Aspen Gardens estate in Hammersmith. habeebee/Flickr. Some rights reserved.In 1980 the Thatcher government famously gave council tenants the right to buy their homes. This was supposed to usher in the brave new world of a ‘property owning democracy’. Less than forty years later, though, what we have is a whole generation of people from all walks of life who haven’t a prayer of being able to own their own home. ‘Generation Rent’, that’s what they’ve been called.
Today we have a whole generation of people without a prayer of being able to own their own home.
And for far too many of them, what they are renting in an unregulated private market is exorbitantly expensive accommodation. Worse, they can be kicked out of it any time the landlord feels so inclined. What a disastrous state of affairs. Where did it all go so horribly wrong? The reasons, we are told, are fiendishly complicated. But this is not true. They are in fact incredibly simple.
