A colleague tells me that when she was about 30, back in the Nineties, she went on a first date with a man of roughly her age. When she asked him where he lived, he replied he still lived at home with his mother, and she gave him a quizzical look.
‘Oh,’ he said, a little crestfallen. ‘Is that weird?’
Though she was too polite to say so at the time, she tells me that, yes, she did think it a bit weird — and back in those days, I suppose she had a point. It really was somewhat unusual for a man of 30 not to have flown the family nest.
How things have changed.
Underlining this fact, an analysis this week of figures from the Office for National Statistics finds that in the mid-1990s, fewer than one in five of those aged between 20 and 34 lived with their parents. By 2013, that was up to more than a quarter — while today, one in three males in the age bracket is still ensconced with mum and dad.
That’s a whopping 2.2 million of the blighters.
As regular readers will know, I write with some feeling, since the youngest of our four sons remains in apparently permanent residence, though he’ll reach the ripe old age of 31 next month. Oh, well, at least there’s a grain of comfort — for both him and us — in knowing that we’re very far from alone.
Interestingly, the ONS figures show that the proportion of young women in the same position is significantly lower. Today it stands at less than one in four (though at 22 per cent or 1.4 million this, too, has been steadily rising for years).
We can all take a fair guess at why women seem to find it easier to move into shared flats or set up on their own. But the fundamental differences between the sexes, which in my experience go well beyond the merely physical and into the realms of the psychological, are a column for another day.
My purpose today is to ask why the young of both sexes linger in their parents’ homes for so much longer than we did in my day, and of course we don’t have to look far for the answer.
The fact is that rents, mortgages and deposits — particularly in the South East, where demand is highest, but all over the country too — have become prohibitively expensive for huge numbers of our sons’ generation, and especially those saddled with student debt.
When I first became a homeowner, buying a one-bedroom flat shortly after our marriage in 1980, the median property price in this country was roughly three times the median wage. Today that ratio is about eight to one.
True, mortgage rates were much higher then than they are now. Indeed, if I remember rightly, there was a brief time when we had to struggle on our combined salaries to pay something like 15 per cent a year. We were practically in despair.
But though I’m lousy at maths, even I can see that 15 per cent of a modest sum can be a great deal cheaper than the 5 per cent many have to pay now on a massive amount more.
These days, even so-called ‘affordable housing’ — defined by the Government as an offer to rent or buy for at least 20 per cent below local market values — is well beyond the means of great swathes of those such as my son, who have neither well-paid jobs nor indulgent parents with money to spare for a deposit or help with the rent.
All right, he could probably afford to rent a room somewhere seriously grotty, on his pay as a trainee teacher. But it’s little wonder that he prefers to save up for somewhere nicer.
In his case, that’s even though this means suffering the pain and indignity of living with his wretched pensioner parents, who keep asking monstrously irritating and intrusive questions, such as: ‘How was your day?’ or ‘Are you likely to be home for supper?’
Mind you, living at home does have certain compensations for the lad. Call me an idiot, and say that I’m killing him with kindness, but I simply can’t bring myself to charge rent to my own beloved flesh and blood, while I’m still paid much more than he is, though I work only one day a week.
He also enjoys not only his mother’s home cooking but the freedom of the fridge, when he’s feeling peckish between meals. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if he thinks it miraculously restocks itself, after he’s hoovered up its contents with his voracious appetite.
His washing and ironing tend to get done for him, too, perhaps by those same fairies who keep the house and garden looking nice for the three of us who live there — though they look to me remarkably like his old mum and dad.
Let’s face it, however, it’s not much fun for a self-respecting 30-year-old, fast approaching 31, to share a home with pensioner parents who prefer costume dramas to his beloved Match Of The Day and pull rank on him over the remote control.
Meanwhile, he’s extremely reluctant to bring his friends home, because of the risk that they’ll bump into his boring, embarrassing dad.
But then it’s not the happiest arrangement for us, either, or for the legions of other parents in our position. Heaven knows, we’ll probably miss him like anything when he’s gone, because he can be great fun to have around. But for his sake, and ours, we long for him to have a fully independent life, among friends of his own age.
Indeed, commentators often speak of the acute housing shortage as a crisis that mostly affects the young (the age-bracket, as cynical politicians will be aware, who are least likely to vote). In fact, the issue matters hugely to all parents and grandparents who care about the happiness of their children and grandchildren.
Yet even the most ambitious of the policies put forward by the main parties come nowhere near the scale of action needed to bring rents and house prices down.
That would entail balancing the supply of housing and local demand, and I can see only two ways of achieving this.
One is to make a bonfire of time-consuming restrictions on housebuilding, scrap crippling taxes that penalise downsizing and tear up burdensome regulations — such as the proposed ban on no-fault evictions — that drive many landlords out of the rental market and dissuade others from entering it.
The other is to reduce the enormous pressure of demand. Short of bringing down the average lifespan, or forcing unhappy couples to stick together, this can only mean radically cutting the mass immigration that added almost 700,000 to our population in the year to last June alone.
As for why Tory defector Natalie Elphicke apparently believes Labour is the party most likely to bring the numbers down, I can only believe she’s either incredibly stupid or plain barking mad.
Indeed, if my sons’ generation think they’ve got problems today, they should wait and see what’s in store for them if the general election goes the same way as last week’s locals.
But, oh dear. I fear I’m expressing exactly the sort of opinion that makes our youngest so reluctant to bring his friends home.
Which reminds me. The colleague who thought her date’s living arrangements a bit weird, all those years ago, assures me that it wasn’t because he lived with his mum that her first outing with him also turned out to be her last. But I can’t help feeling it didn’t help!
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Tom Utley
