middlemarch, is a story of exactly that. Following a group of intertwined individuals in a Midlands town, Eliot tells the story of how their early ambition and desire for purpose eventually became a realisation that happiness and meaning are found in stability and constancy, and that a stable life is the secret to a good life.

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If we are to put meaning to the British dream, the lessons of Eliot and Middlemarch are the strongest contenders for its values. If the American dream is one of opportunity, mobility and enterprise then the British dream is one of stability, certainty and security. There is nothing in Britain that represents these core principles more than the virtue of homeownership.

Homeownership has been the foundation of a stable life in Britain for generations, providing the opportunity to start a new life, pursue a career and, eventually, start a family of one’s own. Throughout the family history of a Brit is the recurring tale of a young man or woman who moves away to somewhere new, with someone new, and builds a stable livelihood there.

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That’s how it once was. In 1960, when the typical house price was £4,000, and the average wage was around £900 a year, stability through owning your own home was an inevitability through work. The same was true in 1980, when the average house price rose to £40,000 and average annual wages rose alongside it to £12,000. What has happened in the decades since, though, has been remarkable. While wages have risen decade-on-decade: £20,000 in 1990,£25,000 in 2000, £30,000 in 2010, house prices have risen exponentially. In 1990 the average house price was £70,000. Now, in the mid-twenties, the average house price sits at just under £300,000, over eight times the average salary.

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To put it in non-mathematical terms, it is virtually impossible for a person in their twenties today, starting out in their career, to envisage a prospect of buying their own home, and starting a stable life, in the near-to-distant future. Recent estimates by the Institute for Fiscal Studies put the overall wait for a recent graduate to be able to afford their first mortgage at 15 years, rising to 20 years if you live in the Southeast. That is a whole decade in which young people of previous generations would’ve been making life choices, settling down and starting a family, because of their ability to access housing for themselves. Time that the young people of today will instead spend living with family or in rented or shared accommodation.

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Those core tenets of the British dream: stability, certainty and security, are unachievable for young people now, who are unable to access the very foundation of these principles. The question of how we got into this position is one littered with continuous policy failures that, over time, have all amalgamated to create the ultimate housing affordability crisis – where young people are locked out of homeownership and the stability offered by it.

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After the Second World War, successive governments embarked on a mass housing and council housing-building programme. Homes were built at a rate of over 300,000 a year. Not only was there a large and high-quality stock of affordable social housing but, by focusing on the supply of homes into the housing market, affordability rates stayed low, with the average University graduate in the 1960s able to afford to buy a home outright within a few years of starting work, something unimaginable to the debt-ridden and hope-robbed graduates of today.

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In the 1980s came Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme, where council tenants could buy their homes at a large discount, creating a new class of homeowners – living the British Dream. Despite its popularity, giving ordinary working-class Brits the chance of stability and security with their own home, a fatal error was committed. The homes that were sold off were not replaced. For every home dispensed under the Right to Buy scheme, there followed no replacement. Affordable housing stock began to disappear, replaced by the private rented sector, with many of the ex-council homes becoming a private asset in time, fuelling the buy-to-let market.

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At the same time, financial deregulation, where the government removed the bulk of restrictive regulations on the City, enabled deregulated lending and low rates, fuelling demand and pushing up prices. What followed this was a failure of successive governments to address the supply of housing into the now deregulated market, allowing population growth to massively outstrip the raw numbers of houses in Britain.

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The complex stranglehold of the planning system, giving undue power to local councillors to decide on developments, almost all of whom are elected on their anti-development and NIMBY (not in my backyard) credentials, has made it slow, expensive and risky to get planning permission.

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The end result of this is a modern-day Britain which, according to all the data, has over three million fewer homes than it needs. A culmination of stock reduction, deregulation and inadequate replacements of supply, fuelled by NIMBY objectors in local areas, who roll up to any proposed new development and launch hatred-fuelled objections on the grounds of ‘overdevelopment’, has led to a crisis of the British Dream, in which no ordinary young people can envisage it, nor even hope for it.

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The old rules of the game – a societal promise that if you work hard and follow the rules – are no longer true for the youth of modern-day Britain.

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Enter this Labour government, one-and-a-half-years old. Them oral mission to fix the “broken system”, as Keir Starmer puts it, is the first real attempt by any government in the last 50 years to try to deal with supply issues in the housing market that have been fatal for affordability. The aim of one-and-a-half million new homes by 2029 is music to the ears of those who have been crying out for a supply-side action. The Ministry of Housing, now fronted by the enthusiastic Steve Reed, who is more often than not seen donning his “build baby build” red caps, has embarked on a programme of legislation, funding and enforcement designed to tackle what has been a post-80s status quo on housing.

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The mandatory binding targets for local housebuilding strip away the power of NIMBYs intent on pulling up the ladder behind them, after reaching ownership of their own, and empower local young people to dream of a life of stability in a home of their own, where they want.

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There is no silver bullet, and early signs show that, despite positive changes, there still needs to be more done to even attempt to begin to offset the massive shortage in housing in Britain today, but to have a government that, at the very least, recognises the necessity of dealing with housing affordability for the sake of future generations, is a far cry from the blocker-backed governments of the past.

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The prospect of a country that finally listens to young people crying out for a future, and one in which our present housing crisis is dealt with, is music to the ears of those priced out of stability because of our affordability crisis. The reality is that decades of policy failure has robbed people today of the opportunities generations of decades gone had.

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The truth is that any homebuilding exercise must succeed, for the sake of saving the British Dream. Without the prospect of the British virtues of stability, certainty and security being a reasonable goal for the young people of today, the social contract’s promise of hard work leading to the modest but sufficient rewards that George Eliot wrote of will simply fade into history.