Want to live with your parents forever? Then vote Tory

House prices are now so high that the average earner needs a mortgage of seven times their salary to buy a house. In London, the ratio is even larger at nine times the average salary. And if you’re lucky enough to have a deposit big enough to secure a mortgage, your payments will eat up half your income.

The result is that millions of people are forced to live with mum and dad. It is a trend that has been going on for so long that it now shows up in the national census – the number of families in England and Wales with adult children living with their parents rose 13.6% between the 2011 and 2021 censuses, to nearly 3.8 million.

The simple fact behind those figures is that the UK has not built anywhere near enough houses for decades.

And yet the property porn continues with the Daily Express promising just this week that a house price boom is on the way. As if that is anything but a disaster.

The government has poured petrol on the flames by subsidising first-time buyers’ mortgages. It also admits that it is unlikely to end “no fault” evictions by private landlords by the time of the general election, meaning renters have virtually no protection from being evicted just so their landlords can charge someone else more for the same flat.

And all this while Tory councils are desperately rushing to cut their planned housebuilding ahead of an election, in order to satisfy the Nimby vote and store up trouble for any post-election building boom that Labour has planned.

It all makes for a perfect storm in housing: Ever-rising prices, fewer homeowners and a rigged rental market.

This would all be bad enough if it was just about the cost of getting a roof over your head, but it isn’t.

Very highly qualified people are not moving to parts of the country where they are needed and productivity is being badly damaged as a result. The economy is increasingly dependent on property wealth, tying up capital and preventing entrepreneurial investment.

Social mobility will die; why bother trying to better yourself if you will only end up living at home whatever you do? People will move in increasing numbers to the few places they can afford to live, and take whatever jobs they can when they get there, rather than the ones they are trained to do.

Emigration will balloon as the young decide to get out while the going is good, taking their skills and taxes with them.

The solution is to build so many homes that property prices fall or at least fail to keep up with the rise in average earnings, for decades.

And yet the general election will be besmirched by rampant Nimbyism, with lies that immigration is to blame, that there is no room for new houses, that plans are afoot to concrete over the whole country and even that rising home prices are good news.

Young people need to vote, in very large numbers, for any party that will promise to build huge numbers of new, well-insulated, environmentally friendly homes. If any party is brave enough to speak the truth, that is.

Their future and ours depends on it. Everything else is just snake oil.