In Britain, young people are expected to become independent in their 20s. Yet the UK’s economic model increasingly denies them the means to do so. Analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), commissioned partly for the BBC, finds that the proportion of 25-year-olds living with their parents has risen from 25% in the 1990s to 42% today. The research says “co-residence” among those in their 20s and 30s has increased by more than a third over two decades. The rate in Britain remains well below Italy and Spain, where leaving home is frequently more about finding a partner than turning 18, going to university or starting work. But that is scant comfort: Britain appears to be slowly drifting towards a southern European experience without the family culture that makes this feel normal.
Young Britons struggle to move out of “the hotel of mum and dad” for obvious reasons. Employment for those aged 25 has fallen for both women and men. Real earnings have barely progressed beyond the level reached around two decades ago. Hardly a surprise, then, that home ownership at 25 has dropped from 43% in the mid-1980s to 15% today. As the IFS notes, the changing age, educational, ethnic or migrant composition of the population might have been expected to reduce rates of co-residence. Instead, the “declining affordability of housing” has driven them up. In short, young adults are not just opting for a cheaper domestic arrangement to save money. They are submitting to it because they have less control over their lives as the options narrow for housing and work.
