Two new reports show how that model has completely broken down.

The first comes from the Resolution Foundation, which launched an in-depth study of inter-generational fairness with a look at the housing market. …

… The idea that each generation would be more fortunate than the last no longer applies and perhaps helps explain why young people feel that traditional politics has little to offer them. The political economy of the analogue age was based on the idea that people would have secure, full-time employment that would enable them to save the deposit on a home relatively quickly.

Two new reports show how that model has completely broken down. The first comes from the Resolution Foundation, which launched an in-depth study of inter-generational fairness with a look at the housing market.

The findings are shocking. So-called millennials – those born between 1982 and 2004 are on average 16 percentage points less likely to own their own than their parents in generation X. They, in turn are 10 percentage points less likely to own a home than their parents in the baby boomer generation.

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For those on low to middle incomes the situation has become particularly tough. As recently as 1998, more than half of those earning 10-50% of average national income had a mortgage. That figure has now dropped to one in four and will be around one in 10 within a decade on current trends. Owner occupation is increasingly becoming the preserve of the elderly and the well off.

It’s not difficult to see why it has become harder for a young person on a modest income to get a foot on the housing ladder: in the late 1990s it took them three years to save up for a deposit, while today it would take 22 years. Soaring house prices have been marvellous for baby boomers, who have often used their windfalls to create their own mini buy-to-let empires, but have been disastrous for generation rent. London has become a virtual no-go area for young people with ambitions to own a home.

Unaffordable country: where can you afford to buy a house?
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Rising house prices are, however, not the only reason young people find themselves trapped in rented accommodation. The other factor is that they are struggling to make a decent wage in an increasingly insecure and casualised labour market in which low pay is endemic.

That emerges from the first in-depth study into the number of “crowd workers”, people who are paid for work through online platforms such as Uber, Upwork and Taskrabbit. Prof Ursula Huws of the University of Hertfordshire says that 5 million people are being paid through these online platforms, with more than 3 million of them regularly engaged in various forms of crowd work. Delivery drivers, cleaners, tree surgeons, plumbers are increasingly likely to get jobs this way, with the online platform taking a cut of whatever they earn. …”