So much for the dream of buying a family home

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jan/07/so-much-for-the-dream-of-buying-a-family-home

Version 0 of 1.

John Worrall, Ed Brierley and Will Wright respond to an article by Kirsty Major on the struggles many face to climb the property ladder

Kirsty Major (Meet the young families stuck in their starter homes thanks to the UK housing crisis, 3 January) describes a financialised housing market in which a decade and a half of interest rates close to zero, along with George Osborne’s outrageous help-to-buy policy, pushed prices from a mortgageable three or four times average earnings to more than nine times. It is now one where those with inherited property wealth or the Bank of Mum and Dad (the UK’s sixth largest lender) might compete, but those without mostly cannot. And so the social divide widens.

But then Keir Starmer says he will back “the builders not the blockers”, implying that supply will fix affordability. That would need developers to increase it to the point where they had to drop prices and then keep building – and incurring losses – while prices continued to fall. Obviously they won’t do it. It is deeply concerning that Starmer and Angela Rayner don’t acknowledge that.

But help-to-buy debt at least could be written off, because that was a government intervention that saddled buyers with more debt than the banks thought they could afford, in what was a straight price-and-profit-maintenance bung to a development sector donating millions to the Tory party.

And, you never know, greater disposable income left by smaller borrowings might then help generate the economic growth that Starmer has promised.John WorrallCromer, Norfolk

Kirsty Major’s piece is an overdue indictment of the Thatcher legacy. The destruction of building societies’ role in maintaining the dream of affordable homes for all working people – by allowing financial institutions to offer mortgages that were not realistically based on people’s ability to pay, but which cynically put buyers into competition with each other to inflate “value” – has loaded people with debt for most of their working lives, for the enrichment of “investors”.

The fallacious belief that this would somehow make the UK a “property-owning democracy” was further exacerbated by the enforced sale of council houses at knock-down prices. That the rising price of homes, which seems to be a matter of celebration for media outlets, has nothing to do with their value, but everything to do with their profitability to lenders is an enduring scandal.

It’s difficult to reflect that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did nothing to mitigate this, easy to see how David Cameron and George Osborne made it worse with Brexit and that Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak just didn’t care.Ed BrierleyHumshaugh, Northumberland

Kirsty Major’s article includes a quote from Georgina in Yorkshire, who asked why her parents could afford a family home and she cannot now. One reason that I seldom see mentioned is the change in lending criteria that happened in the last decade of the 20th century. When my wife and I bought our first home in 1985, the maximum mortgage we could obtain was (I think) a multiple of three times the larger earner’s salary plus one multiple of the lower earner.

Similar rules were in place for all lenders and this effectively limited house price rises to wage changes over time. At some point those rules were changed, and prices rapidly rose to a level of larger multiples of two salaries, resulting in the problem Georgina is experiencing.Will WrightSandy, Bedfordshire

Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.