00:00For young people hoping to buy their first home, the dream is slipping further away.
00:06Wages haven't kept up with house prices and deposits have become harder to save.
00:11Experts say the problem can be summed up in just a word.
00:15In a word, affordability. House prices have gone up quite remarkably in the last couple of decades.
00:22I mean, they've been going up for a long time before that.
00:25But, of course, the gap between what people can actually earn and the amount they've got to have in terms of deposit and then getting a mortgage has become problematic.
00:35That affordability gap is stark. A decade ago, many lenders offered mortgages covering nearly all of a property's value.
00:41Today, a first-time buyer has to find tens of thousands of pounds up front.
00:45If you're talking about a house that's, say, £250,000 and you're looking for a 10% deposit, you've got to have £25,000.
00:51Now, of course, that's all good. You may save up for it.
00:54And in the meantime, they've gone up. So that gap has been sort of increasing.
00:59That means even those who work and save face a moving target.
01:03Homes are increasingly treated as investments rather than places to live.
01:07And while property ownership builds wealth for some, it risks shutting others out altogether.
01:12So it's all well and good for people who have lots of money who can sort of pile into housing and see the asset prices going up.
01:17But for sort of young people who just want a home, somewhere to sort of bring up a family, it's become all the more problematic.
01:23For some, help comes from the so-called bank of mum and dad. But not everyone has that safety net.
01:29If you come from sort of limited means or your parents don't sort of want to give you money, then it becomes sort of problematic.
01:34And of course, we get this divide, as it were, of the sort of the haves and have-nots.
01:38And indeed, if I sort of go back to sort of the early sort of 1980s, a certain Margaret Thatcher, she believed in, if you like, in the sort of the properly owning democracy, the ability of every person to own houses.
01:51Labour came to power promising one and a half million new homes. But experts warn that at current building rates, that target looks far off.
01:58The promise, if you like, of sort of Labour to build more housing is all well and good. But of course, they have no particular control on sort of house builders.
02:07Experts say the real problem isn't bricks and mortar. It's the land beneath them.
02:11You can manufacture housing because, of course, a house is just a series of components. But of course, you can't manufacture land, which is part of the issue.
02:18For many young people, the first rung on the property ladder is moving further out of reach, leaving them stuck renting and unable to build the security of their own home.
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