NatWest’s chair, Sir Howard Davies, has told the BBC that he believes it’s not difficult for people to get on the property ladder.
“You have to save, and that’s the way it always used to be,” he told the Today programme.
This is disingenuous however. In the mid 90s, the average house price was around four years average earnings, while today it costs roughly eight times the average earnings in the UK.
Thanks to the gender pay gap, buying a home is even less affordable for women, who would need to spend 14 times their average salary in London, vs 12 times for a man.
In a country where the average deposit on a home needs to be nearly £28,000 but where many young people struggle to pay their rent, it’s clear that he’s only talking to the more affluent sections of the British population.
With the spiraling cost of living, and even unionised employees struggling to get pay rises that keep up with inflation, housing is only going to become less affordable to the average person over time.
Home ownership rates have already fallen to 63 percent, far below its peak of 73 percent in 2007. Though for some sections of society the rate is much lower. Only about 20 percent of households in the Black African ethnic group and 17 percent of those in the Arab ethnic group own their own homes.
A combination of factors, such as the chronic undersupply of new builds, the removal of rent caps under Thatcher, and the lack of investment in social housing have made private renting more widespread and home ownership more expensive over recent decades.
Access to decent housing can and should be a right, not an expensive or unreachable burden. If a sanctioned and impoverished island such as Cuba can achieve a 90 percent home ownership rate, we would be more than capable of doing so here if the government of the UK actually answered to the popular will.
Unfortunately, we’ll never have democracy while the economy is privately owned and money is allowed in politics. We need socialism to achieve real democracy, and to finally provide for everyone’s basic needs such as housing, food and heating.
