John Harris

May 22, 2023

Mon 22 May 2023 01.00 EDT A huge social shift is happening that has barely been noticed, let alone understood. Earlier this month, the Office for National Statistics revealed data from the 2021 census about the number of adults in England and Wales living with their parents: 4.9 million of them , up nearly 15% on the figure for 2011. The fact that the stats were collected in the midst of the Covid crisis may suggest a blip, but the ONS is adamant that the rise “appears to be a continuing trend rather than a result of the pandemic”. Ten years ago , it reported record levels of such living arrangements, and the latest numbers are even more striking. Men outnumber women by three to two. The share of 20- to 24-year-olds living in the family home is 51.2%, up from 44.5% 10 years ago, and for those aged 30 to 34, the figure is nearly 12%. Almost half of single-parent families now have adult children at home. In London, one in four households had at least one adult child in the home, and in five London boroughs, the average age of what the ONS calls “adult children living with their parents” is 26. The numbers in more rural places are often almost as remarkable: in Dorset, for example, that description applies to nearly 20% of the grownup population. Clearly, all this highlights the cruelties of our housing crisis. Woven into the same picture is a higher education system that spits out twentysomethings already burdened with astronomical debt. The result is a kind of compulsory extended adolescence, which is now threatening to envelop even those starting their 40s , and is surely a big part of the huge downturn in younger people’s mental health. It also has big potential repercussions for an already-blighted economy, not least when it comes to people’s ability to be as mobile as modern employers often demand. Over the past few weeks, housing has rightly moved into the political foreground. While the Conservatives squabble about their devotion to the green belt, Keir Starmer and his colleagues have been promising to restore the government’s binned targets for new homes, give first-time buyers priority on new houses built in their areas, and stop speculators based abroad from purchasing them. It has been good to hear him break one of politics’ most stupid taboos, and suggest that property prices need to fall in relation to people’s incomes. But a set of grimly familiar preferences and prejudices seem to sit under a lot of what he says, leaving millions of people unspoken for. When politicians talk about new housing, they usually mean the kind of developments that now ring most British towns and cities: three- or four-bedroom starter homes, with a car in the drive, and a slide and swing in the back garden. To state the obvious, there is nothing wrong with that: millions of us crave the certainty and security associated with home ownership, and the collective British mind tends to think that houses embody those things in a way that other kinds of homes do not. The archetypal swing voter, moreover, is likely to either own a house, or to want to – which only deepens Westminster’s attachment to an imagined utopia of cul-de-sacs and crescents, full of people happily mortgaged to the hilt. But where does that vision leave many of those people still living in the family home? What a lot of them need is housing that we never hear about: flats, suitable for single people, concentrated in and around towns and cities, and available for either reasonable prices – or, more urgently, genuinely affordable rents. An abundance of such places would not only help the young: it might also unblock a big chunk of the property market by attracting older couples and single people currently living in large dwellings, but prevented from moving by the unavailability of smaller properties. But who is building them?