Andy Sommerville, Director at Search Acumen, comments on the ONS Housing and Affordability in England and Wales 2017:
“These statistics on housing affordability show us that the UK housing crisis is truly a generational crisis.
“People in their twenties and thirties now have to earn twice as a much as their parents did to be able to afford to buy any property type in England. And, as house price growth has continually outstripped anaemic wage increases over the last two decades, home ownership has been thrown firmly out of reach for a whole generation.
“Worryingly, the solution to the crisis has always been to find more land to build more affordable homes. But the new homes being built in England and Wales are anything but affordable. In fact, newly-built homes were less affordable than existing dwellings almost every year over the last two decades.
“Clearly, we need to do more to find space to build truly affordable homes up and down the country. We’re buoyed to see the government’s concerted efforts to make information on UK land more transparent and open and we believe this will help developers find the space to build more homes that will drive down the affordability chasm our younger generation currently faces.”
