The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has reiterated calls for stamp duty receipts to be devolved to London to fund much-needed affordable homes, as new figures reveal an alarming rise in housing inequality between older and younger Londoners.
New data released by City Hall shows that home ownership rates among younger Londoners have fallen dramatically since the 1990s, and a lack of social housing means only one-fifth of London households now live in social homes.
The 2018 ‘Housing in London’ report shows how the Right to Buy scheme has seen more than 300,000 homes sold by councils in London since it was introduced in 1980, with just one in five having been replaced. As a result, social housing has gone from being the capital’s largest housing tenure in the 1980s to the lowest in 2017, accounting for just 21 per cent of London’s households. It has also meant the numbers of private rented households with children have more than doubled in a decade, from 140,000 in 2007 to 320,000 in 2017.
London’s overall home ownership rate has also fallen in recent decades – but the data shows stark differences in the trends for different age groups. In 1990, around half of London households headed by a 25-34 year old owned their own home, with around half of the households headed by someone over 65 owning too. But in less than 30 years this story has changed dramatically – the proportion of young people owning their own home has fallen to around a quarter, whilst amongst the over-65s the opposite has been the case, with the proportion having risen to almost three-quarters.
