Why England's young people are angry about housing, in one chart

Do you like charts? Do you like being angry about how your parents generation has screwed everything up for you? Then, boy, do we have the chart for you.

Duncan Stott, director of the affordable housing campaign Priced Out, has alerted us to this gem. It’s from the government’s English Housing Survey, published last February, and it shows, well, look:

This is not just any age bracket. The late 20s and early 30s are meant to be the key family formation time, when people are most likely to pair up and start popping out babies.

Starting a family, though, is a hell of a lot easier if you have a measure of security that you and your kids aren’t going to get thrown out on the street at a couple of months.

On the whole, then, the news that only 36 per cent of households in this age bracket – down 11 per cent in just four years, and more than 30 since the early 1990s – now own their own homes is a bit of a downer. So, come to that, is the fact the number in private rental accommadation has increased by a factor of two and a half in just 10 years.

There are two competing explanations for why this has happened. One is that house prices have gone through the roof, making it harder to save for a deposit or get a mortgage, and meaning that people are buying later in life, if at all.

The other is that maybe people just plain stopped wanting to buy houses.

Anyway, we’re just going to leave this here.