Home ownership plunges to the LOWEST level in 30 years as we reveal one in five Brits rent
One in five households in England are choosing to rent privately due to the soaring price of buying a house
HOME ownership has plunged to the lowest levels since the days of Margaret Thatcher in the mid-1980s, official figures revealed yesterday.
Just 63 per cent of Brits own a home, while the number of people forced to rent has soared by a million since 2010.
A 30-year high of 4.5million households now rent privately - making up one in five households in England.
But the rate is much higher among younger age groups.
And with private renters spending more than a third of their income on rent, the problem is a massive blow to Theresa May’s promise to help thousands of first-time buyers on to the property ladder.
The latest housing figures were part of a triple whammy of bad news for the Government.
A House of Lords inquiry said the housing crisis in England was dealing “a crushing financial and emotional burden for many families”.
And research by the New Economics Foundation warned that just one in five new-builds are classed affordable.
The think tank blamed the “fire sale” of publicly-owned land and said some developments are made up entirely of luxury homes.
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Figures also revealed that councils across England have been forced to hand more than £800million from right-to-buy sales back to the Treasury. This is enough to build 12,500 new affordable homes, Labour analysis found.
Shadow housing minister John Healey blasted: “The number of people stuck in an insecure and increasingly expensive private rented sector has grown dramatically over the last seven years.
“Since 2010, the number of households renting privately has ballooned by over a million.
“After seven years of failure on housing, not only has home ownership fallen, but affordable housebuilding has hit a 24-year low and rough sleeping has more than doubled.
“Conservative ministers are out of ideas and have no long-term plan to fix the cost of the housing crisis.”
But a government spokesman blamed the falling trend in homeownership on the last Labour government.
“This Conservative Government has halted the decline in home-ownership that began under Labour, when home-buying plummeted by 40 per cent and house-building fell to its lowest peacetime level since the 1920s,” the spokesman said.
“New house-building starts and the number of first-time buyers are now at the highest level for almost a decade.
“But we know that there is more to do to fix this country’s broken housing market and to make Britain a country that truly works for everyone.”