UK poll: Work and money worry young people more than culture wars or climate
81 comments
·March 31, 2025reedf1
apt-apt-apt-apt
By house to earnings ratio beating SF, it seems you mean it's easier to buy there than SF (Manchester 7.1 to SF 10.5 from first Google results). That seems expected as SF is known to be expensive.
schnitzelstoat
I emigrated from England mostly because housing was just utterly unaffordable compared to wages, even in tech jobs.
I think older people might not be aware of how bad it is, as you are quite insulated from it if you are paying back a mortgage from a 10-20 years ago rather than renting at market rates.
If you have a good job you can get by, but with a significantly lower quality of life than a comparable job would have on much of the Continent, let alone in America.
That said, my experience is mostly limited to London and the South-East where I grew up, so perhaps it's better elsewhere but most of the jobs are in London, and anywhere even within commuting distance is ridiculously expensive. Getting a house like my parents or grandparents had would be impossible, and they weren't rich.
The new government has said they want to sort out the NIMBY stuff and get Britain building again, let's hope they do.
philipallstar
> Getting a house like my parents or grandparents had would be impossible, and they weren't rich.
The two main factors for this are: two-person income households up-bidding, making it less affordable for single people/mums/dads, and an unsustainable level of immigration.
> The new government has said they want to sort out the NIMBY stuff and get Britain building again, let's hope they do.
The former factor is just a massive wealth transfer exercise to people who had a house in the 1980s, and is just what we have now - no building can help it any more. The latter is somewhat out-buildable, but our building is not going to hit housing 700k people/year levels. We can't build a city the size of Nottingham every year, and if we did, that would be to maintain the current prices, not to decrease them.
quietbritishjim
> The two main factors for this are: two-person income households up-bidding, making it less affordable for single people/mums/dads, and an unsustainable level of immigration.
No, the one main factor is lack of new housing, mainly due to the green belt.
On the supply side, natural population growth due to reproduction is surely a bigger driver than immigration. Unless you want some sort of dystopian mass sterilisation policy, or simple a mass slaughter of young people, the only solution is to build more houses.
Government policy is unfortunately concentrated on giving first time buyers access to bigger mortgages, but of course this is just going to drive up prices. In a free market, that would incentivise house builders to build more houses, but with no land to build them on there's no way for that to happen.
philipallstar
> On the supply side, natural population growth due to reproduction is surely a bigger driver than immigration
This is from ONS[0]:
> Natural change has previously been the main driver of UK population growth. However, since the 1990s, the influence of net migration has increased, becoming the main source of growth.
The UK is not a devoping country. It would have a very stable population, or even a fractionally declining population, without net migration. And house prices for young people would look very different.
[0] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...
HPsquared
Reproduction is below replacement across the entire developed world.
(Edit: Israel has 2.9 TFR but that's an exceptional case, and Saudi has 2.3 but that's more of an emerging market)
Angostura
Or is the main factor foreign investors treating residential property as an investment, rather than somewhere to live in?
xienze
> On the supply side, natural population growth due to reproduction is surely a bigger driver than immigration.
No, it’s really not. When a citizen is born, they don’t need their own place to live until they’re 18-20 years old. There’s time for the housing supply to catch up. When a citizen is imported, they need housing TODAY.
No two ways about it, 1M births every year is a lot more sustainable from a new housing perspective than 1M immigrants every year (on top of births!).
kypro
Obviously it's a multi-facade problem, but the other commenter was closer to the truth imo.
There is no natural population growth in the UK anymore. We have below replacement rate birth rates. Immigration is the only net driver of population growth today and immigration is currently growing the population at around 2% annually. We saw similar problems with housing affordability in Canada after their mass-migration experiment. It honestly surprises me that there are still people who deny that mass-immigration policy without a comparable mass-home-building policy would increase house prices. The UK would need to build something like 500,000 homes a year just to keep up with the current rate of immigration. This isn't feasible in any near-term time frame. As it stands, if you want mass-immigration to continue you must accept increased home unaffordability.
Obviously you can offset the impact of immigration by building more houses, and the UK should build more houses, but to say that you would need a sterilisation policy to fix is obviously wrong – you just need to slow the flow immigration and the growth of the population to levels which match the rate at which the UK can build homes and new infrastructure.
The bidding up of property prices in the UK is also an issue and the parent commenter is right to raise it. It's not just dual-income families responsible there though, but also wealthy, foreign and corporate buyers. In the UK property is seen more as an investment than somewhere to live. So here it's quite common for people to buy and hold property simply for the return. Often properties in the UK are brought by foreign investors and left unoccupied. We've tried to make changes to stop this in recent years, but it's a problem.
globular-toast
Women had 1.9 children on average in 2017: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-42110846
More than 50% of women aged 30 were child-free in 2022: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/jan/27/women-c...
Has reproduction increased a lot since then?
If we build houses everywhere where do we grow food? Where do we go to get some peace and quiet? We don't all want to live in a hell hole where the only chance of quiet is in a small sealed box.
nicoburns
> The two main factors for this are: two-person income households up-bidding, making it less affordable for single people/mums/dads, and an unsustainable level of immigration.
I feel like you have at least missed two other very significant factors: low interest rates and increased borrowing limits for mortgages driving up the amount people are able to afford and the fact that councils almost completely stopped building houses since the 70s/80s.
philipallstar
I agree with you, but I don't think they're absolute fundamental drivers.
Low interest rates will drive prices up, but not to the point we have now where nice-sized family houses are divided into multiple small residences and it's still not enough. I haven't tried it, but I suspect if you game-theoried it out with a stable population and low interest rates there would be up-bidding, but everyone would still end up with a house.
With a relatively stable population you don't particularly need many new houses to be built (and not by councils in particular).
tonyedgecombe
Also increased longevity. Where we once had three generations alive now it is four. Where I live is full of aging single people clinging on to their family homes.
schnitzelstoat
After the war, entirely new towns were built and cities massively developed and expanded.
We've done it before and we could do it again.
The problem is that it has opposition from the Right who wish to preserve small villages or simply increase property values and opposition from the Left who see economic growth as a dirty word and development as gentrification and environmentally destructive.
But if we want a better future for our children and grandchildren, it must be done.
modo_mario
Alternatively and far more likely and simply one curbs migration. Allowing housing prices to not be buffered up by the promise of eternal population growth and conversely creating less downward pressure on local birth rates.
ben_w
> but our building is not going to hit housing 700k people/year levels. We can't build a city the size of Nottingham every year
"Will not" != "can't".
While I agree it's unlikely that the UK government will, such a building policy absolutely can be made to happen.
> if we did, that would be to maintain the current prices, not to decrease them.
Depends on the policy. UK used to have local councils building and owning property specifically to be cheap enough for working people to afford. This has different incentives than getting the same number of units built by private investors.
globular-toast
> two-person income households up-bidding, making it less affordable for single people/mums/dads
It should also be noted that two-person incomes are much more tax efficient than single because the tax bands are per-person rather than per-couple. So two people each on median pay (37k) would take home 60k between them. A single earner would have to be on almost 90k to take home the same amount, which would make them a top 5% earner.
philipallstar
Yes, it's inbelievably harder to do things as a single person or a single-earner family than it used to be. There's just no hope for the majority of earners. No hope at all.
gbuk2013
As someone living in SE London and having traveled to many places around the world, I’m not sure I can agree with the “significantly lower quality of life” part, although of course YMMV as to what you are looking for. London has its share of problems like anywhere else, and I would say things are in some ways not as good as they were (could just be me getting old) but it is still on balance a very privileged place to live in terms of access to work, facilities, entertainment, food options etc. I have not seen many places that can compare, let alone be better for my needs.
schnitzelstoat
I mean, it depends on what your life is like too, as priorities are different.
As I have a young child, and perhaps more children in the future, having good restaurants isn't as important as being able to afford a 3 or 4 bedroom house. And this is pretty unaffordable not just in London (which probably isn't the best place to raise children anyway) but across the entire South East.
I agree that it has excellent work opportunities though, which is partly the problem - the best jobs in the UK are all concentrated there.
HPsquared
It's a work camp, basically.
HPsquared
The various amenities have no value to QoL if you can't afford to use them.
gbuk2013
The hard fact is that enough people can, if only judging by how over-subscribed many of these amenities are. Whether or not this is sustainable remains to be seen - I certainly have bones to pick with the IMHO unwise government policy decisions that are pricing essential service workers out of the area - London can not function on bankers, lawyers and techies alone.
Angostura
There are a fair few free amenities in London - museums, art galleries, concerts sometimes. The parks and gardens are good too.
cjs_ac
I emigrated to South-East England from Australia for the same reasons. Whether the grass is greener depends on who's looking, I suppose.
schnitzelstoat
As a great philosopher once said: "The grass is always greener, where the dogs are shitting."
HPsquared
With enough irrigation and fertiliser, your own grass can be as green as you like.
flir
> The new government has said they want to sort out the NIMBY stuff and get Britain building again, let's hope they do.
There's decades of underbuilding to make up for, and the current government's house building targets are modest. I don't think we're going to see price inflation slow in this Parliament, or the next.
ohgr
It's not that bad in London. Mid-range tech salary is £70-80k and you can get a decent 2 bedroom apartment for £380k somewhere nice. Even easier if there are two of you. I'm a bit higher than that but there's nowhere else in the UK or Europe I can have as much disposable income as I do now. I know because I tried.
benjiro
Took my parents 20 years to pay back their home, with a 6.5% mortgage, barely 15min from the center of the capital.
My generation, they need a down payment of 50k Euro, just for the banks to even talk to them. And to borrow for a decent house, within 50km of a job location, people need to deal with 30, 35+ year loans.
The problem as i see it:
* The older generation live longer and longer, and this combines with a generational change where people want to live by themselves (and not with the kids). This creates a issues where homes are off the market, for 80 a 90 years. Reducing supply.
* Ground prices have gone up because zoning laws made tons of buildable land, zoned differently. Speaking from experience as a large part of land that our family owned was altered into agricultural 50 years ago. Only for the government to disowned it (and pay out) as agricultural for their own building projects.
* What used to be a easy to build home, has now tons of regulations regarding isolation norms, what you can build, how it can be build, this increases the construction costs.
* Immigration / foreign capital. This is often also overlooked. Maybe this is only a local (my birth country) issue, but we had a strange situation of people from different countries immigrating here, and buying homes in the smack middle of the capital. How? Because the foreign banks of those immigrants considered owning the property as a investment, resulting in them easily giving loans. Much more easily then the local banks gave loans. This created a situation where entire areas turned into immigration zones, pushing out the locals, and reducing supply.
* Second part of the foreign capital is that large investment companies or oligarchs just buy up tons of homes, apartments etc. So we get insane tower projects with 100's of apartments that no local can affords but sold to foreign capital as "investment". What in turn drives up the prices all around the areas', creating a massive bubble effect that expands to all around the areas.
* Then we have the issue that if somebody wants to sell a home, they are going to charge the max they can. And with a more limited supply then demand, it keep driving up prices. To the point that we see absolute ruins being ask insane prices for. Because the owners think "we own XXXXX in value". No, you own a ruin that costs you nothing beyond the land tax, but forget about them dropping prices. The ironic part is, despite a lack in supply, its easy to find empty homes because of this investment/holding on issue.
Owning a property is cheap, so cheap that companies see it as landbanks, and the people who own one, are going to keep a occupied until their 80 or 90s. Combine that with a increased population in all countries in the world (beyond maybe russia etc), and the country flight (people moving to cities because the jobs are there).
The ironic part is, a lot of the home prices is because people need a home, to be within reason of a job location. They are the people earning money and spending it on a home. When you look more country side, you find TONS of cheap homes but no work.
THAT is the main issue in my mind. We allow too much companies to be placed in central spots, this means everybody want to live there for the work but that drives up ground/home prices (and infrastructure costs as roads get congested). The places where its cheaper, lack the investment from companies/population growth, so price are stable or drop.
We do not run out of land, we have tons, but so many villages in so many countries died out, because jobs are not there. Nobody invested in those smaller villages and put all the good infrastructure in those top10 cities, resulting in them ballooning even more and ... Now combine that with the other factors...
Ironically, the work from home/pandemic movement helped for a short time but it created such a rush, that we had not normal price increases but ballooning effects. Too much people buying country homes in a short time, again, sellers market. In a more normal society, we have work spread around. More cities, lower work density concentrated on specific spots. But that requires government involvement (good luck with that) and LONG term planning. Not a few years, no, 20, 30+ year plans.
But the work from home movement is already under pressure from so many companies, despite the clear benefits for employers and employees. Because how can you be a manager when you can not oversee people in person... There is something phycological in people with power position about them having fine control over their employees.
Anyway, its a mess everywhere, not just the UK. We are still renting here in our 50's. The only people benefiting is the people who owned the rental properties as their capital goes up and up (rental income + property value increases). But as a middleclass, it really starts to hurt them. And no right wing "we solve it with simple solutions or its the immigrants fault" type of stuff is going to solve that. But people are desperate and yea, then we have a increase in ultra left and ultra right parties.
Worst part is that a lot of politicians are personally invested into keeping higher property prices, and have no incentive to deal with the issue, as it hurt themselves.
jfengel
I would not assume that what people tell pollsters is the same as the way they will vote.
"Work" and "money" are hard problems. Any meaningful solution is going to be difficult to understand, and I think people know it. The economy fluctuates regardless of who is in office, making past experiences murky. A politician is going to have a hard time convincing them that any of their policies will actually work.
It's easier to find a politician who agrees with you on the culture wars, and then assume that their economic policies will also work.
So I take it with a grain of salt when they say that they're picking based on a sound consideration of a politician's economic policy. They can say it, and maybe even believe it, but I bet you'll find that the correlation to culture is even more predictive of their vote.
anotherhue
What exactly is the social promise now? One can study hard, get an objectively good qualification, if you're lucky get a decent job and still all you've signed up for is to be a good tenant for a landlord for the rest of your days.
In the seventies social housing programs gave an entire generation a chance, and now that same generation is scalping their own offspring with the very same properties.
martin_a
I think Chinese people have already seen exactly that and are now "laying flat", see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_ping
ohgr
You can get an objectively good but objectively useless qualification by studying hard. The trick is to pick something not objectively useless. My daughter did and jumped into a high salary job straight away.
kypro
> In the seventies social housing programs gave an entire generation a chance, and now that same generation is scalping their own offspring with the very same properties.
Controversial opinion, but the pension system is even more problematic in this respect. Boomers are living longer and didn't have enough kids to maintain the affordability of the post-war pension system, but they don't seem willing to take any responsibility and instead have demanded my generation must accept mass-immigration and record high taxes instead of say pushing back the retirement age or requiring boomers who are sat on a large property wealth sell their home to fund their own retirements....
I've been alive a little over 30 years and I've seen my city completely change as a result of immigration. And everyone I know who is working complains endlessly about the amount the government is taking from them in taxation.
And of course some people would argue that this cultural change was a good thing, which is fair enough if they feel that way, but one can't help but be amazed at how keen boomers have been to make such significant and permanent changes to our nation's culture and demographics simply to ensure they get their pensions. And it's not like boomers as a generation don't have the wealth to chip in a little...
axegon_
This is hardly surprising - money was my primary concern in my late teenage years and early 20's - for many young adults in Europe and North America, this is the first time when they are expected to be in full control and really, far too few are prepared - I certainly wasn't. I too was not too worried about culture wars or climate. And I too was majorly concerned about the future of democracy. The one thing I find alarming is that I am magnitudes more concerned about the future of democracy now than I was back then. The 2010's me was far too optimistic it seems. To be clear - I am not from the UK but I spent a long time living among British people and I can relate. I have only one advise for younger people(all people actually) - hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
lsllc
Pretty much every young person (in their 20's) that I know outside of work (obviously) either can't get a job, or has an "in-between" job (e.g. temp work). All but one of them have college degrees (albiet not necessarily in the most useful subjects), all of them are either living with their parents, or are heavily funded by them.
They all report more or less the same, hundreds of job applications going out, mostly zero, or only 1-2 responses (but for jobs that they have hundreds of candidates for).
Forget buying a house (which is totally unaffordable), even paying their monthly bills is a challenge.
Seems like with AI (for a lot of white collar jobs at least), this isn't going to get better. Governments might have to start thinking about UBI ...
zabil
I recently moved to London(been a few years) and love the city, but the cost of living is extremely high—whether it’s dining out, attending concerts, going to the theatre, or especially paying rent.
A large portion of my salary goes toward rent and utilities. Fortunately, I work in tech, but I often wonder how others even manage.
Workplace conversations revolve around how expensive everything is and sharing tips on saving money. It’s definitely a source of anxiety.
kome
That’s what happens when agenda-setting is controlled by a vocal bourgeois minority, basically untouched by money problems, while completely ignoring the struggles of the silent majority.
tetris11
Hard to plan for tomorrow when you can barely plan for today. There's nothing out there in the job market.
A dearth of half-promises from startups without any clear mission other than AI salad in the hopes they can entice lost VC or paranoid big corps to buy them out, in the meantime hollowing out their shell as much as they can with the biggest manic grins you could possibly imagine as they dry out from the inside.
It's a shitshow.
frawleya
It's the economy, stupid.
newsclues
It’s the government policies.
Housing and employment are affected by the supply and demand. Housing is expensive because there are too many people for the number of homes. Jobs are poorly paid and rare because there are too many workers looking for jobs.
Why is the government flooding the market with people given the negative effects?
Angostura
The unemployment rate is relatively low at 4.4%. The pernicious gig economy may certainly be driving low wages, but the government is starting to clamp down on that.
Housing is arguably expensive because it is being treated as an investment opportunity. I remember when the 2012 Olympic Villiage flats were put up for sale. Many locals were excited at the prospect. In the end most were snapped-up by firms buying 10s or hundreds of them
zelos
The official unemployment figures hide a lot of detail, though. It looks like youth unemployment is roughly 3 times the overall rate, plus anecdotally there's a lot of under-employment: intelligent young people with decent degrees working minimum wage jobs etc.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin...
ghaff
I mean, leave aside whether today is uniquely bad (I doubt that it is although I'm sure it's worse in some ways and better in others). But, I'm pretty sure young people of most eras have worried about work and money more than cultural conflict or macro global concerns.
I think the problem is largely the enormous wealth extraction from the working class (this includes any working person, including high-tech and finance workers) to the old asset-owning class. Property prices (and rents) and income taxes are setup in such a way to effectively drain you of any potential wealth accrual. You simply cannot reach escape velocity in almost any job.
If you are a high-earning knowledge worker - you will be taxed to the pips, pay some of the highest OECD childcare costs, pay >= 35% of your paycheck in rent alone. The median house to median earnings ratio in even second cities like Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle are comparable to San Francisco. The older generation living an index linked lifestyle are completely immune to seeing these effects.
I've lived in the US too - there is a huge cultural difference in how house prices are treated. Even home owners bemoan high house prices, because they increase their property taxes. This is a huge cultural blind spot in the UK. And a similar system would be enormously helpful (but not exhaustive) in terms of incentives.