Media Spotlight: Poorer Than Their Parents

22 August 2011 | By Natalie Thomas

BBC Radio 4, presented by Alvin Hall

The recent riots in London and Manchester painted a disturbing picture of the youth of today.

Many reasons have been given for the cause of the violence, from the widening gap between the rich and poor to boredom and gangsta rap. Some have also attributed the discontent among the young to the realisation that they do not have the opportunities their parents did.

The eccentric Alvin Hall, in his Radio 4 series Poorer Than Their Parents, has been exploring this issue and in his latest episode he turns his attention to property.

The average age of first-time buyers is creeping up, with many people in their 30s and 40s struggling to get a foot on the housing ladder, compared with many of their parents who bought their first home in their 20s.

Hall’s journey begins with him meeting with a father and son. The son is struggling to get on the housing ladder, while his dad has started to dabble in the buy-to-let market to fund his pension.

Much has been said about buy-to-let investors and how they are making it harder for first-time buyers by pricing them out of the market. But neither the son nor father is in a good position.

The son is reluctant to buy what he can afford, a one-bedroom flat, instead renting a three-bedroom house. By contrast, the father finds that properties he invested in just as the market began to crash have made little money.

Hall’s interviewing technique is more pussycat than tiger, but there is a brilliant bit of investigative journalism when he flags up the fact that former Labour deputy Prime Minister John Prescott failed in the promise he made seven years ago to build homes for £60,000 to help first-time buyers.

Prescott devoted much of his speech at the 2004 Labour Party Conference to the problem of young people being priced out of the housing market. At the time, he said the government would overcome this by embracing modern construction methods like building homes off-site and using materials more effectively.

Hall discovers that 10 developments got the go-ahead under the Design For Manufacture scheme, as it became known, but two did not materialise.

He meets Gillian Parker who bought her home, which was part of the scheme, for £210,000 in Milton Keynes.

Her construction cost was around £85,000, but as Shelter chief executive Campbell Robb points out in the show, the government might be able to build a home for £60,000, but that doesn’t mean the developer will sell at that price.

The programme paints a glum picture of the housing situation, with little hope of improvement ahead. Had it not been for Hall’s cheery manner many listeners may have lost interest and switched off halfway through the 30-minute show.

It would have been nice if Hall had made some comparisons between the youth of today and their parents in terms of what mortgages they could get.

The phrase ’it has always been hard to get a mortgage’ is often flung about, but Hall could have explored this notion by using examples of what percentage of their wage parents had to use to get one.

For those in the financial services industry the programme will not be an eye-opener, but Hall’s charismatic and entertaining style make it worth a listen.

Review by Natalie Thomas