Shropshire Star comment: Mission impossible for first-time home buyers

It must be like mission impossible, with added heartbreak.

Just when the dream seems in reach, at a stretch, and in circumstances in which they will have to watch every penny, something happens, like a rise in house prices, which makes it distant again.

Now the misery of dashed hope and receding dreams is spreading. Those young adults on what are described as middle incomes - between £22,200 and £30,600 after tax - are seeing their chances of home ownership collapsing.

According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, in 1995/96, 65 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds on middle incomes owned their own homes. Twenty years later, the equivalent figure was 27 per cent.

It says the reason is that house prices have risen around seven times faster in real terms than the incomes of young adults over the last two decades.

Crash

That is perhaps something to bear in mind next time there is a news item reporting in gloomy tones that house prices are "depressed" or "stagnating." In any normal operation of market forces, the lack of people able to afford to buy would lead to a crash in house prices, to a level that got the market moving again.

But the system is not working.

House prices have gone up beyond the reach of many ordinary people and have never come down again to levels which would give them a chance. They are effectively dispossessed, although of course they never had the opportunity of possession in the first place.

Sellers can and do come down a little to make a sale, but are themselves in a vice. Having splashed out on a house, they cannot afford to lose a fortune when it comes to putting it on the market.

Rather than making a really big cut in price, they may as well hang on to it and hope that either the market will have another upturn, or that somebody will come along who has a bit of money and is prepared to pay what they are asking.

And as quite often they do, the housing market continues to go on "uncorrected."

Mass home ownership was a great 1980s dream by Margaret Thatcher. Britons who had previously been quite happy to rent embraced the opportunity and got on the housing ladder.

Thirty years on, all the choices which were laid at the feet of a previous generation are being snatched away.