Good piece in Thursday’s (10 April 2025) FT by Miranda Green, Deputy Opinion Editor. It talks about a newly released 2025 Youth Poll by the John Smith Institute, a non-aligned charity in Scotland that promotes young people’s engagement in politics across the UK. Go to page 85 for an eye- catching headline. It says ‘In short, want to build more trust in politics? Build more houses.’
The report provides helpful insights into the attitudes of young people and their priorities. As Miranda Green notes, housing comes first. For observers with ears to hear this is not a surprise. But the report reveals a pressure cooker type safety valve. To me, a first glimpse. The valve is called hope. Here is why. The report says
’What is striking about our poll is that despite having been dealt an objectively difficult economic hand, despite the fact that affordable housing has never been more out of reach, despite stagnant wage growth, despite the effects of social media, this generation of young people in the UK continues to hope. Most believe their lives will be better than their parents.’
This faith, this hope, this self-belief I embrace. Perhaps my own father’s personal sacrifice aged 37, on active service in north-Africa in 1943 gives me an intensity of empathy. I do not know. But what I do know, is that these young people are wrong. Saying so fills me with deep sorrow . Because the houses they want will not be built. At least in the numbers they need. So their living costs in the years ahead will be unnecessarily high, whether due to excessive mortgage debt or excessive rents, and their prosperity will be less, probably much less.
I shall not repeat here all the reasons why this government’s housing supply policies will fail. This blog has that information. Sufficient to say, if a government wants something which is in its gift (all the land needed is here in England) but then asks a bunch of people (landowners) and companies (builders and developers) to do the job knowing they have a separate agenda, which is to turn a profit, that government is either really daft or plainly naive. Sorry young people: abandon hope.
Ian Campbell
11 April 2025
