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In Britain, young people are expected to become independent in their 20s. Yet the UK’s economic model increasingly denies them the means to do so. Analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), commissioned partly for the BBC, finds that the proportion of 25-year-olds living with their parents has risen from 25% in the 1990s to 42% today. The research says “co-residence” among those in their 20s and 30s has increased by more than a third over two decades. The rate in Britain remains well below Italy and Spain, where leaving home is frequently more about finding a partner than turning 18, going to university or starting work. But that is scant comfort: Britain appears to be slowly drifting towards a southern European experience without the family culture that makes this feel normal.
Young Britons struggle to move out of “the hotel of mum and dad” for obvious reasons. Employment for those aged 25 has fallen for both women and men. Real earnings have barely progressed beyond the level reached around two decades ago. Hardly a surprise, then, that home ownership at 25 has dropped from 43% in the mid-1980s to 15% today. As the IFS notes, the changing age, educational, ethnic or migrant composition of the population might have been expected to reduce rates of co-residence. Instead, the “declining affordability of housing” has driven them up. In short, young adults are not just opting for a cheaper domestic arrangement to save money. They are submitting to it because they have less control over their lives as the options narrow for housing and work.
Britain’s economy risks turning a generation’s 20s into a depressingly prolonged “kidulthood”. Having your own home provides privacy, the ability to establish adult relationships and the space to experiment with identity. The dilemmas that not having a place of one’s own can create were highlighted by a 26-year-old man who moved back to live with his parents. He told the BBC’s Today programme: “I’m not going to bring a girl back to my parents’ house. So it would have 100% affected that part of my life, which does get me low.”
Richer parents often help their adult children to become independent; among the wealthiest fifth of households, about 15% gave or lent money to their children in 2018-20, compared with under 5% among the poorest fifth. Lower-income families help by keeping their adult children dependent in the home. The latter may save rent, but it can also mean less privacy and autonomy for young adults, and greater housing and living costs for their parents. The evidence is that the trend reproduces inequality not only in wealth but in the ability to establish an independent life.
These financial outcomes are not the result of neutral markets. They reflect institutions that suppress wages, let landlords capture housing scarcity and allow the wealthy to buy opportunities denied to others. A social democratic programme should build more social housing, strengthen wages and job security, and shift taxation away from work towards rent extraction. “If you don’t give people a good home, what chance have they got of having a good life?” Andy Burnham has argued. Before becoming prime minister, he promised “the biggest council housebuilding programme since the postwar period”. Without bold change, the government will keep subsidising the consequences of social and economic failure while leaving the causes intact.
