For the first time since the 80s, those who own their home outright outnumber those who have a mortgage.
The 80s were a particularly influential decade when it comes to house ownership – Margaret Thatcher and her Right-To-Buy policy encouraged the nation to become house owners, and it’s mostly thanks to this that we’re in the current situation.
Right-to-buy means that council tenants could buy their houses – at up to a 70% discount. Councils were also banned from building houses to replace the ones they had sold. Right-to-Buy is still policy today – although it has mixed popularity, with many parties hoping to abolish it if they win the next general election.
200,000 council houses were sold to their tenants in 1982, and by 1987, more than a million council houses in Britain had been sold – and they weren’t allowed to be replaced.
The 80s is when people bought houses like there was no tomorrow – and 25 years later, they’re all paid up and mortgage free.
This wouldn’t necessarily mean that they would overtake mortgage-holders at this point – in order for that to happen, people would have to stop buying houses. And how could a policy designed to make the nation house owners have the complete opposite effect?
There are no more houses – and definitely no more social houses. The population is expanding wildly, the council aren’t allowed to build council houses - so social tenants are being housed privately – creating even more strain on a private housing market that simply cannot meet that need. Only a tiny percentage of the required 250,000 houses a year are actually being built.
House prices are skyrocketing, wages are stagnating and the proportion of 25-34 year olds who own a house has taken a nosedive from 59% to 36% in the last ten years.
The housing charity Shelter said that for millions of people “a home of their own has become a distant dream, no matter how hard they work or save”.
There is a generation that wasn’t even born when Margaret Thatcher was in power, millions of people who don’t remember the miners’ strikes, and who have never known free milk in schools – and yet they’re the ones who carry the heaviest millstone of her legacy.
