Who can afford to buy or rent property in Britain now?
This bubble will burst: The Coalition government has engineered a recovery based on the false inflation of house prices and rents. It is bound to burst; the only questions are when – and who will be harmed by the fallout? [Picture: Haynesonfire blog]
If you are an “average” UK earner (whatever that is), then your income has been cut by almost 10 per cent in the three years and five months since David Cameron became Prime Minister. Who can afford to rent at these prices? Who can afford to buy?
And is this the private rented accommodation that people affected by the Bedroom Tax were supposed to rent instead?
Are these the houses on which the government is going to underwrite 15 per cent of the mortgage in its ‘Help to Buy’ scheme? Already a(nother) huge housing bubble is growing and the debt crisis when it bursts will be appalling.
Meanwhile, everything costs a fortune and you have no money.
But somebody is buying. And somebody is renting.
Somebody rich, obviously.
“Higher rents in almost every region show that, despite government schemes, buying a first home is still a difficult aspiration,” the article quotes David Newnes, director of LSL Property Services.
“This is not only down to low salary growth, but also a general shortage of supply – which is the underlying reason why homes are getting more expensive. The long-term trend to renting therefore looks unlikely to change significantly in the near future.”
So the lack of house-building – either to buy or to rent – has proved lucrative for property developers and landlords. They don’t need to build any more if the value of their current buildings keeps rising. And nobody else can afford to build.
In the meantime, people in social housing are feeling the bite of the Bedroom Tax, with 50,000 families in danger of eviction because of it – putting pressure on local authorities who have to pay through the nose to put them into bed and breakfast accommodation instead.
Was this the Tory plan? To make things – the important things like housing and land – so expensive that only they and their friends could afford them? To push you into dependency by proxy?
And we didn’t see it coming?
Gosh.
At least nobody reading this voted for them. Anyone who did that must feel like a real chump now.
[…] Who can afford to buy or rent property in Britain now?. […]
I hope we can assume that you are right, and none of your readers voted for this shower, though I suspect some may have voted Liberal? With the current ineffectiveness of the opposition, what will we do next time? It is certainly worrying.
As for house prices, even here in Norfolk, where you can get a supposedly ‘affordable’ house for just over £100,000, nobody earns enough to save the deposit, and barely qualifies for a mortgage when they do. Times are tough for younger people, and our whole concept of home ownership, or moving away from parents, and getting started on your own, is all being forced to change. Sad.
Regards, Pete.
Reblogged this on HUMAN RIGHTS & THE SIEGE OF BRITAIN POLITICAL JOURNAL.
[…] Today the BBC reported that average private sector housing rents have hit a record high of £757 per month – just three days after the Corporation told us house prices have also hit a record high (a… […]
Tory voters never “feel a real chump.” Facts are irrelevant to them, they have no conscience, no moral values, no human compassion. They are sociopaths and incapable of rational thinking.
The stupids have won, civilisation is finished.
Well, they can’t have the Plebs owning property; they might get ideas above their station and upset Gideon’s Oligarch friends
Hhmm, uncertain about this, seems there are two England’s, those inside the M25 and those out with. Here in south Durham, houses are cheap, a modern four bed detatched with garage can be had for sub 170k. Those inside the M 25 having lived and worked there, are so far up their own rectums they must live in perpetual twilight!
It seems to me our comics in goverment in the main base policy on what happens inside the anal circle AKA M25. In my opinion, most MPs would fail to find their own backsides using both hands on a dark room. We know people who have been trying to sell for over three years. Perhaps the North East should join the Scots in the bid for independence, after all, Scotland is closer the populations have more in common.
There is not a uniform position within the Conservative Party on the issue of housing. For example The Daily Telegraph continues to vigorously oppose the planning Minister, Nick Bowles’s attempts to relax the planning system allowing more homes to be built in rural areas. Also irrespective of whether one supports or decries the sale of council housing stock under the Thatcher administrations the sale of local authority housing did lead to a rise in the number of home owners some of whom had never previously thought of home ownership. If parties of the left or right are to win elections they must appeal to the broad spectrum of voters. For a party to deliberately aim at home ownership for only the very wealthy would not make electoral sense as the extremely rich are only a very small percentage of the British electorate. Consequently it would be electoral suicide for the Conservatives or any other political party to deliberately aim at the exclusion of all but the super rich from the field of home ownership. I do agree there is a problem. I purchased my flat in 1997. I live in the suburbs of London and have seen it’s value rise to a point where I could not aford to purchase the same property where I to be starting out on the property ladder today.