UKH

Just seen another post (on another thread) with a dig at the older generation who are "quite happy sat at home with their pensions, mortgage free houses etc.". There's been several others similar on here recently. COVID seems to have exacerbated the level of oldie-envy in our society, which was already becoming increasingly noticeable before the pandemic.

So, as a fully paid-up oldie, a word in our defence. Yes, many of us (by no means all) do now enjoy good pensions and mortgage-free home ownership. But I think I'm not untypical. My family bought our first car when I was 8, our first television when I was 10. I bought my own first car and television in my early thirties. And of course smart-phones were not yet invented. In my teenage years and early twenties foreign holidays were a luxury rather than the rule. Living in London, climbing weekends in the Lakes or N Wales were barely possible - it took the best part of all day just to get there before motorways. We didn't complain about it because we knew no differently, but the fact is we lived a great deal less affluently than young people today expect as normal. 

Because we were willing to live more frugally, we could accept jobs with good pensions (paid for through lower salaries) and save for house deposits and mortgage payments, which is why many of us are today reasonably comfortably off in our retirement.

Yes, I accept there are some ways in which young people today are justified in feeling that government policies favour the older generation  - triple-locked state pensions, the failure to build affordable housing - but if young people want a bigger say in government policies they need to get out and vote - all of you. Politicians currently pander to the grey vote because they know we oldies will reliably turn out at election time - every time. 

Hopefully a few thoughts to spark a debate.

Martin

No, politicians pander to the grey vote because it appeals to the selfish part of our psyche, where we want to be safe in our own future before we think of society. It's the failure of the political system not the fault of the old. They could cut pensions, fund schools and healthcare but then be blamed for hardship and early death at the expense of better educated children.

I suspect there are just as many 'old' who care for the younger generation as vice-versa and also a balance between those who care nothing for each other. That last pair of groups are the vocal ones!

because blaming the generations of before is an important tradition (just like blaming the youth is).

your lot gets much of its finger pointing because a) gen X that came after didnt do much b) your generation got things as good as they ever will be, soaking up more of everything than any other generation and taking it all with you, and c) the current vocal generation is incredibly self-victimizing with the mouth piece to broadcast it.

your paragraph on having a say rings half true; 100% the collective should get their voices out there, but the half thats not conducive is that the oldies who we are voting for ignore a lot in favour of maintaining the oldie status quo agenda.

your generation had a bookend of post war society to start from, almost a year zero where anything before that was old history from the start. generations since havent had that, things have simply stacked higher onto a base of post war consumption values that wont move on and more annoyingly, continue to present as the norm despite being the anomaly.

you say you expected less and lived more frugally yet that is in hindsight. compared to the generations before you were also the exponential spike in consumption on almost every vector and the beginning of unchecked unsustainability. todays youth point the finger at you because they dont see you as being personified by the frugal peaceniks you may see yourselves as, they see you as being defined by the likes of mick jagger, trump and chomsky, the bloated dinosaurs around which anyone younger must try and squeeze. with a large portion of resources locked down in your age group - regardless of how you ended up with either by frugality or by extortion - by default you become the enemy to many. you are the 'they' and whilst individually 99% are not culpable, collectively your real estate, funds and holdings can be viewed as the house of cards the agitated youth rally against. like anyone frugal, having scratched it together you will fight to the death before letting any of it go. perhaps the 'great generation' ideology born of the depression and war instilled this.

a good thing about being picked on by subsequent generations is they have become ever more toothless. whilst your lot rallied and changed things like vietnam, civil rights, equality etc the protests of today are predominantly virtual. its all a lot safer, serious yippie stuff is rare. no ones shooting kennedys or hijacking planes. as annoyed as your gen may be by vocal youth theres a well buffered wall of protection to sit smugly behind. those lessons were learnt well.

Even living frugally, most of the current young generation can only dream of buying a house if they have family help to raise a deposit. The cost of a house vs salary has hugely changed, and extortionate rents in comparison to wages means that saving for a deposit is really very far off for many. 

A lack of public transport in many areas means cars are not a luxury, so buying and maintaining a car has to move up the priority list. 

I have been very lucky in life to have always been able to rent accomodation from friends and family so no extortionate rents. Now, nearing age 40, I have inherited enough money to buy a house, which I am getting at a good price because I am buying it from my mum. If it wasn't for these things I would never have even dreamt of buying a house. I don't have a TV, I drive old banger vehicles, holidays are rare and extremely cheap (if I pay for accommodation it's in a hostel). I do buy expensive food as I think it is extremely important to buy well sourced local and healthy food. But as far as possible clothes, outdoor kit etc are second hand or factory seconds (obviously not safety critical kit). 

And I'm not even the young generation, they have it even worse than us!

https://amp.theguardian.com/money/blog/2016/dec/10/sixties-pay-people-earne...

The Oldies largely voted in the shower of shite that is the current government and voted for Brexit due to misplaced nostalgia. 

I think it's okay to blame them to an extent.

Equating not having access to a TV or smart phone when you were young with not being able to get a house for less than 10 times your salary....

Next you'll say youngsters should just stop eating avocado on toast. 

As far as Brexit is concerned you should dole out the blame in fair measure which means giving a large dose of it the idle  feckless bastards in the youngest voting group who couldn't be bothered to get off their arses and go down to the polling station to put a tick in a box.

I think they were marginally less apathetic in the 2019 election according to Ipsos Mori.

Too bloody right... price of avocados, the kids are eating me out of house and home! 

Disgusting item anyway, avocados on toast.

My nephew, age 31, is considering buying his first house.

He’s looking to spend about £70,000.

I’m fairly sure that doesn’t equate to 10 times his salary.

That will get you nothing in most parts of the country.

Average house price in the U.K. for a first time buyer is 220,000. So yep about 10 times the median salary for that age.

In reality they won’t get a deposit in the first place.

If you earn say 1500, pay 800 in rent,  500 expenses, lives you 200 a month to save... after 10 years you’ll have 24,000, assuming you never lose you job and nothing happens to you. 

That’s about one year salary, which is pretty much what anybody should keep in savings as a bare minimum.

At this point you are already 40, you can now start saving for a deposit to get a mortgage when you’re 50... but ho wait now you need to take care of your parents.

I think it will get you a house in many parts of the country.

We’re talking first time buyers not average house prices.

Come to Merseyside or many other northern towns and cities.

My house, a three bedroom 1950’s semi, large front and rear garden in a desirable CH postcode is worth £220,000.

There’s no way that a first time buyer would be paying anywhere near that.

It won’t get you anything in the vast majority of the country.

It is the average house price for first time buyer.
Your local area is not representative at all of where the majority of the UK population lives and work.

Sure but there aren’t many jobs there and that isn’t where most of the population is, you’re taking an example at the extreme left hand tail.
 

Not many jobs on Merseyside?

What decade are you living in?

The area has come a long way since Boys from the Blackstuff.

No. There are very few.
There may be plenty enough jobs for the local population, but it’s a different question, the point is there isn’t enough for everybody in the UK.

What planet do you live in ?

Most of the population in the UK lives in big cities, London and the SE. You can’t move them to all to Mereyside. And if they did,  the house prices would go up all the same.

You need to take a realistic view of what an average first time buyer house cost. According to zoopla it’s about 220,000, for all buyers it’s about 277,000

I give you 

https://www.moveiq.co.uk/blog/buying/10-cheapest-places-buy-house-uk/
 

Don’t even think of arguing against Phil Spencer!

Well you just my make point, 70,000 is so unrepresentative it’s basically the range of the top ten list of the cheapest places in the UK.

You basically chose the most biased sample possible.

But hey if you’re going to deny the most basic parameters about UK house prices and population distribution there is no point.

I live in a supposedly sh*t part of Crewe and it is excellent, 3 bed terraces going for 60K, great neighbours, there are jobs, the countryside is a stones throw away I can be in Manchester in 40 minutes, London in less than two hours. And I can get a pint for two quid

Good for you but again look at where most of the economic activity and U.K. population is and do the math.

I picked an article that stated the cheapest places to buy a place to live.

Places where people actually live.

Why would you choose to live anywhere such as the South East where you can’t afford to buy a house?

Because you can get a job that pays good money?

How about moving up North, getting a job that pays far less but you can actually afford to buy a house? With the added bonus that you don’t have to live in the south east.

An area not exactly noted for its climbing.

Yes, a small percentage of the UK population

It doesn’t take a genius to realise the problem  with this argument : If everybody did that then the house prices would be the same or worse as they are in London and the SE.

You aren’t going to move all the jobs and people to semi-rural northeast towns, and if you did, well, they’d become expensive cities.

I think you're conveniently ignoring the massive rise in house prices, in real terms, since then. Depending on exactly how much of an 'oldie' you are, of course...

I bought my house outright, having saved up. But I would been better getting a mortgage about ten years earlier (1994), as house prices pretty much doubled in price in that period. They have increased further since then, though not as dramatically.

I do live frugally, though...

Two thirds of the UK’s population doesn’t live in the South East.

I wasn’t arguing for a redistribution of the population. If people are daft enough to live in the south east then good luck to them.

I was merely pointing out that in many areas of the country it is possible for a young person to buy a house for less than ten times one’s annual salary.

Ah, good to see our man 2000 miles away in the sun has got his finger on the pulse of Britain.

I feel so much better with on the ground commentator!

Average house prices:

England - £248,000

Wales - £162,000

Scotland - £152,000

Northern Ireland - £141,000

And that's the average, considering that the average house price in London is £487,000 then that must mean there are houses in England cheaper than £248K. Same with Wales, my son who is at Uni, has just bought a 3 bed house in Swansea for £75,000

Errr....Liverpool is one of the biggest cities in the UK. Here's the top ten for UK cities. Don't know what your UK geography is like, but most aren't in the South East and in most you can buy a cheap house in the less salubrious parts. Which is what I did and what most other people do when first stepping onto the property ladder. Of course, you can decide that living in such areas is infra digs, but then you won't be buying your first property until you're in your 40s.

1 – London – 10,236,000

2 – Manchester – 2,639,000

3 – Birmingham-Wolverhampton – 2,512,000

4 – Leeds-Bradford – 1,893,000

5 – Glasgow – 1,220,000

6 – Southampton-Portsmouth – 883,000

7 – Liverpool – 875,000

8  – Newcastle – 793,000

9 – Nottingham – 755,000

10 – Sheffield – 706,000

In Liverpool you can get a decent terraced house for £120,000

I look at it like this, my parents were mortgage free in their early 50s, the is because all through his 20sand 30s my dad worked a 7 day week of at least 10 hour days as a maintenance Fitter, I was 8 before we went on any holidays and when we did it was a simple holiday in North Wales. To get in holiday we sat on a bench in the back of the work van. I was 15 before we had a family car and we only had that because in 1986 my dad took a massive gamble, borrowed £1000 of my grandad to buy a second hand van and started his own business. 

Everyone that I know of my dad's and previous generations worked long hard hours and did without luxuries to get a foundation under them. 

The downside is my dad died at 60, as did his dad before him but at least my mum was well provided for andddd is still going strong at 74. 

Covid19 and home working will be the game changer, get out of the south east and buy in the coming recession. Home working has been proven. You don't need to squeeze 5000 people into a concrete tube in canary wharf anymore to claim to be productive. 

My first house was bought in the cheapest area from where I could get to work.

And my second and my third.

Only by my fourth, after a lot of years, could I afford to live in an area I would be happy to live the rest of my life in.

Yes, but will it also change the parameters of what is needed in a house so people who previously maybe only needed a 1 bed flat might now need a family starter home to have space to set up a home office? This could put more demand on a category of house which is already a bit stretched puting their prices up in areas they are currently affordable? 

In a similar discussion on the other channel I was pointed to this Royal Institute lecture which I found pretty interesting:

youtube.com/watch?v=ZuXzvjBYW8A&

Of course, change of use will require a bit of a rethink on how we design and furnish internally. The only real minimum requirement is a desk and a proper chair. 

And space to put those and still have normal living space. I am lead to believe that those currently living in 1 bed flats in London can barely swing a cat in them. We wanted to stay with a friend in London and she couldn't create enough floor space for both of us to lie down to sleep! I don't know exactly how common that is, but I can't imagine you would keep living like that if you were also working there.

Martin you forget that your generation and mine did not have to pay for higher education; not only are the younger generation expected to go into higher education they are also expected to pay for it. 

I will have payed my mortgage off before I retire but only because in my mid twenties I worked somewhere unpleasant and, at the time, dangerous some made enough to buy a small terrace house. I only moved because later in life, compared to most, I had a family.

We probably did grow up more frugally but times change, the current younger generation have a much harder time financially and from expectations, although materially it is probably easier for them. 

That's my point. With home working many wouldn't need to live in an expensive rabbit hutch in London. 

Yes, so demand outside of London goes up and prices rise! 

Since UKC tends to like Sheffield as a place to live here is a breakdown of average prices by category. 2019-2020:

Detached £285,000

Semi-detached £160,000

Terraced £124,000

Flat £119,000.

That’s true that home working will surely rise but however I think we are fooling ourselves if we think this will change the powerful effect of agglomeration economics drastically or redraw the population map of the UK overnight.

Interesting stats; unlike nearly every other country in the world our biggest city is 4-5 times bigger than the second. Typically it would be 2 times the size, and that is at the heart of an awful lot of what's wrong with the UK. The lion's share of infrastructure, investment, jobs and other economic activity is concentrated in the bottom right hand corner of the map. It becomes like an economic black hole sucking jobs and therefore population, with the event horizon somewhere near Luton.

I seriously hope that CV-19 makes remote working permanent, to level up the UK jobs market (at least geographically)

I think theres a lot if misconceptions about the different struggles that each generation have faced. Although my Nan did well out of the housing market she did have very limited life options, far less than anyone does now so I wouldn't trade places.

I think my biggest frustration with the older generation is the inability to have a sensible conversation about pensions. 26% of gov expenditure is on pensions and this is clearly unsustainable moving forward as evidenced by the fact that I am now paying 3% into a workplace pension scheme which I suspect is because there will be a vastly reduced state pension in the 45 years that I'm likely to retire 

Dont get me wrong the pension is a lifeline for lots of people but the so is the benefit system and we've stripped that down to the point that children frequently go hungry. I do wonder what would happen if we referred to pensioners as benefit claimants.

More young people should vote but the current political class hardly represent them. If you live in a tory or labour stronghold I can see why it doesnt seem worth it. Let's not forget that 54% of people voted for non brexit parties in the election but we're still getting the hardest brexit imaginable.

Try looking at many parts of SCOTLAND! I can find you a number of 2 bed bungalows with gardens for around £70k in the NE. Plenty of jobs too....

Please don't tar me with that brush.

A couple of key points for this thread.

1. Young people need to stop blaming other people. Mainly for their own lives. Also for everything. It seems one big complaint against the world. I appreciate this may be a very vocal minority with access to the mouthpiece of the internet. It's not the 'fault' of older people that young peoples lives are how they are.

It's ridiculous

2. House prices must be being paid or they wouldn't be where they are. One poster said (roughly) 'if all the jobs were in Merseyside everyone would move there and house prices would go up' If that happened who would be pushing the prices up? (rhetorical, the answer is people buying houses.)

As a couple of general observations:

1. There is no doubt that the ratio of average house price to average salary in the UK has changed dramatically over the past 40 years or so - see e.g. the graph at https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/5568/housing/uk-house-price-affordabilit... . The same has happened in other countries as well.
2. There is nothing - nothing! - that the ruling classes love more, than to have the rest of us blaming each other for things going wrong: it completely diverts attention from the people with big money and big power who are really pulling the strings. So the young blaming the old (or the old blaming the young) is counterproductive: look elsewhere for the real villains.

In a covid world I don't think the bright lights of capital cities have the same draw anymore. The underground, concerts, cinema, theatre, packed tourist attractions .. suddenly seem less appealing to the masses than rural areas. 

Many office businesses have already adjusted and won't be going back to the old days. Every month this drifts on, more industries will adapt.

As I understand it you are  not entitled to a state pension at all if you have never worked.  I think this  is what differentiates the pension from various other benefts.

A notable exception might be married women/ partners who receive a payment based on their husband's NI contribution record. It could be argued that it's fair to call people in this last category benefits claimants.

Housing is one of the big cruxes. Where I live average housing costs are around 7 times average salary, its down to demand increasingly outstripping supply and this is not helped by the people living in big houses buying up the smaller houses as buy-to-let's to increase their wealth whilst helping to lock out the younger generation from getting on the ladder. Many older people who have had relatively average jobs their whole careers are now property millionaires in large detached houses whilst people starting out on the same types of careers now are wondering how they will ever afford a 3 bed semi... Ultimately we are moving backwards to a situation where a persons chances in life are becoming more strongly linked to their parents passing their wealth on to them (or vice versa), and that is only going to breed discontent. 

Not sure if I count as an oldie at 54, but I'm not counting on a full state pension in 13 years time, let alone 45. Also 3% into a pension isn't a huge amount TBH.

I think the danger is this polarisation. All younger people are feckless avocardo on toast eaters, all pensioners live in mansions they bought for £30 and have massive pensions. It's all bollocks, there's poverty and hard times affecting everyone.

Indeed. The generation will soon be upon us who have no houses, have minimal pensions rather than gold plated final salary schemes (paid for largely by today's workers of course) and yet still have to pay rent until they die. Social housing - forget it. 

Another massive difference: at what point did a 3 bedroom semi become a "starter home" ?

Yes, you can't move for retired nurses,  factory workers and welders living in their mansions round here 🙄

To change tack slightly (though I am happy to expound my opinions on house prices if preferred):

This pandemic has resulted in a huge reduction in output as people have been unable to work and effort has been diverted to dealing with the immediate crisis. This has an enormous real cost. So far that cost has largely been borne by the Government, but ultimately it will have to be paid for. The last recession was paid for partly by the poorest in society as a result of austerity cutting services (no politician is going to try that again) and partly by workers through reduced wages (especially in the public sector). What we are all wondering who is going to pay for it this time. People are already losing their jobs or being forced to accept reduced salary and hours. And yet pensioners with their triple lock will not be asked to help one jot.

That's the way it feels at the very least. The intergenerational contract seems to have been broken for some time now.

At the point when people were buying their first home some time after having children?

"they see you as being defined by the likes of mick jagger, trump and chomsky, the bloated dinosaurs around which anyone younger must try and squeeze."

Are you comparing Chomsky to Trump and Jagger? The guy has spent his life fighting for equality, he is a hero to younger people and not a bloated dinosaur. Not sure why you'd pick him.

I don't envy the older generations, the only advantage they had was living in a world with a much smaller population where university education was only for genuinely intelligent people. As such property was cheaper because there was plenty of space with less demand and university was a small enough enterprise to be covered by the government spending without being too expensive.

For everything else their lives were so much worse, they lived in a world which was massively less productive and so the average person could only afford a meager material existence. Things we'd consider basic today were expensive high technology and what we rely on today didn't even exist no matter how rich you were. 

How many people here in their 20's and 30's if given the chance to start over would really want to be born again in the 1950's? I know I wouldn't.

youtube.com/watch?v=ZuXzvjBYW8A&

This is definitely worth a watch. David Willets (former Tory MP and baby boomer) explains why his generation had it so much easier than mine and why wealth redistribution is necessary

Check your stats - £220k is the mean value of property bought with a residential mortgage, with BTL finance it’s circa £130k.

In much of the UK property is very affordable even on modest salaries, and there’s plenty of available jobs with staff accommodation. 
 

But if you go to uni at 18 then immediately move to London I can imagine it’s very difficult. That’s a choice. Additionally there are an ever increasing proportion of households with just one person...obviously that makes it harder. 
 

Personally I got a house at 23 and it wasn’t difficult in the slightest, but that’s through an accumulation of choices made for a number of years. 
 

That's certainly one way of looking at what happened.

To me it seems somewhat insensitive to the debt saddled precarious lives of the younger generations whose careers are blighted by recession, bad government and workplace power imbalance resulting from the neutering of labour unions.

Jk

Looks like I succeeded on that point anyway. Sorry not to have participated again yet. I'm otherwise occupied most of today, but I'll hope to reappear later. 

Martin

That's a very zero sum way of looking at education. 

The vertical bonds, those between generations are far stronger than those within them, the problem isn't individuals' desire to see offspring thrive and parents comfortable, it's more systemic. 

Jk

Good for him but I'm fairly sure you also know the coincidence of 70k houses and work to fund buying them is very rare. Houses round me start north of 200k for a 2 up 2 down and obviously that's modest by many comparison with many other UK cities.

Jk

There were plenty of pretty stupid people going to university in those days due to money, contacts and targeted intensive tutoring. I met pretty ordinary intellects in Cambridge in the early 80s with obvious family connections (albeit very few in STEM). The worst example in my time was prince Andrew, whom we marched against. Currently about 2/3 of middle class kids go to Uni so a target of half is no issue to me (even an increase if we can get lots more of the disadvantaged). The most successful economies in the world already have way over half educated in HE

Residential mortgagee is what we are interested in, what the hell are you talking about ?

The data suggest it isn’t. The proof is in the pudding: those born in the early 1980s have vastly lower home-ownership rates in early adulthood than any generation for half a century.

The fact is that most jobs are in large urban areas for obvious economic reasons.

Those born in the early 1980s cohort have accumulated only half as much asset wealth, on average, as their predecessor cohort had when they were at the same stage in life.

And we know this has nothing to do with behaviour because they are actually saving a higher % of their income than their predecessors.

And the main reason are simple, they have suffered from lower wages, and the two main types of assets which people accumulate during their lives, housing and pensions, have both become much less affordable over the last couple of decades.

This is very obvious in the data.

My nephew works in B and M stores and was previously employed at Sainsbury’s.

So he’s not exactly earning a fortune - probably around £19,000 a year. That’s not much more than minimum wage.

There’s plenty of cheapish housing and jobs in many parts of the country.

I'm not arguing against lots of people going to university and certainly it should be based on merit not connections. (Although I think how much merit you need may need some tweaking).

The point I was making was sending a handful of people to a few universities is cheap enough that it could be underwritten by the state. Where as sending half the population to university is expensive and requires people to chip in. Basically if we want mass university attendance we have to accept it costs money. So it's fees for those who go or an extra tax on everyone to pay for it. 

The fact is that yes people from back in the day didn't have to pay for university but it's also a fact that most of them just didn't go to university at all because only a few existed compared to today.

This forum tends to be quite northern centric. I understand all the comments about affordable housing in a lot of places. That's totally true and correct.

But for those of us with family ties in the south its a different story. I could be wrong but I think you'd be hard pressed to find much in the way of housing for less than £100k anywhere south of Watford, bar tiny bedsits.

And again, people are correct that a 3 bed semi maybe should be seen as a starter home. My grandpa recently died and when selling his house I was appauled at the state of the market. A 2.5 bed (loft conversion by himself doesn't really count) semi that he bought on the wages of a saw sharpener in a box factory is now going for nearly 600k. It is a starter home, he proved it. And now only the richest of us could afford it.

I get the argument that you should just move if you want a house, but really is that an argument at all? To be forced to move away from your family even if you don't want to? For the record I did that exact thing moving from the commuter home counties to the south coast. 

1. You are making a race to the bottom argument: the state pension in the UK is already very low compared to many other countries.
2. 3% is a very low contribution to be making to a workplace pension scheme. If that suits your purposes then great - but make sure you have done the calculations.

Where I used to live, in Edinburgh, a starter home would be a one bedroom flat in an average area. Will set you back roughly 170k.

Indeed, to have a decent pension you should pay in about 30% of your income in a pension scheme.

As a rule of thumb, you work for two thirds of your life so you’ll need to save roughly a third for the rest.

Also let’s be clear the current generation won’t get a state pension or if they get it, it will be more symbolic than anything else.

It's not a race to the bottom. It's asking for acklowedgement that the oldies are asking us working age people to fund something that we know we won't be getting ourselves. No one is suggesting not giving a state pension only to reassess the affordability of the current system in the face of near certainty of its demise before those funding it will see the same results. 

And 2. 3%, if that's their contribution only and matched by their employer as per the law is fine assuming they aren't getting on a bit. That percentage should be upped by a point every couple of years from your late 20's or whenever you can afford to. 

yep yowth!  Gorrit in one.  Big Brexit Supporter I am, deffo.  At the moment Rented house, living on dwindling savings, sans benefits.  I took it all!  ~Robbed you!

(spent the 80s jumping from one place to another as jobs disappeared, after struggling to get jobs at a time when there were a handful of vacancies (literally) even for a city, Durham.)

We all had it so easy

Divide and rule. 

This governmenys policy.

30%!  you must be on an absolute wedge or have very low outgoings. I know I wouldn't be able to afford losing 30% of my gross!

Maybe once you're in your 50s but that's totally unrealistic for people with families, for example. 

It sounds convincing until you look more deeply so I'd make much the same points about Willetts' lecture that I made on the other channel.

The cost of DB pensons is largely manufactured by a faulty valuation system that just doesn't work in  the unusual times we are living in. The idea is the money already paid in pays for the pensions eventually taken. The only intergenerational cost is a secondary factor to make up deficits.

https://www.professionalpensions.com/opinion/3033124/death-discount-rate-fu...

The most embarrassing evidence of this is the closed £27 billion Coal Miners' scheme. The Telegraph and anti DB campaigners complained that this would cost the taxpayers a fortune when the government took this on. The reality in real assets.. well over £10 billion surplus so far with no sign of the government's 50% cut of that changing anytime soon.

https://www.pensionsage.com/pa/Govt-defends-position-on-Mineworkers-Pension...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/2794289/Taxpayers-may-have-to-d...

I agree with Willetts on housing, but he was part of a government that removed a fairer rates system and gave away council housing to private ownership at ludicrous discounted levels that helped make that bubble. QE also fuelled that bubble. Overseas property holding companies who avoid tax also fuel the bubble. If people are earning vast sums from their home, just tax it. If there are loopholes fueling the bubble close them.

University fees are an intergenerationally unfair regressive tax as are loans disguised as grants.

Willetts does illustrate how problems compound... housing costs make movement harder to new jobs and this depresses market driven wage increases.

I've said many times that I think we currently live in a kleptocracy. The super rich and globalised multinationals get away with murder and the average tax payer picks up the pieces. The ironic side to this is Willets' cost estimates are overblown as people have stopped living longer and his estimates had lifespan growth built in. It's desperately unfair for the young but can be resolved by an improved tax system and blocking the theft.

Generations blaming each other is the last thing we need. Target the theives and the politicians that enable them.

Yes and plenty more places where there is absolutely none.

Jk

I think that's a question best answered in 20/30 years time when climate change, habitat degradation & species extinction has progressed so much more, and the China Vs US thing has resolved however it may...

Most people would not.

I agree that it totally unrealistic. Hence why most of this generation will have very shit pensions.

Not that this already assumes the fund invested don’t go down in value, and  that the cost of annuity doesn’t go up too much. (I personally wouldn’t bet on both)

I just blame people who can't be arsed to punctuate correctly.

Yes, exactly the point. A 3 bed house for £2.50 and a tube of pringles is all well and good, but if your job is elsewhere, your family is elsewhere, your kids are elsewhere then its a moot point.

People don't expect to be able to afford a house in every single town or postcode. But being able to afford one somewhere within a 10 mile (20...30?!) radius shouldn't be asking much.

So why suggest it?

If the objective is to get a 'good' final pension, it's a very low figure.

(And, without going down the rabbit hole on this, the rules you are referring to have changed. https://www.thepensionsregulator.gov.uk/en/employers/new-employers/im-an-em... says that, from 16.4.2019 onwards:

"The amount you and your staff member pay into your pension scheme may vary depending on which pension scheme you choose. However, by law, you and your staff have to pay a minimum amount into your scheme.

"This is set at 8% of your member of staff's earnings. You, the employer, must pay at least 3% of this, but you can choose to pay more.")

Back in what day? The boom was from the 60s and we have been back to slow growth long before fees came in. The economics of fees indicate the taxpayer will have saved nothing and may even have lost money in the shift from 3k to 9k mainly due to the predicted defaults. It's a dumb regressive system that at the current level costs as much as it saves. It now sits on the national debt as (unlike PFI) the system forced correct accounting.

Ah so its now 5% minimum, fair enough even better!

As I said, 3% (or rather 5% as we have just discovered) is fine if you're youngish.  it also depends on what you're spending the rest of your money on.  If you aren't saving into a pension because you're paying off a mortgage, that's really not so bad as the house itself is an investment which will have value and benefits when you retire.  You'll hopefully be mortgage free and/or be able to release equity both of which mean your pension can be lower that might otherwise be as outgoings are reduced.

theres no point scaring people with 'you arent saving enough' or 'you shoudl eb putting 30% of your salary away'- rather jsut making sure they are aware of what theya re doing and making sure its appropriate.

It is asking for the world.   We had to get "on our bikes" under Thatcher to find work at all.  From the NorthEast I had to find work at Loch Kishorn, later Wallsend, Kingston on Thames, Sheffield, Carlisle, Newcastle (by which time that was 60-70 miles from home, running at a just about covering the cost of existing on agency wages) to name some.  I got what i thought was a stable job at  well over 40 only to be made redundant at the end of my 50s

.In my view people who can afford to buy a home within 30 miles of work are lucky

I don't expect any sympathy, just that we should not be labelled as being well off and pampered in some way by the calculator generations

So what you're saying is, those places where homes are affordable, people don't want to live and there aren't any jobs there.... sounds like a perfect system we should definitely be aiming to continue that.

If you read my previous post (to which you replied), you will see that that is exactly what I said: do the calculations, in order to make sure that what you are doing actually fits your needs.

I bought my house in the early 80’s for probably about 1/10 of what it is worth now. Got divorced and interest rates went through the roof at about the same time. Hence quite a few hard years working silly hours to make sure I could pay the mortgage. I struggled but eventually got through it, but was always concerned about being unemployed and losing the house, until the mortgage was paid off. I didn’t realise it at the time but the interest rate was working in my favour in regard to my pension as my contributions were linked to my income. Yes, some of us oldies are in a good position, but it wasn’t easy getting here. Yes the current system isn’t fair, but when was it? I hope that somehow things get better for the younger generation but when you are young it can seem that the whole system is stacked against you.

Nice advice but overlooks completely the fact that for many 30% of income available to invest at the end of each month is no more than a pipe dream. See above- cost of housing, depressed wages, cost of education etc etc

not really - simply that what you are advocating as being a reasonable expectation seems like luxury to me

An illustration- my in laws, average salaries (social work/admin jobs both public sector) both retired early 50s (due to stress supposedly) and now around 70, full pensions, virtually free house by today's standards now worth say £600K and showing no signs of shuffling off yet. They will spend over half their lives funded at a very generous level by the state.

I can tell you its not like that for their children.

I completely agree and made the same points above.

As such if you are born in the 1980s I wouldn’t bank on retiring any sooner than before you are 70 at a minimum.

back at the end of the 70s the huge obstacle was getting a job at a time when there were few and they all seemed to demand experience.  How could you get experience without a job?  It certainly felt as if the odds were stacked against us.  I managed to get a place on a government City and Guilds course for programming (quite a stiif entry process despite having got an A in computer science on the basis of 1 evening a week at Durham Tech).  A couple of years later I found that I was the only one on that course entry (about 20) who was known to have got a job in computing.  Must feel like that to be a salmon swimming upstream!

Not saying it isn't hard now, particularly when people have to get a huge debt to study, just that people need to understand that they are making huge assumptions about other people's pasts when they come up with the guff.

Not sure I'd change large parts of my life though I'd like to be better off!

Yes, apologies Alyson. I fear I and maybe Siward missed your point completely.

I think its important to understand that each generation has had its difficulties.  Interest rates above 20% is one my parents often mention.  I don't think that people 'moaning' on here (me included) about the boon that the boomers have enjoyed are ignorant of that fact.

Pointing out an imbalance is not the same as ignoring all the other factors.

So skimming this thread if house prices were more affordable for first time buyers GenX wouldn't have much to complain about?

...and no, there's no need for them to thank the wrinklies for transforming society's attitudes to racial and sexual equality. Still a way to go of course but compared to fifty years ago..

You did indeed say that, but I never like to read to the end of a thread before replying, where's the fun in that! ☺️

That’s true but the hard data is pretty clear that in terms of asset accumulation things have been a lot worse for millennials than for any other generation in a century (And it isn’t due to buying avo toasts...)

Would that not be partly down to the fact a much higher % of people born since the 80s go to university? It seems likely to me that if you left school at 15 or 16 and started working full time, you'll have a much higher chance of buying a house in early adulthood than someone who went to university until their early 20s , those 5 plus years of income must make some difference. I'm not trying to say that house prices haven't gone up a lot as well. 

A good point but most jobs these days require some form of superior education.

According to the IFS the main drivers are really the stagnation in wages coumpounded with increased housing costs.

Why on earth are you casting doubt on your in-laws in public? For information those who retire early due to work related stress tend to have truncated rather than lengthened lives compared to the average. Some pensioned professions used to be infamous for staff dying young after early retirement, including teachers.

There absolutely no question that house prices have risen at a faster rate than wages over time.    In the past banks offered first time buyers 100% mortgages (sometimes even more) to the value of 5 x their salary.  This would normally be enough your first home.  It might not be in the most salubrious area of town, and you might need to pull on the overalls and get decorating, but you'd have a home.

Now house prices have risen to the point that this is no longer possible.  I live in London and earned £14k a year at my first job.  Even if the bank could offer me a 100% loan (which they wouldn't) the £70k on offer wouldn't have bought me anything whatsoever in London.  Let alone that even if there was a flat on the market for 70k I'd have never been able to save the £7k needed for a 10% deposit as I was paying more than 50% of may wages on rent.  I'd normally have absolutely no money at all for the last week or so of each month.

Now I don't blame the older generation for having it a bit easier on this front, they've benefited from better times and I would have done exactly the same.  What I do mind is the older generation not acknowledging this and going on about how hard they had it when they were young, well look at the figures, times are far harder for young people now.  

Yes, young people enjoy some luxuries today that weren't common (or even invented) back in the day such as mobile phones, foreign holidays and avocados but so do we all.  Society has moved on and life has become more indulgent for the whole population.  Young people now aren't enjoying the luxuries their children will in future years.

I suggest we look at the facts and figures and acknowledge the opportunities offered and the financial security this brought in days gone by are superior to those offered now, let's not point at young people's Avocado on Toast and use that as a stick to beat them with.  

Just as an aside, I have now been lucky enough to purchase my own house, in a less salubrious part of town for an extortionate amount of money and I feel extremely lucky to have done so as I know that if I were 10 years younger there would be literally no chance of this.  

I think more useful to look at what has caused this situation and to try to address those issues rather than inter generational squabbling.  So... What do we think?

Right to buy, deregulation of financial markets, growing consumer credit, sale of public sector industries.... Any more? 

Be careful.

Remember that interest rates in the past were much higher and people pay for a house what they can afford to spend every month. Note also that for many years you could buy a house without a deposit, in fact you could also put your legal fees on your mortgage. Isn't this the root cause of unaffordability? The fact that now you must amass a very substantial sum while paying a high rent?

Right to buy and first time buyer schemes haven't helped, the latter being proved to only benefit house builder execs.

poor levels of housebuilding

too high a population

inequality in wage growth

Whilst the growth in population is a factor it's a delicate one, as when people start saying this it can lead to people pointing to immigration etc.

In general a country having an growing population (including immigration) is a good thing as having more people grows the economy and therefore tax returns.  What the problem really is here is too many people not contributing enough to the economy which again, is tricky as people start to point to "dole scum" etc but actually the far bigger drain on the economy is... yup you guessed it... the aging population.

We have more older people receiving more money in state benefits and pensions, and costs for the NHS, than we ever have at any time in history and that only going to get moreso in future years.

Personally I think we need to pay more tax.  Far more.  Our public services are alll hideously underfunded and falling apart at the seems but no party is going to win an election on a pay more tax ticket...

No doubt cast- the stress was real. However the settlement is like nothing seen these days. Even ignoring the going early millions are in the same position of having 1) had cheap housing (a couple times salary) 2) generous pensions and 3) long lives. Who is funding this- our children.

A growing population is only a good thing, if the economic benefits are felt by the wider public.  This hasn't happened in the last couple of decades, and instead people are left to deal with the downsides without feeling the upsides (hence brexit).

You point out too many people not paying enough tax, which I agree with, but then focus on the bottom end of the economic scale, rather than those of us rich enough (and those very much richer) to afford to pay a little more tax.  Its all very well saying we should pay more tax for better services, but then we go an vote for parties that are specifically set up to not do this!

The whole word is overpopulated and the UK is a small island, I don't think that is disputed. There's a difference between acknowledging that fact, and blaming immigrants.

I think you mean Gen Y/Millenials? Gen X are in their 40s and 50s, so I imagine they complain about their offspring still living at home.

Agreed.  Particualrly re. brexit, which was less a referendum on Europe but more a question of "Are you happy" which very few people are after decades of erosion pf public services, rising costs, wage pressure, austerity etc

There needs to be a higher rate of income tax. It's the fairest and most progressive form of taxation we have.  45% over £150k is a joke there are people in this country who earn multiples of that in a week.

I'd dispute the UK being overpopulated, it's just under funded.

Reading some of the replies on this topic I have to shake my head. This isn't how my Daughter and her now Husband have found it buying a house. They bought a brand new 4 bedroom semi before they were both 25 years old. They had a 30K deposit between them and furnished it with all new furniture. Since then they have been to America on holiday 3 times including a 3 week honeymoon. Mexico and France. Both have a car each and all the latest gadgets youngsters require. 

There is one thing neither of them did do though, and that is to go to University. As soon as they both left school, they got jobs and have both been in full time employment ever since. Maybe there is something in that ??

Yes agreed, especially when there are middle earners asking to be taxed a couple of % more and big earners saying they would happily pay much more.

Maybe it is a question of funding- i guess from my perspective i view it as 'over populated' because of the state of our town- rubbish everywhere, the roads being overly busy.  i guess these things could be dealt with by more money and keep the population the same/ increasing.  Not sure funding would affect the dire lack of wild spaces in the country, the lack of appropriate size building plots for homes etc.  I guess one could dream of a state that buys back farm land and sets it to wild, on a scale appropriate for a country with 70m people.

Maybe.

What do they both do, how much do they earn and how much was their house?

I'd argue a vast number of jobs only require a good broad education upto GCSE level, it's the entry requirements to jobs that keep increasing, not the actual level of education required once employed.  

What were once A level entry schemes are now degrees and so on. If everyone has a degree, than some sectors look for those with masters etc. 

Just a general response from a young person here (26). I certainly don't resent the older generation as individuals. My grandparents lived through the golden years of state support, great state pensions in (now privatised) state services and a booming economy and I'm happy for them that they are financially secure.

I understand that generation didn't have many of the luxuries we have now (seems every 10 year old has a smartphone now), but I can't help think that there has been a collective failure from the older generations to re-distribute their wealth in a fair way. When the country falls upon hard times, the younger generations suffer the most.

Perhaps growing up without modern luxuries taught older folks to hold onto everything you get? I'm not sure, but this country is going down the drain, public services are on life support, big business seems all powerful, wealth is hard to come by and controlled largely by the older generations, buying a house is extortionate, and successive governments (labour and tory) have failed to re-balance society and the economy in favour of future generations.

It's easy to see why many young people are disillusioned and fail to vote. That's why so many young people voted Yes and why so many young people supported Corbyns' Labour. They were the two important moments in recent times that offered real change for young people. I do vote, but I know that as long as we have a mediocre tory-light-labour/tory party running the country it will be business as usual. Doesn't it stand to reason that the future of this country should be decided by people who will actually be alive in the future? I'm not suggesting old people shouldn't be allowed to vote, but at the moment it seems the scales are tipped in the opposite direction..

Yes and no. In a functioning marketplace supply would have increased as prices did then prices would have reacted to the reduced accessibility of credit. As is supply is deliberately choked to maintain prices and the credit crunch just changed who was buying, lower priced starter homes moved from the owner-occupier market into the rental sector where they stay for decades with little 'property ladder' turnover reducing availability and pumping prices of those that do come to market and those higher up the 'ladder', often to the notional benefit of the settled investors.

It's a deliberately dysfunctional market which successive shocks and changes have only made more so in recent years.

jk

I think thats a very specific point in time. IIRC 95% mortgages were the norm when I got my first mortgage and you had to convince the building society (interview where you had to list all your income and expenditure) to lend you either (again IIRC) 3.5 x single salary or 3.5% joint salary.

Rather than it being generational, I think a couple of years difference in when you were looking to buy a house has almost as big an impact than 30 years.

A distorted housing market and a national economy centred on what goes on in London village is one issue, the loss of council housing through right to buy removing affordable rented housing, (and illegal sub-letting of remaining stock), buy to let has removed affordable housing for those wanting to buy.

We have over population driving up the cost of housing (I disagree with la benya, we are overpopulated), and we have woeful public services including health, education, elderly care, policing and no affordable housing in decent neighbourhoods because of ridiculously low levels of taxation. Oh, and most of the population seem to be dickheads as shown by recent events.

Maybe A level/trade schooling but yes overall I would agree.  Doesnt help the kids though who now have to give up several years and pay a shitload for the privilege of not much.

There is plenty of empty housing. The problem is the population demands are very unevenly distributed.

Hence why people can waffle on about being able to buy a house for 20 quid. Not much use when the only jobs available is the estate agents.

Whilst it might appear those who are 70 plus now really have the best of all worlds. I know many whose pensions aren't that great due to market crashes in more recent time and many more that endured tough times in 70s and 80s, that's 10 to 20 years of real hardship for many. 

The average age of first time buyers in the uk is 30, and 33 in London so your daughter and Husband are the exception rather than the norm.

I turn 40 next year, have owned a home for 3 years.  All of my friends my age have bought their home within the last 5 years, many are still renting.  We have good jobs (architects, journalists, doctors etc) but this is the reality for people of our generation living in this city.

Absolutely nobody I know has purchased their home without some form of inheritance or assistance from their family.  Saving tens of thousands of pounds when you pay more than 50% of your wages in salary is a non starter.

Having 'rubbish everywhere' has nothing to do with your town being 'over populated.'

Yeah probably, I was thinking of my colleague.  He's 52 now, bought his first house in around '90 with a 100% mortgage.  Hadn't saved a penny.  I hear that it's not always been like that, but if you look at the growth in house prices compared to wages there's clearly a disconnect, particularly in some areas.

EDIT: I just looked this up. Other than a couple of brief spikes (for wars etc) average house prices have been between 4 and 6 time the average salary since the early 20's, mostly closer to 4 than 6.  They're now over 8x which is a level not seen since the beginning of the last century.

Arguably a year or two can really make a difference. but again, look at the trends over 30 years and it's made a huge difference.

Agreed 100%

I can see where this disussion is headed so shall we just cut to the chase?

Bring Back National Service!

(joke, obvs)

Funding who and what though? It's way more a diffrence left by bad politics than any greed of the baby boomers. Since most of the difference ends up in the pockets of the super-rich and the globalised corporate giants why are you not blaming them and the politics that doesn't stop that??

I'd agree, in my youth(80s) folk started higher level entry schemes, junior management training with decent A levels, higher btecs, hnd, hnc and zero debt. Now they need a degree as a minimum, are saddled with debt and can't even start earning full time until 21or 22. It's of no benefit to employers either. 

Yes it does. when every corner has an old sofa or matress on it, when each house has 6 people living in it and only two bins, rubbish is everywhere.  When 100k people desend on your town at the slightest hint of a sunny day.

In small rural villages, rubbish is not really an issue.  In over populated towns it very much is.

Absolutely, loads on empty housing.  I'm from the North East you can get a council house the same day if you don't mind living in certain areas.  

I don’t think that is true at all. In my sector for example I’ve recruited several data scientists and software engineers over the years and that’s one area where I simply don’t think I could have possibly taken someone at GCSE level - unless they have self-taught but that would be the very rare exception.

I expect that translates to most other sectors.

Which is fine for a bit and then your company realises if someone can do the job from Redcar then they can also do it from Pune or Gdansk. WFH quickly becomes working off-shore

That sounds like either poor quality local services, or dickheads living in your area: there are a lot of both around. But it's nothing to do with over-population per se.

That is exactly where this is going from what I can see.

More population, more dickheads.

I think you would be naive to think the two are not linked, as you would be naive to think that it is the only reason.

As I said above, you could argue that we are overpopulated only in the sense that we cannot fund it, more money and we could happily have a larger population- as you say, public services go a long way to hide the negatives of over population.

I also only said that as an example which fitted with someone suggesting the above- it was the first thing to come to my mind which pissed me off that can be fixed with more money.  i could have said more doctors or better schools, but i don't really use either so their lack of funding doesn't really piss me off.

In what way are they funded at a very generous level by the state? Beside their old age pension, which is the same for everyone, everything else they have belongs to them.

If your objection is that the older generation voted  Leave and Tory then the way to alter things is for young people to turn out at election/referendum time and use their right to vote. You can't disenfranchise a section of society just because they don't vote in line with your opinions. 

I disagree that it is easy to see why so many young people fail to vote. Your vote as (probably) a 26 year old Labour voting Remainer carries exactly as much clout as my vote as a 68 year old Labour voting Remainer. Our ages are irrelevant.  Our geographical location on the political map might have a bit more influence on whether we think it ''s worth voting or not, but that would apply to older people as well as younger ones. 

There's one thing for sure: if the scales are tipped in a way which you want to change, the solution doesn't lie in non-involvement.

( My criticism is obviously aimed in the general direction of your age group, not at you personally because you are one of the minority who is bothered enough to vote)

Their final salary pension scheme. More than many's actual earnings. 

Tons of empty housing even in London, just unaffordable for people with normal jobs or being kept 'in the bank' empty acquiring more value per year than most people's annual wages to be sold for profit when the investment matures.

There isn't a lack of housing, there is a lack of houses that people can afford because the 100k house was given a lick of paint and a new kitchen and it's now 'worth' 250k

If the younger section of society had bothered to vote in the referendum perhaps they might have gone some way to negating the leave vote. Or perhaps they, like me, were confident that the British populace weren't daft enough to vote leave. The vast majority of my friends and associates who, by the way are, are largely in the veteran stage of life, voted to remain. But I do agree with your lack of admiration for the current government. Unless, of course, you meant it as a compliment.

Their final salary scheme is just deffered pay. The crime is it is no longer available not that old people are exploiting young people because of it. You keep blaming the wrong people.

https://theconversation.com/britains-great-pension-robbery-why-the-defined-...

You seem to be confusing "vast number" and "all".

As for software engineers. Outside of a few specialist areas an apprenticeship scheme would probably deliver better results. A specialist computer studies course doesnt really prepare someone for the workplace in many cases.

As an oldie myself I get a little irked at folk who retired early on (usually public sector) fat final salary schemes proclaiming how its due to their contributions during their working life, when in reality their contributions were not nearly enough to fund their generous pensions, with the balance made up by tax payers. 

Us on defined contribution schemes would have needed to build a pension fund of well over a million pounds with much higher contributions to get similar benefits, whilst the same funds were depleted by some (not all) defined contribution pension funds drawing fat fees out of said funds for investing them badly.

If its deffered pay that that would suggest they were really getting paid twice their salary. As he says the pensions are currently more than most people's salaries are you suggesting a public servant being paid double the 2020 salary in the 80s/90s is anything other than robbery? Or, is it nonsense and they have (sensibly for their budgets) pushed the burden of the pensions onto the next generation... 

Sure it doesn't, but it provides people with a deep appreciation of the basic foundations that they would literally not get with an apprenticeship, let alone exposure to a wide enough section of computing to be employable beyond that company and beyond that specific job role.  

Frankly, we don't need any more bad programmers on the job market, let alone software engineers, it's hard enough to find suitable candidates for roles as it is. This is an area of lifelong learning, dropping people into the workplace even earlier is going to do nothing good in all but the most exceptionally talented cases that don't need an apprenticeship anyway.

Not really we are overpopulated because we are constantly struggling to find suitable land to build new houses, it doesn't matter how much we fund the government this will not give us more land.

Ok, boomer.

Actually, I think you're Bob on. My generation is pretty lucky in some ways but maybe things are tougher in other ways? 

Stay safe all,

BB

Specifically struggling to find land in places where people want to live.  Like I said, up in the North East there are miles and miles of post industrial wastelands where you could build houses, but likewise there are plenty of empty houses as nobody wants to live there as it's a post industrial shithole (I'm allowed to say this, it's my home!) with no jobs.  This leads us on to the decentralisation of the UK economy, HS2 etc etc...  but this is getting quite far from what this thread is about.

Let's bring it back to where we started...  

Older people have have enjoyed benefits and opportunities that younger people do not now, I think we can all agree on that. 

But that's not a good reason to have a go at them because us younger people would have done exactly the same if we were them.

Younger people now enjoy  luxuries and creature comforts that weren't available to older people when they were our age.

But likewise, older people don't have a go at us, you'd be having avacados and flat whites if you were our age too.

We're all a product of the time we live in, we can't change that.  What we can change is our understanding and perception of who we are and our place in the world.

No, I agree that a typical computer science degree won’t actually prepare you well at all for the workplace well but it will give you foundations that you will need.

In which case their salaries far outstripped the earnings of equivalent salaries today.

If the reality is that eveyone following on has had to suffer comparitively hugely reduced rates of pay why isn't the burden shared? You are right I think that there are structural and societal reasons why such benefits have been stripped away but the reality on the ground is still an inequitable one.

Of course, the reality used to be that one didn't live long after retirement. The 40 year retirement was a short blip we won't see again.

And nice, large, ripe avocados were only 79p at Morrisons yesterday.

If we boomers have done OK - having been self employed most of my life I think I'm OK, but never 100%  sure - once I shuffle off this mortal coil my money is going to go to someone - my kids and grandkids. Not sure how that affects the intergenerational divide.

The reality is people were better payed in real terms then and they had deferred pay on top of that (the DB pension). That's hardly the fault of the old... deal with the politics of why that changed. Willetts did mention the old currently stand to lose nearly everything if they get dementia... as each new government further encouraged the destruction of DB schemes and did little when pay levels stagnated and worked out new interesting tax methods to make saving less fair they also all failed to live up to their promises to fix the unfairness of the 'dementia tax'. Everyone except the super rich and globalised corps is losing out and they must be laughing all the way to the tax havens when the old and young fight over the scraps.

Did you read the full article? The headline and figures are a bit misleading as despite, what the first entry says, these aren't average house price the average price of a one bed-flat. All it does is was show that even in the cheapest parts of the country a one-bed flat costs 3 times the average wage outside of London.

I have nothing against changing tax systems to make things fairer. A capital gains tax on house price rises from purchase to sale that grew faster than a particular index + measure would be especially welcomed by me even though I might have to pay it sometime. I'd pay more income tax and more council tax for a more equitable society where the rich theives are stopped. The old haven't stolen the money from the young it's the super rich and the corps that did that, aided and abetted by politicians.

£9k student fees are just mad as they don't save the taxpayer anything over the old £3k fees...it's way more sensible to charge £3k and just give the Unis £6k, not that the government will....it's an easy option to make the debt get paid by future taxpayers.

Yes I read the article.

We we’re discussing how young people couldn’t afford the buy somewhere to live. A cheap flat would seem to meet that requirement. Although as has already been stated in previous posts they are plenty of places where <£70,000 houses are available.

As someone who will probably benefit from a similar parental hand me down I can say that I would personally forgo that for a more similar run at housing/ jobs that they had. Money from my parents will (hopefully) come when I'm about 50. If I'm in need of a hand out then I've gone wrong somewhere.

Well it sort of is the fault of the old as they were the ones making the decision to pay themselves in that way. They had the choice knowing full well that the next generation would have to pay and they said fcuk it let's do it. 

It's already happened. Whole call centres offshored etc. Decades ago. 

You think British industry will survive the recession and global changes if folk go back to dressing up in their suits and trekking into offices everyday, just to sit at a terminal all day? If you aren't paying for uk office space, there is arguably less chance of a job being offshored. 

No there aren’t, not anywhere that would be useful for a young person starting out on a career.

There is nowhere available for anything near that price in the entirety of London. 

I'd love to know how you came by these statistics from two secret ballots. 

As we’ve already discussed, two thirds of the population doesn’t live in the south east.

What’s the point of starting a career if you can’t afford anywhere to live?

Pick another job which might pay less but allows you to live in an area where housing is affordable.

Daughter is a manager in retail after starting as a part timer whilst still at school. Her hubby is a postman.

My point is that we don't feel that they have done anything out of the ordinary. They've saved any spare money they had, and used birthday and Christmas money for their deposit. They've lived a good life, whilst still being able to afford to buy their house. 

It's not a pop at anyone who hasn't been able to buy a house. But when we hear that youngsters can't get on the property ladder, that isn't our experience.

Inherited wealth mate . A Bad Thing

There is life, housing and work outside London. A very large number of people have known and understood this for years.

Ok, so this is exactly the issue which has been highlighted quite a lot recently. Quite a lot of industries or careers (mine included) are largely based in London, this means that the only people who are able to make a start in these industries need to be from higher socio-economic backgrounds as they’ll need to be supported in the early years of their careers as they won’t make enough income in their own to be able to afford to live, and later to get onto the property ladder.

The result of this is that the industries become over saturated with people from these backgrounds and people from the North, lower socioeconomic backgrounds and indeed BAME backgrounds are under represented. At a time when we are looking to increase diversity in all industries (particularly the media, which I work in) this is a serious problem.

So yes, I know life exists outside of London and I could choose to live elsewhere etc, but the point is young people shouldn’t be economically cleansed out of their chosen career path.

Yes, if you’d read my previous post you’d see I’m from the North East. 

Why pick on us oldies?

Because it's great entertainment and you're relatively easy to outrun if you get a bit feisty or fighty. 🙄

But most live In densely populated urban area which are expensive. Not as much as London or SE but still.

I am not sure there is any point to this discussion given that there is plenty of data showing that affordability of housing has massively decreased since the 1960. About 50%.
 

You aren’t going to have anywhere to live if you don’t have a career. Catch 22.

if everybody decides to take lower paid jobs we are going to have a bigger problem than housing, namely a big problem of tax revenue. 

You’ve reached peaked absurdity in the argument when your solution is to tell people to take lower paid (and presumably lower skilled) jobs

Well as you can now hopefully see that for a large proportion of their generation they are very unusual. We aren't even discussing the deposit which they saved. More the affordability in general of housing and mortgages. Did they spend anywhere near 10 times their salary? You don't say where they bought?

I started in retail. On my salary at 25 I could afford a studio flat, maybe, with the max mortgage and a big deposit. With 2 salaries maybe a 2 bed flat. And I live in Bournemouth, not exactly the commuter belt or London.

I geniunley didn't realise there was this disconnect. I assumed everyone knew how unaffordable housing was in alot of the country. Surely you realised that where your daughter bought was a relatively cheap place to live compared to the other half of the country? 

They paid 180K,  in Leicestershire, better now ??

As for earnings.I don't know what they earn, none of my business. I just know they have a very comfortable standard of living, and are very shortly about to become parents for the first time. So they must be doing something right.

What’s the point in having a highly paid, highly skilled job if you can’t afford to buy a house?

Haven’t we just seen how important some of the lower paid,less skilled jobs are?
Many people choose to live in places where they get paid less but enjoy a better quality of life.

I would suggest that most people who live in cities are neither highly skilled nor highly paid.

We used to laugh at friends who were teachers in London when they described the difficulties that they had in financing their houses.

The thought of moving somewhere cheaper to work and live didn’t seem to register with them even when they had friends like us who’d done that very thing.

There’ll be many people who can’t move because of family commitments but young workers should widen their horizons.

Maybe they could move to Europe.

You tell me what they're doing, because I don't see them struggling. Our Daughter even manages to save £250 a month into her company's share save scheme.

By young people I think we are talking about people up to about 30-35, so young families etc. A one bedroom flat would not meet that requirement.

There are places in the country where there are houses for sale at £70,000 but they are a vanishingly tiny percentage. Would you live in one? Would you want your children to? Would you want to bring up a family in one of these? The answer is no, no one does. They are populated by tenants who have no choice, in areas with terrible depravation. 

This is all getting a bit Norman Tebbit isn’t it? I don’t even have a bike.

That’s a pretty damming description of whole swathes of the north. Luckily it’s not an accurate one.

Its happening with much more than call centres but this will only accelerate.

Sure, not paying for an office will lower the cost of employing someone in the UK but it will not make it competitive with other countries, I'd argue that the only 'office' jobs that need to be here are ones where you need to be in an office with other people to do them or need to visit client sites frequently.

No it's a description of small areas of many northern towns, like I said there aren't whole swathes of the north with houses at £70k, if there were none of us would be buying houses for more than £150k! To take a place I know, the Rossendale Vally, it is a generally a poor area but even here the number of houses for sale at less than 70k is tiny. Burnley has a few streets with those sort of prices, I'd be staggered if any of them are owner occupied.

That's great for her and congratulations on becoming a grandparent. Not quite sure why you seem to be getting upset. You're the one that bought your daughter up... 

You should be especially proud that as a 25 year old homeowner completely self funded she is in an exceptionally small minority. You're right she is definitly doing something right that the rest of us seem to be missing some how. 

I wasn’t getting upset, you were pressing me on some pretty personal information, hence my slightly curt reply. It is UKC after all.

Thank you for your good wishes.

I'd agree. To an extent the UK is behind some other countries who have embraced home working, flex, hot desking etc for years. Whilst my partner was doing it for aon 15 plus years ago, other UK companies until covid were obsessed with face to face. 

I don’t think anything can really replace f2f interaction. Zoom has its limit.

What I expect is that offices will transform in collaboration spaces instead of being places where you work.
They’ll just be a lot less people at the same time but the value added from the space will be a lot bigger.

Counter intuitively this may mean that location will be as or more important than before

You're right. Young people do need to be engaged more in politics to improve the situation, but we also need elders and leaders willing to break away from conservative traditional thinking. I believe over 60s generally vote Tory and have more conservative, traditional views. I'd like to see more older people willing to change their attitudes and beliefs, demanding a different kind of politics from the parties who prioritise them. In turn, young people might be willing to change their own attitudes towards political engagement. I appreciate that their are people of all different kinds of political backgrounds at all ages, even young tories (hard to believe). I guess my views are based on having met a lot of old people through my work.

I dunno, maybe without highly skilled highly paid jobs you wouldn’t have the computer or phone your writing on, or about everything else you take for granted.

They are important that isn’t the point.

Good for them, but not everybody sole objective in life is to maximise their quality of life.

But they are still needed.

And it didn’t seek to register to you that if ell the teachers moved outside of London you’ll have a problem.

This is the most mobile generation ever, let’s give it a rest.

I’m not sure the penny dropped yet. If everybody goes to the cheap places the cheap places will become expensive.

Well that’s a very good idea and a lot of people used to do that unfortunately that not going to be possible for the vast majority thanks to brexit.

Jesuschrist, how much is the going rate for Birthday/Christmas presents in your household?

I met lots of young people during one of my jobs and it was a major factor in my attitude towards lowering the voting age. 

"Well it sort of is the fault of the old as they were the ones making the decision to pay themselves in that way. They had the choice knowing full well that the next generation would have to pay and they said fcuk it let's do it. "

Now I know your trolling... making the decision to pay themselves and knowing the future.

Were talking generationally- so yes the royal 'they' did decided what to pay themselves.

And I know you're being intentionally ignorant if you believe they weren't aware that deferring pay for 30 years would mean someone else - in 30 years time- would have to pay <surprised pikachu face>.

I can understand why you're getting defensive. I'm not blaming you (royal you) as given the chance we would probably do the same. Hopefully not but probably. Luckily we don't have the choice and have been forced to think longer term and pay into private pensions as we all know state pensions aren't going to be around in the same form in 40 years.... Oh, so maybe we wouldn't do the same. 

The SE problem could easily be helped in lots of ways: good infrastructure investment and development elsewhere; the government moving more of its work outside London; change the tax system for company owned property; put back something like the old rates system where tax is proportional to property value (or even add extra tax for property say over 2 million) or other incentives to not stay in housing that is too big for the needs of the owner; laws to deal with any housing sitting empty for long periods. None of these will be popular with big tory donors.

No you are trolling as you would be a moron if you really insist the people involved knew this 'debt' would happen and the debt probably isn't even real. All DB schemes were designed to pay for themselves and given neccesary actuarial caution, to avoid risk, were on average likely to lead to a reasonable surplus. Where schemes got in trouble the employer topped it up but equally they also could take pension holidays if the scheme looked to be heading for large surplus.  My pensions scheme is unfunded but has consistently been providing more income in payments than pension outgoings in all my professional working life. That's spare money for the UK government for 36 years and that excess government income is increasing as the amount we pay in has been going up, with no change in pension outgoings..

The whole point of DB was it should pay for itself without pension levels being a whim of the market conditions on retirement and it largely did that, until we came up with the tax raids, the distorted valuation system, putting the debt on company balance sheets and then hit a period of perfect storm where gilts plus valuations were trashed by weird economic conditions and QE. The Miners scheme is a perfect example of a closed scheme with real assets, where those miners paid in and the scheme surplus is huge, and the government have already taken about a quarter of the scheme value in profit. Part of their deferred pay is providing money for the next generations ... the opposite of what you say

Sure I'm defensive about DB as it is still a great idea and should be available for the young but has been wrecked by rich crooks as per the article I linked from The Conversation. The young are paid less and get less good deferred pay because organisations can get away with it. The main modern form of deferred pay, DC pensions, makes more profit for the pension industry and so less for the pensioner at higher risk for that pensioner.

To be honest, I'm sure most people hadn't a clue about how pensions were or weren't funded.  Pensions just happened.

Not like the deferred disaster of climate change which is widely known about which everyone pays lip service to.

you lost me when you said necessary actuarial caution- that is laughable.

Haha, well excuse me if I don't cry a tear for them then. I could understand some people focusing on money for a while in order to be happy later but if your sole objective in life is to earn as much as possible regardless of your quality of life then I can only laugh at thier misery really. 

Mean even if you're only concerned with being rich, you're going about it the wrong way if you have obtained a high salary but have to spend most of it on the basic cost of living in order to get it. Using salary as an indicator of wealth is like using a business's turnover rather than profit as an indicator of its success, it's often not as it seems.

I too laugh at people in London earning £50k+ a year in a high stress job who in thier 30's still live like students in flat shares and have to use public transport and complain about never being able to save to buy a house. They could simply move north, do a similar job for less money rent a house to their selves and easily save to buy a nice home and actually have a nicer life but it's just not worth having to admit you're a scummy northerner and only earn 30k apparently.

There is a bit of a chicken and egg situation with jobs though I'll admit that. Companies base in London because that's where the workers are. But the workers are only there because the companies are there. If companies got some insensitive (if cheaper rent and wage bills weren't enough) to base in northern cities then we'd see more skills move north and start to balance demand for jobs, skills and housing around the country a bit rather than focused on London. Yes it means prices might rise a bit in the northern areas but wages will rise too and it'll decrease pressure on the south. The result being a similar average wage overall but spread more evenly and  fewer spots of intense demand for houses.

what if you family isn't in the north?

what if there aren't the same jobs in the north?

what if you value having more than 10 days of sunshine a year?

what if you don't like whippets?

More seriously, I agree that career for the sake of career is hardly a defensible position (i moved out of London ASAP), but I think they meant that people working on things for the betterment of mankind (tech/ science etc) might feel obligated to stay put.  There are also other factors which mean you may be tied to a particular location (divorced with kids living at the other ones house, for example).

London is a dynamic powerhouse economically and culturally and the centres of even Manchester , Birmingham, Glasgow and Edinburgh really do not stand up in comparison.Been out in those city's week days and then compare with London for the same period.

If you are young there is really no comparison.Different league, chalk and cheese.

Work there in your mid twenties and then bail out in your early 30's. Its always been like that.

Does not appeal to everyone.Usually those who will in the end up doing OK for themselves.

If you are reasonable climber then clearly its a bit daft to live there.

That's great. You sound like an enlightened fellow.

Facepalm.

You are correct that, currently in the UK, age is a clear dividing line in voting patterns - see e.g.

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/10/31/2019-gener...

However, if you look at that survey data, you will also see that 16% of 18-24 year olds vote Tory, as do 18% of 25-29 year olds. So you could consider doing some persuading among your own demographic ...

It was a joke or irony or whatever the correct term is.

In my experience those percentages hold about true for people who don't know anything about politics/ don't care and are just told to vote by their parents or go to vote only for the selfie at the polling station.  Not much you can do about that kind of stupid (not saying Tory voters are stupid).

I'll agree there is far more going on in London culturally than other cites and if you're choosing to move/live there for the culture and what not then fine, but that all comes at a cost (expensive housing etc), if you're happy to pay it for the lifestyle then that's a balance you strike but it all comes down to how much value you put on those elements over say a nice home with a garden for your children to grow up and play in etc. 

As a climber and someone who enjoys the outdoors and nature more than nights on the town and the bright lights of the cities I'm at the opposite end of the spectrum but I too have made sacrifices to live where I live (Cumbria). Houses are expensive and job opportunities are few and far between (by northern standards), but its a sacrifice I'm happy to make for the lifestyle it brings so I'm not complaining. The problem comes when you are complaining, because it's at that point where the sacrifices you're making are obviously more than you're willing to pay for what you're getting out of living where you chose to live.

At the end of the day, it's about quality of life, if you're getting it from London then great, if you're not I'd advise moving somewhere you can strike a better balance for yourself.

 

I'm not imputing any motive. And each vote cast has the same weight as any other. So if sharpendadventures wants change, he/she could consider productively targeting his/her own demographic as well as thinking about 'older people.'

Yes agreed, and the government is trying to address this situation. 

For example In my industry that was part of the reason for the BBC's move up to Manchester.  These days lots of contracts we do for the BBC have to be fulfilled outside of London etc

I'm sure there's plenty of other initiatives too (HS2 included) but this counteracting a legacy of generations of London centric business, and whilst the government can encourage businesses to open offices outside of London they can't force them and the bulk of them wish to stay in London.

In short there are a still way more job opportunities in certain sectors inside London, so the talent is all drawn to London, this is being addressed but it will take many many years before the balance has been tipped.

Well, now I've had a spare hour or so (yes, I'm retired) I've read through all the posts on this thread. Certainly the longest discussion anything I've OP'd has ever generated. And mostly quite good natured and well argued too. Thank you!

97 Likes to 52 Dislikes. What does that say? That twice as many readers agree with my post as disagree? Or that Forum users are mostly older, middle class folk like myself?

Just to add some more thoughts in response:

On housing, yes that's the biggest flaw in my OP. In most parts of the country housing is more expensive in real terms today than when I first bought a one bed flat in the early 80's (my early 30's). We clearly need a political shift in housing policy. A major house building programme, biased towards affordable homes, would help. I would also like to see an imaginative compulsory shift in the rental market whereby a proportion of all rents contributed to a percentage stake for the renter in the equity of the property. "Right to buy" was a very crude attempt at this - we can do better.

On pensions, I stick to my guns. My state pension is around 25% of my current pension income. But even that I see as largely paid for out of my own tax and NI contributions over 40 years of employment. The 75% (my DB occupational pension) is funded by my and my employer's contributions - averaging in total around 12% of my salary throughout my working life, topped up by additional personal contributions later in my career. Yes, my employer was the State. But I do object to people seeing my pension as paid for by other taxpayers (eg today's younger generation). I was paid a "package" that was right for the job in comparison with the private sector at the time, but which comprised a below market-value salary with above market-value pension benefits. In effect I was forced to save for retirement, which I now, not surprisingly, with hindsight see as a good thing.

Several posters mentioned university tuition fees. Yes, mine were free, and yes, only 10% or so of my generation went. People have said that adequately paid starter jobs today require a university degree. But I think what many employers want are staff with an above average capacity to learn. Since we now send the brightest 50% of young people to Uni, the only way employers can get that is by requiring a degree. In fact, it might arguably be better all round if more employers took the same young people straight from school and trained them (and paid them) on the job.   

Finally the politics. I do object to the statement that today's young people have been saddled with Brexit, and the current government, due to the votes of the old. Brexit is a huge mistake, and the blame for this and other political difficulties we face are substantially due to our inadequate electoral system. I was heavily involved in the Remain campaign, and earlier in the AV campaign (an imperfect solution, but much better than what we have). The majority of those who worked with me locally on both campaigns were over 50. The oldies who voted Leave were very largely not the oldies who are criticised as "quite happy sat at home with their pensions, mortgage free houses etc.". As in all generations, the Leavers were largely those who were not happy. And, yes, if a greater proportion of young people voted, we would not have Brexit, and quite possibly not this government. 

Enough from me I think.....

Martin

As much as that? Wow. That is a surprise. I shall have to infiltrate and diversify!

Can confirm, my climbing is definitely not reasonable (or reasoned). 

HS2 is a money pit. Two standard highish speed lines would give more benefit, be much cheaper and would be more environmentally friendly. The investment is needed away from the SE not linking to the SE.

I'd disagree that the brightest 50% of young people go to Uni...

Employers have to take pension holidays in the good times because they're not allowed to use a pension as an investment.  The problem is that when times are good and companies have money to put in they can't, then when times are bad and companies have no money to put in they have to!

^^^This. OK, so some schemes didn't keep up with the rise in life expectancy and changes needed to be made to contribution rates to correct this; but make no bones about it, schemes were closed because the big liability figures appeared on company balance sheets.  I know, because that is why mine closed.  The scheme was closed with a £9 million deficit and 31% company contribution rate in addition to the 6% staff had to put in, yet as soon as most people had transferred out for various reasons it jumped to £2 million in surplus. £9 million might sound like a lot of money, but at least one person had a transfer value of £1million - he started as an apprentice and had worked his way up to director level in his early 50s. Had he died the day after retiring that liability would have evaporated. Pensions are long term, corporate mentality is short term.

I agree completely. 

Whilst I'm all for major travel infrastructure projects I'm not sold on the benefits of this at all.  I just gave the example as this is often bundled into the governments attempts to move the economy away from being so London centric.

Personally I'm not sure being able to get to Manchester 20 minutes earlier is really going to change much but what would I know?  I'm just a London media wanker who knows f*ck all about transport.

Steady on, pal: too much talk like that will get you a Cabinet position as Transport Secretary.

So houses in the undesirable parts of the country are cheap. but what are first time buyer wages like in those parts of the country? Obviously the minimum wage puts a floor on the value, but if non-minimum wages jobs pay poorly the affordability is still poor.  It's quite noticeable that when the babyboomers were ftbs you only had to borrow 3x breadwinner salary on a 15/20 year term for a 2/3 bed semi. Now you have to borrow 5x combined salary on a 25-30yr term.  That is a big difference.

I don’t live in an undesirable part of the country.

Admittedly and obviously the cheaper houses are in the less desirable areas but that doesn’t stop people from buying them and raising their families there. 

Some people can afford to move but plenty spend their entire lives in the same house.

The important bits being that young people can afford to buy a property and that not all less desirable areas are run down or deprived.

You do to someone with family down in Hampshire/ Dorset/ home countries etc.

Heaven forbid that someone should have to move away from home for work or to find a house.

There is a difference between moving away from home and moving to the other side of the country while trying to raise a family, as you then lose access to your support structures and increase your childcare costs.

I do have to ask, why are you being so contrarian to something that literally not even the conservatives are disputing?

Because it’s not true to say that there’s no affordable housing for young people.

Some people don't have that option.  What if you rely on family for childcare? what if you ex wife has the kids?

People should be willing to move if necessary and able to move if they want, but 200/300 miles is not really a sensible solution. 

Well if you remove all nuance then yes, that statement is true.

You can find a bush and live under that for free! 

Agreed that not everyone has the choice of moving.

But given that we’re talking about young people in particular that should reduce the number of people who are constrained compared to older people.

Why live under a bush when you can have a reasonable house for reasonable money?

I’d quite like to live in that place where Harry Redknapp lives - Sandbanks or whatever it’s called - but like many people I live where I can afford to not where I would like to.

The main factor is house prices. Using my own parents as an example, who it would appear are a similar age to yourself.

My Dad graduated university in 1972 and got an entry level job in insurance which moved him to Manchester from his home town of Lancaster. He married my Mum in 1973, she was a nursery nurse. They bought a house together for £7,000, the national average at the time was a touch under £10,000. They were 22 and 20. The average annual salary was around £2,130. The average house was around 4.7 times the average salary. My parent were able to buy a three bed, modern semi-detached for around than three and a half times my Dad's salary.

In 2020, the average house is a touch under £250,000 and the average salary is around £26,500. The average home is 9.4 times the average salary. The £7,000 home that my parents bought in 1973, would perhaps be £175,000 now, using the multiplier of three and a half, this would now require a salary of £50,000 a year, virtually double the average. This doesn't include deposits, which are of course another barrier to purchase, in 1973 5% would almost certainly secure you a mortgage, whereas now it is at least 10% and can be much more.

I'm old enough to have been able to get on the property market in 2003, so benefited a little from the steep rise in property values over the next 5 years, however it did mean that whilst my very modest little terrace increased in value by £10,000 a year for each of the three years that I lived in it, family sized home that I bought after this was increasing in value by £20,000 a year at the same time. For people younger than me, getting on the property ladder is much harder, especially if they don't have parental support.

We are currently supporting a child through University and thinking about how we can help her when it comes to her trying to get on the property ladder. She is lucky in that we are able and willing to do that. However, my Dad got a completely free university education including a fairly generous grant, came out of university to a reliable job that paid reasonably well and bought a family home at an affordable price; I got a free education a grant that hadn't increased in value for a number of years topped up with loans, graduated to a less reliable employment market and was eventually about to buy a small house and work up from there. My daughter will come out of University with £45,000 of debt, which would be more except we are contributing £6,000 a year, to an even less reliable employment market and house prices that mean that even a very modest property is half a dozen times average graduate earnings.

They talk about it a lot more than they actually do anything.

This is obviously a well known example, but it was as much BBC cost cutting as anything.

The Northern Powerhouse is considered a bit of a joke in professional circles in the north, particularly as its supposed main advocate in Government, ran off to edit the London Evening Standard. If the Government was serious, the serious investment would be in linking the northern cities and Birmingham first, not just getting people to London quicker.

It is not being adequately being addressed. It is worth looking at per capita infrastructure spending for London compared to every other region of the UK. Government policy directly contributes to the overheating of the London economy, with a negative affect on the UK economy as a whole.

If they want to have a career in their chosen profession, yes, it is true. Skilled workers move to where they find a job.

Let's evaluate a simple example:

Someone graduates in some engineering discipline that the country needs.

They find that there are companies in that industry in Cambridge and London.

Neither is affordable if they want to buy a house.

They also find warehouse worker jobs in the north west and houses there for £70,000.

Which do you believe is the more reasonable course of action here:

• Not actually going into their career of choice that they are highly skilled in and which has much higher long term prospects, doing unskilled work and buying a cheap house in a deprived area.
• Going into their career of choice as skilled workers, making double the amount of money with much higher prospects, contributing a hell of a lot more to the economy and the exchequer but not being able to buy a house until their late 30's.

If you feel that the first option is reasonable, I am going to suggest that this is precisely why young people feel they are being screwed by the system. We need these workers, in these professions, at these locations, yet there is no housing available. Something has to be done there, whether it's relocation of industry elsewhere or more housing becoming available. In the case of London, disallowing foreign interests from buying half of London and leaving it unoccupied as a property investment would be a good start.

A great deal of the housing problem in this country is tied up in that very phrase, which I detest.

Agreed, it was just one of a number of factors, but one of the ones that was made public. I've spoken to quite a lot of people at the Beeb and there's quite a lot of pretty shady shit that will never be made public went on with that deal.  A lot of businesses made a lot of money off the back of that decision

Yeah I'm with you on both of these too!  Believe me, I am no fan of the tories. 

I'm not sure I agree. We have different housing needs at different times in our lives. I'm not one for moving lots, I've lived in my current house for 14 years, but when I bought my first house, I could not have afforded my current house and my circumstances mean that I would really struggle to live in my first house now.

Prices in my borough of London are rising faster than anywhere else in the uk.  I genuinely couldn't afford my house now and I bought it less than 3 years ago.

Genuinely.  My mate just bought a house round the corner for 50k over what was our our budget.

No particular argument with that.

But the phrase 'property ladder' exposes hideous aspirational attitudes which have nothing to do with actual housing needs. And the wheeler-dealer mentality underlying those attitudes partly explains the mess housing here is in: housing is viewed as an investment, rather than as a place in which to live.

I don't know the history of the phrase, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that it was introduced in the 1980s, alongside things like the selling off of Council housing.

It's not a phrase I would ever think of using myself.

A quite google doesn’t really support you personal loading of the meaning of the phrase.

A lot of young people are envious of parents who could afford houses and retired much earlier than the younger generation will. I'm 41 and my parents retired at about 60 but I know there is no way on earth I'd retire before about 67. My parents had similar jobs to my wife and me but managed to buy a house that is now worth about £350k after saving for 3 years. The wife and I saved for 8 years and bought a house now worth £160k.

I think it is very hard to compare lifestyles though and people of my age and younger enjoy things that the older generation never had. We go on foreign holidays, we have the internet, wide screen TVs, cars that work even when it's a cold morning,  central heating,  piles of cheap toys for the kids that barely fit in the house and considerably better healthcare (40 years ago cancer was pretty much a death sentence and life expectancy was about 10 years lower), and a better quality climbing rack. 

The answer is of course to build more houses.Increase the supply both of social and affordable houses ( whatever they are).

One of the downsides is that you then incur the wrath of local opposition, usually well organsied by the older generation who do not want new housing estates.

I incurred the wrath of alot of my retired and older  neighbours when I declined to sign a peition opposing housing development near me. Basically said it was all nice and fine for us to oppose it,but where were younger familys etc going to live at affordable prices, and I declined.There is an unbelievable sense of nimbyism in the older generation ( and I am 61). It is sad.

It is easy to attack the NIMBYs and to be fair, they deserve it. Others choose to attack the planning system. However, I think that a big part of the problem is how housing is built in the U.K., developers seek to minimise their costs, virgin development is generally a lot cheaper than brownfield sites and also stimulate demand by limiting supply. Both obviously mean increased profits. Only about 60% of residential planning permissions are actually built.

Would you want to live on a brownfield site if you had the choice.....old industrial areas etc. I would run a mile.Its like giving the younger generation the hand me downs.

Brownfield isn't a definition as such and can mean lots of different things. An old airfield, which is mostly open space and grazing- brownfield. A site that used to be different kinds of housing- brownfield. Ex mod chemical weapon disposal site- greenfield. Housing on old landfill- brownfield. Housing BY old landfill- Greenfield. Former brickwork and clay pits in heart of aonb- well, you can guess

One of the most desirable developments in my area is on an old factory site, properties selling for about £100k more than the equivelant property elsewhere in the area. Most city centre developments are on previously developed sites, including the multi-million pound penthouses. I would suggest that you don't know what you are talking about.

We are not building enough properties and alot of people including families do not want to live in city centre sites in apartments(they want to live in suburbia) in.

Building on brownfield ( which is hardly new and has been encouraged for a long time )  has not really delivered the volume of properties needed or desired.

Its an example, one of a couple that I gave of housing on previously developed sites being desirable. Suburbia is full of previously developed sites.

My entire point. The permissions are the there, they can be desirable, they just are not getting built. The large volume house builders cannot be relied upon to deliver the numbers. We need to look at different ways of delivering housing.

One thing about new builds and it coloured our house hunting. The new builds are built to maximise profit and quality seems somewhat lacking (what will be a new town near me has had no end of press reporting issues that are going unfixed) and a lot aren't freehold with relatively short leases which could cause issues selling.

It may only be n+1 experience but friends I know with new builds around the SW all have issues. No point building houses if no one wants to buy it due to poor reputations.

https://www.lindenhomes.co.uk/developments/devon/sherford-plymouth#view-pri...

Not exactly affordable in the slightest. You'll need at least £30k as a deposit and be well above the Plymouth average wage. 

Now I'm not going to say I know the answers I'm a computer engineer, not town planner but I can at least identify the issue.

In summer I had a conversation with a Canadian chap (who happened to design the logo for a VERY expensive Canadian outdoor brand) about HS2. When I explained what was proposed his first question was, "If your government want to show commitment to the north, why did they not start in the north and build south?" As a completely unbiased outsider he could clearly see the ulterior motive of better rail links in the south and midlands with no money left for the north.  

An interesting article on the pension triple lock

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/03/scrapping-pensions-tr...

Why pick on the old guys? Well, there's a good question. 

Here's why. Because you can't tell just by looking whether that old duffer voted tory in the 1979 general election. Every Brit born before 1961 is under suspicion. And it gets worse. Clearly, on recent evidence, they are repeat offenders. Ask any former DPP about what he'd do to repeat offenders.

And don't think for a moment that Margaret Thatcher was any less of a dangerous greedy c9nt than Boris Johnson. She was even more dangerous because she was so much better at hiding her true nature. 

The really obvious failure of Johnson is his failure to understand that there is not a choice between people and the economy because people ARE the economy and every one of those tens of thousands of people who have died unnecessarily of COVID-19 was a piece of the economy dying. Thatcher was exactly the same. This 'no such thing as society' is effectively the same mantra as Johnson's. 

None of you matter. None of you matter. None of you matter. None of you matter. That is the truth of the UK that millions of total £3<&ing idiots voted for in December. Black, white, pink, brown, gay, straight, 18 or 80. None of you matter. So get off your lazy 4r5es and change things. Protest, write letters, write posts, do memes to counter the millions of fascist ones, sign petitions, join campaigns, join parties. Do it now before all of that has become illegal. 

Not all old gits are useless. Some of them wrote this.
https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/index.html

And this.
https://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Convention_ENG.pdf

I am so sick of all this moaning about politicians. F#<& o££ and BE ONE.

Yours sincerely 

Mr Grumpy

Did the pubs open a day earlier in Scotland ?

First I'm in no way suggesting Johnson is a great leader or that I agreed with everything she said. But if you look at the whole speech it's not so different from today, applying it after the Blair years. Social responsibility to study, to work, or even following covid rules to protect others, social distancing etc. ...

"I think we have been through a period when too many people have been given to understand that when they have a problem it is government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant. I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They are casting their problems on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no governments can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours. People have got their entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There is no such thing as an entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.”

I was born before 1961.  I voted Conservative in 1979 and, if faced with a country in a similar state of turmoil now, with a similar opposition, I might do again. 

I haven't voted Conservative for over 30 years now.

Was bu11sh1t. Is bu11sh1t. Always will be bu11sh1t. 

The ones overplaying their entitlement were Thatcher and her croneys. Now it's Dom Cummings, his puppet Boris and all their worthless pals. The job of government is to preserve and enhance the lives of the people. THAT is what ALL the people are entitled to and that is where UK governments have repeatedly failed for decades. It is why the UK, located in the richest, safest and happiest part of the planet, and brimming over with resources, is the poorest and saddest pile of sh1t in the region. 

There's an obvious flaw in your argument right at the start. Any of us who voted in 1979 were young guys in 1979. What makes you think Thatcher was our generation's fault, rather than our parents (long departed in my case)?

I didn't vote for Thatcher or Johnson. I've actively participated in political campaigning for AV and against Brexit. I stand in most local elections. I AM involved.

Most of the responses to my OP have been well-argued without recourse to obscenities - a good advert for UKC.

Martin

The dislikes are ticking along nicely. 

What is the Brits hate about being safe, happy and prosperous?

What do you think we are spending all our money on that you didn't? A phone and a laptop are a financial drop in the ocean compared to rent/mortgages and university.

The reason people are cheesed off at your generation is because you benefited from things like free higher education, the NHS, cheap property etc and yet you insist on voting for governments that are systematically removing these vital lower rungs on the ladder for the new generations, and are uninterested in repairing the environment of which the brutal ramifications you will not be alive to endure. 

Do you vote, every time, council, euro, national?

Of course. 

Why do you say of course, many young people do not, and is a reason why their voice is not heard, there is no of course about it.

Nothing against the older generation. They made use of things that we all would have at the time. Regarding high house prices. Labour embraced high house prices during their glory years upto 08 crash, so to think that house prices will suddenly come down if labour get into power is a bit silly. High house prices are embraced by all parties who get into power. 
To many people are brainwashed into going to uni these days. So many useless degrees around. Had a friend who studied comedy at uni. Laughable isn’t it. Alot who go realise this but still choose to go as they don’t want to work at 18 years old. Best thing i ever did was getting an apprenticeship. 

 

Some of your points are answered above, but here in summary:

Yes, I benefitted from free higher education but only a small percentage of my generation did. Free university education was affordable because only around 10% of us went. Most of my generation didn't benefit.

Who, today, doesn't benefit from the NHS, and from treatments that could only be dreamed about in the 50's and 60's? I don't get your point there.

As I've conceded above you are right on housing costs. We need political action to redress the broken housing market.

I don't think there's any doubt we lived more frugally when I was young. Yes, some new technology is not expensive, but if we all consumed the world's resources today at the more modest rate we did 50 years ago we would not have such an environmental crisis looming. 

My generation do NOT insist on voting for right wing governments. That's a quite unjustified generalisation. I may be wrong, but I think you would find that those of us lucky enough to have benefitted from free university education are more likely to be left of centre voters in our retirement. I certainly am. And I'm involved in political campaigning too.

You vote every time "of course". I'm afraid the "of course" is misplaced, as SteveX points out. If you want the younger generation to have more say, then you need to persuade your generation to get more involved and ALL vote EVERY time. Not just in elections, but in important events that affect our political structures like the Brexit and AV referenda. And you will have my support if you campaign to lower the voting age to 16.

Martin

There's no reason to assume we know how the OP voted then or votes now though.  But what is evidenced on the OP's part by that: "Because we were willing to live more frugally" is a tendency to assume that what came to them by luck they actually earned by their own virtue.

"I bought a detached house and raised two children on a single salary in the '70s because I didn't waste all my money on avocados and smartphones."  How condescending is that?

For various reasons when I was a teenager I couldn't concentrate at home and got into the habit of doing my homework at a desk in the local library.  Without it I wouldn't have got the A-level grades that allowed me to benefit from a free University education.  It's a couple of hundred miles away and I haven't given it a thought in years, but I checked - that particular library does still exist, but the opening hours* are so short it would be completely impossible to do what I did now.

* E2A: The 'normal' opening hours, it's completely closed at the moment obvs.

Don’t agree with you there Martin. No way should they lower the voting age to 16 years old. I think it should be 21 myself. To vote i believe whatever path you take after school, higher education, apprenticeship, armed forces, whatever it is you do you need some post school experience and experience of the real world. 

Those who went to university were a fairly small minority of "my generation" back in the day.  Bristle all you like, I don't think the generalisation is an unfair as all that.  Look at the demographics of the Tory party membership.

Experience of the workplace you mean presumably?  If you're going to exclude teenagers on those grounds you should disenfranchise those who have been retired more than a couple of years too.

https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2019/12/how-britain-voted-and-why-my-2019-gen...

Check out this exit poll giving an example of voter demographics. It doesn't paint the picture you describe. 

The NHS is being slowly privatised by our governments, even Blair played a part. Watch The Dirty War On The NHS for more info. Older voters do not generally seem aware or bothered. 

Regarding free uni I don't disagree that it can't just be the modern university model just nationalised, but that's not what I proposed. 

Young voters not voting is not an excuse to let older voters off the hook. They are equally responsible for the way we are governed. I'm not saying it's all their fault but the OP wanted to understand the negative sentiment in their direction, which is what I explained. 

and the out of work too

I have to agree. I left school in the early 80s, (didn't get free Uni but got day release to technical college), and it was a pretty miserable time job and housing wise.

I'm doing ok now nearly 40 years later, but I'm conscious that's more luck than judgement and hard work on my part.

57% of over 60's voted for conservatives in the last election. 67% of over 70's did the same. only 29% of those with degrees voted for Tories, but thats probably skewed by the younger generations having proportionally more degrees per capita and being less inclined to vote tory.

I thought it was common knowledge that the older generations voted Tory. Makes sense as they have the most to gain from it... as long as they absolve themselves of any altruistic responsibility.

Probably better that we just go back to the system where only land owners are allowed to vote- they've proved that they're responsible enough.

Maybe we shouldnt let the ladies vote either....

Maybe they voted that way because they consider the Tory party the best for them and their grandchildren.............its terrible that they have a different view of the world to you...just not right is it....

From somebody who did not vote Tory or Labour last time,.

The real issue is that the Torys have aligned themselves with  working class voters whereas the Labour party has aligned itself generally with degree educated  middle class voters.This a broad brush view , there are as always exceptions.

As a younger voter you need to recognise this and figure out what to do politically.

Great point... which I sort of made myself.

I also didn't really say anything negative against the Tories, or how I voted the last election.

But keep on with the righteous indignation.

Old people- why don't kids vote, if they don't like things they need to vote to change it.

Also old people- kids cant be trusted to do what's best for them. They should be focused on playing, not voting.

I don't actually disagree with your point- maybe the voting age is too low. maybe it isn't.  But for your arguments to work, the older generation need to vote for what will benefit the disenfranchised generation (and not just their progeny)... which doesn't happen.  It's human nature.

I think more 50-70year old folk might have voted tory last year purely because they saw Corbyn taking the Labour party back to the 1970s, which is quite likely why they or their parents voted in Maggie in 79. 

A different Labour leader will likely see Labour gain many of them back. 

Voting demograhics will change with time. Alot of young voters seem to very much be labour, so as years go by labour will become the powerhouse, if the young people stick to labour as they get older. When labour do get back into power, whenever that may be, there will be alot of disappointed people though ,who expected labour to deliver big change and realise that they aren’t the answer to all problems. 
 

We're talking about 16 year olds, not 10 year olds.  "Understanding of the real world" is rather subjective innit, everyone alive lives in the real world though they may not experience their daily life quite the same way you do.

What you need in order to vote 'responsibly' is an understanding of the "real world" as experienced by people other than yourself.  Otherwise you'd just vote out of narrow self-interest without any regard to the circumstances of others, especially others less fortunate than yourself.  And you'd probably be prone to falling for the lies spouted by populist demagogues, should one happen to come along.

If you're suggesting that teenagers would be more prone to this than pensioners, I think the evidence of the last few years is against you.

Rather than changing the voting age, the real solution would be to offer the UK real democracy and introduce proportional representation. There's no point a 16 year old voting in a safe Tory seat, or an 18 year old voting Green in any other constituency other than Brighton. Maybe if a party with 43.6% of the vote didn't get 56.1% of the seats in parliament more people would go out to vote. 

If you want schoolchildren to worry about politics and not enjoy childhood then that is a real shame. Plenty of time to worry in life. But its all opinions. 
 

The proposition here is that people from the age of 16 up should be allowed to vote, not that it should be compulsory.  Those who are oblivious now would be perfectly welcome to remain so.

Plenty of teenagers already do "worry about politics" now though, and rightly so.  They are engaged, and in many cases they are campaigning, despite being disenfranchised.  Go along to a demonstration some time and you'll see them there, waving placards, 'taking a knee'.

The consequences to them of many of the decisions being made by governments now are far greater than they are for "us oldies", and they know it.

Yeah. Its certainly true that worrying, anxiety, mental health issues are growing among teenagers. To make a logical vote at 16 they would realistically need to start learning about politics at 12-13. Wow. Being subjected to politics and social media etc etc who can blame them for increasing mental health problems. As i said. It is a shame. 
 

Well, I checked your Ashcroft link. Yes, it does confirm that over 65's as a whole voted more strongly Tory than under 65's, but not that graduate over 65's (perhaps just 10 - 15% of us) did, which was my point. My own circle of graduate over 65's largely did not vote Tory. Don't forget that many of us are of the '68 student protest generation - I may have mellowed a bit from when I wrote a 6th form essay supporting communism, but not that much! I was responding to the specific assertion that those of us oldies who "benefitted from free university education" had pulled up the drawbridge on today's young generation by voting Tory. I don't think that's fair.

Martin

Well we agree on proportional representation. Did you campaign as I did in the AV referendum. AV was far from perfect, but a lot better than what we have.

Martin

I agree; my impression is that graduates are clearly less likely to vote Tory than non-graduates of a comparable economic status, particularly given that the Tory party has degenerated into a gang of far-right nationalists. I would have thought this was generally agreed.

jcm

In a different world the "right to vote" might be reserved to those with appropriate knowledge and experience, but also surely your stake in the future should play a part. Taking both together I think 16 and 17 year old's have as much "right to vote" as those in the last two years of their lives.

Martin

I think Corbyn is one of two key factors in the election, the other was Brexit (that older non degree educated demographic was heavily pro brexit). The third factor will be the impact of this government on those people and their families. Boris promises the earth and fails to deliver again and again. Tens of thousands unnecessarily dead in the pandemic and the oven ready Brexit wonder deal heading to WTO rules. A cabinet of undertalented cronies are not going to rescue this. I predict a change in leader as Tory MPs are pretty hard nosed in such situations.

I agree entirely. I'm just as happy with 16 year olds voting as any age above that. We let people with dementia vote.

Unfortunately I don't think that is true.  As people age, and accumulate wealth they change their vote to the Tories (generalisation alert). Again, it is human nature to protect you and yours, even if it may be to the detriment of others.

I agree there is unlikely to be a massive change if/ when labour get back into power though.... could explain the voter apathy amongst the young.

They don't need "politics and social media" to worry them about climate change, or the antics of populist politicians for that matter.  You don't even need a TV for that, a newspaper will do. 

A David Attenborough nature programme is more than enough to terrify, there's a mass-extinction event gathering pace and you'd have to be absolutely blind to be unable to see it now*.  I don't think there is all that much you can do to shield a 12-13 year old from this knowledge without denying them the chance of a decent education.  Unless you are proposing to lock them in the cellar, an intelligent child is going to look at the world.  The "real world", there is only the one, though different people experience it in very different ways of course.

What's more stressful than being in a scary situation?  Being in a scary situation without having the agency to do anything about it.  I don't see how it's meant to help the mental health of a 16 year-old keeping them disenfranchised for another couple of years.

* - At least in the case of the yoof, they're spared the direct personal experience of it.  "Insectageddon" for example - I find it upsetting and frightening how clean the visor of my helmet is after I ride my motorcycle during the summer now, remembering how many bugs would be splattered over it just 20 or so years ago.  When I first started riding a motorbike you couldn't smile on a summer's evening without a moth getting stuck in your teeth.

I used to see a bee and think "Get away from me, bee!", now it's more "Wow, a bee!  Are you ok?  Can I get you anything?  Cushion?  Cup of tea?"**

** - I've nicked this.  Can't remember where from though.

What proportion of the electorate really changes their vote as they get older (and "acquire wealth")? I would love to know the real facts here. (Intuitively, I suspect it's not very great.)

"Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains."

Logic would dictate that if it has always been the case that age is the great divider and the older generation are more likely to vote conservative, then those that would have voted differently as youngsters must be changing their vote. Otherwise as the oldies die off, their vote wouldn't be replaced- which is not the case.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379413000875

There could be a variety of reasons as to why voting habits change with age- but I think lifestyle (ie how wealthy you are) would certainly be one of them.

edit- the proportion is apparently 0.32%-.038% swing per year.  Over a lifetime (20-80) even at the low end that is a 20% shift.

Don’t think its denying them a decent education. Allowing them to concentrate on study and progressing is more important than worrying about politics before your 16. Its a distraction that isn’t neccessary at that age. 
But you are right that it is difficult with all the media outlets these days.

Been a good chat. Have a good day. 
  



 

Boom boom!

Reply to the thread - if you're still posting on this topic but haven't seen it yet (and especially if your posts are anecdotal), just take the time to watch the Willetts lecture, the link to which has already been posted twice at least:

youtube.com/watch?v=ZuXzvjBYW8A&

Highly recommended summary of the situation and the policy challenges from a former tory cabinet minister. From 2016 or thereabouts so doesn't take account of any further developments related to Brexit and Covid (both are which are only likely to strengthen the intergenerational disconnect) but I thought it was great. Thanks for the link.

Perfect example of an issue the Willetts lecture considers thoughtfully... *not that yours isn't a thoughtful consideration!

Thoughtful in your view. I see the lecture as a massive squirrel in the context of Brexit and Corbyn and the content is an attempt to con the young from seeing the fact that successive governments did this to them. They changed the rules that gradually made perfectly sensible DB pensions look unaffordable;  they applied policy that helped build the housing bubble and failed to tax the huge unearned wealth of that fairly; they reduced worker protections and stood by while the globalised corps exploited the gig economy. The old didn't steal anything the governments did and most of the money ended up increasing the wealth of those already very rich.

It really is irrelevant if you actually studied or not, your generation benefited as a whole from free uni. In the same way we all benefit from having an NHS regardless of whether we use it or not. I didn't blame graduates specifically, and I didn't blame Tories specifically (after all it was Blair that introduced tuition fees)

I think I did vote for AV to show support for electoral reform but it was a ridiculous system that didn't resemble proportional representation in the slightest. 

That would be true if the NHS wasn't free at the point of need and treatment was restricted to 5 to 10% of the population by either ability to pay or very strict eligibility criteria.

No one benefits from 9k fees, as from the government's own figures the total costs of funding undergraduates now end up being pretty much the same as when they charged 3k fees. The rest gets written off as unpaid debt or swallowed in admin fees. The government produced this idiocy that adds debt to those who do pay.

Not sure what you mean by squirrel - do you mean 'squirreling away'? I don't think the lecture really does anything to hide the fact that the millenials and post-millenials have had 'their futures stolen'. He doesn't actually apologise for specific tory policies but he does recognise where the past 40 years have brought us to and doesn't shy away from the impacts that changes in pension policy, amongst many other things, have made. 

Have no fear, you'll never find me defending a tory government or politician of any generation but he lets the data speak for itself. I recognise that you can blame governments or you can blame old people and I will always blame governments (unless they're the labour ones between 1997 and 2010 of course!). And I don't think Willetts is pretending that individual boomers have pulled the wool over the eyes of successive administrations.

In the final slides he does advocate significant changes in policy which include properly tackling and funding social care in a relatively progressive way and the need for increased taxation in various forms. Sorry if you feel if you see it as a whitewash. It made me reflect a bit anyway; can't believe I'm defending recommending a youtube video made by a tory peer!