We earn more than £100k per year, we're in our thirties... and we still can't afford to buy a house in London

Independent

4 days ago

When I was a child, my mum and I had a favourite hobby. At night, after tea, probably with Corrie playing in the background, we'd sit cross-legged on the living room floor of our little house in Lincolnshire making mood boards. The process was simple: potential dreams were ripped from piles of magazines and hopes meticulously pinned on a corkboard from Woolies.
Some nights we 'redecorated' the house, or planned out what our lives would look like when we were finally rich. We'd have a car, for example, she wouldn't have two jobs, we'd go on holidays that weren't bought via coupons in The Sun. And sometimes, mum would clear the board, hand me the pins and say: 'So. You're 30. What does it all look like?'
I had no doubts. I would live in London, I told her, working as a writer at a big magazine or newspaper. I would be happy – I'd perhaps have a partner, maybe I'd have children, too; more certainly I would have a flat, or my own little house to decorate. It was all, objectively, a bit unlikely.
But having come to political consciousness to the sound of D:Ream and Tony Blair promising that 'Things Can Only Get Better', it made sense: I was raised in a generation taught to believe that, regardless of where I came from, hard work reaps reward and, if I really put my mind to it, that predictable rhythm of adulthood – work hard, earn enough, buy a place, build a life – would come. So that's what I did.
I am, then, what you might consider a success story. Over the years, I've done everything that I was told would lead to stability: I studied hard, got an expensive degree, built a career now 16 years strong, lived within my means wherever humanly possible and gained that coveted status of 'working class done good'.
Now aged 37, I work in a job I adore and live with my partner, an electrician, in a two-bedroom home in a lovely part of southeast London. I am five months pregnant. Together we earn more than £100,000 per year; more than I could ever have imagined from where I sat on mum's living room carpet, more than my boyfriend – whose similar upbringing meant he thought that £15,000 per year was nothing short of a fortune when he left school at 16 – once thought possible. We have some savings and decent credit scores. The unlikely dream came true.
Yet, despite all that hard work, despite our successes and our sacrifices, it's another picture from the mood board that has, for decades now, felt like a child's fantasy: owning a home.
For millennials like me who graduated into a recession in the early 2000s, decades of political negligence and economic short-termism – boom and bust cycles, deregulation after deregulation, stagnant wages, sky-high rents and chronically under-supplied housing – have conspired to render us the financially immature generation, never quite reaching that very British apex of what it means to be adult; to be the king of your own castle.
Instead, we've done the hard work we were told to do and been told to be grateful for the opportunity. Without the roots of a stable home, one in four millennials are putting off having children and those without family money have long been priced out of London.
While our household might earn just over £100,000 per year – allowing us, in theory, a mortgage of around £400,000 – first homes in London cost an average of £511,0514 and require an average deposit of £144,000. Houses are now 8.1 times the average income, a figure that has, over the years, horrified our parents – mine a nurse (a single mum) and a mechanic, my partner's a barmaid and a milkman when he was young – who believed that it would be easier, not harder, for us after they saved up their wages to get on the housing ladder.
Instead of the stable foundations they started from in their twenties, we have spent years stuck in adultescent flatshares with mouldy bathrooms and greedy landlords, watching trust fund babies buy two-bed terraces as 'starter-homes' while posting about 'grit' and their 'working-class grandmother' on Instagram. Recently interest rates have been so high that a mortgage on a basic two-bed flat would be at the very top end of what we could afford anyway but, ironically, for the most part rent we pay (for me, at least a third, at times almost half of my salary over the years) is often way above what the bank might look for in a good borrower. It figures: money comes to money, as mum would always say: it's expensive to be poor.
Homeowning has become simply an inheritance, passed down to the lucky ones. And this, for my partner and me at least, is the crux of it, really. Gifts, loans, or 'early access' to their future, all quietly received with a lot of chatter about savvy financial planning.
For us, realistically only the deaths of our parents mean access to homeownership – a truly grim reality that just shouldn't be the case. Social mobility is no longer measured by hard work but by proximity to wealth, and Rachel Reeves ' plan to target savers with offers to invest in shares is unlikely to take off in my experience – when it's taken you more than five years to save up £20,000, there's little chance you're going to take any risks with it.
And while those who point to millennials frittering their money on nice-to-haves, no amount of avocado toast or flat whites could negate a housing market rigged in favour of our predecessors – those who got in early and stayed to ride the property boom. The have-nots are trying hopelessly to buy at the peak of that boom.
Decades of political negligence and economic short-termism have conspired to render us the financially immature generation, never quite reaching that very British apex of what it means to be adult; to be the king of your own castle
Now, Rachel Reeves is offering a kind of soft intervention – looser lending rules, the (very good) idea that rent counts toward mortgage eligibility. Her reforms aim to bring in 36,000 additional mortgages for first time buyers in a single year, achieved by lowering the minimum salary required for an individual to £30,000 from £35,000 as it is now, and to £50,000 from £55,000 for couples on a joint income, and making mortgages for over 4.5 times a buyer's salary available. Could it help? Or are we being handed slightly longer ladders to reach the same crumbling ledge?
Certainly, there's a good chance that this could be at least a short-term boost for the housing market – at least some people will be helped, and rent-proofing is sensible and long overdue. An optimistic ear might hear Reeves' attempt to 'cut the financial red tape' as opening up homeownership in a sustainable, inclusive way.
To be honest, anything that makes it possible for people frozen out of the buyer's market feels like a positive at this point. If the so-called Leeds Reforms also work to boost regional economies and create greater financial equity as the Treasury hopes, all credit to her.
There are obvious risks, however – over-egging demand without addressing supply, for instance, that could just make everything even more expensive (just like George Osbourne's Help To Buy scheme did in some areas). The clear danger of relaxing caps on loan-to-income ratios (as we learned during the 2008 crash), especially since real incomes rose roughly £400 slower than costs between 2020 and 2025, while house prices jumped 4 per cent year on year – basically, even if we get the mortgage, we might not keep up with it. Compounding that is a lack of new housing, without which, inflation is inevitable.
It would all matter a lot less – and help first-time buyers save more readily, or at all – if the rental market wasn't ready to squeeze the life out of us. It's exhausting to continually see every pay rise gobbled up by rent inflation, or to wonder if your fertility will survive another year of trying to gain stability or consistently paying more for less.
We've all had to accept that rent will, for many, now take up half of our income. But there's no fix without serious investment in social and affordable housing, proper rent controls and little regulation on the wild west of landlords – all of which should be at the top of Reeves' agenda. Right now, the insecurity of renting is only driving the pressure to 'escape' into homeownership – but that's little more than an emotionally-loaded symbol of stability in a system that, really, offers none. It wasn't supposed to be a luxury to want stability, to want a small patch of the world that doesn't depend on a letting agent's whim or a landlord's mortgage rate.
All those years ago on the living room floor, Mum had blind faith in me that I might beat the odds to get to work at my dream job in London – that belief is probably the biggest gift she ever gave me before she died a few months ago. But struggling to buy a starter home at 37 with a baby on the way? Back then, we could have never imagined it. Not even with the most elaborate mood board.