Selfish Britain

IveSeenTheLight

jimibaboza wrote: »

I really cannot understand why people are comparing the situation now with the one in yesteryear. The two are completely different.

To all those people who worked hard to buy a house in 196whatever. Would you have still be able to get one if some rich guy came in and offered 500 pounds more every time you put an offer in? Or if some chancers who were able to get easy credit were hovering up all of the houses so they could rent them all out, driving up prices. What if every newspaper article and wireless program was screaming about renting being a fantastic source of income and a replacement for your pension?

I suspect that if the above had happened back in the day then the people of the time would have just as much trouble buying a house as the youth of today.

There probably wouldn't have been the BTL rental market place there is today if social housing hadn't been sold off.

Out of interest, does anyong have the graph showing owner occupancy back then compared to now?

Cheap credit helped people to become owners more than investors in the private rental market.

olly300

IveSeenTheLight wrote: »

Owning a car is an expensive (sometimes essential) luxury and it is a life choice whether you have one or not.

Not having a car releases quite a large monthly budget in my opinion that can be ustilised elsewhere

Depends where you live and work.

Outside cities the UK has a poor and expensive public transport system.

If you live and work in London you don't need a car to get around. Yet move a few miles out to Surrey or Kent, and you will have a lot of difficultly getting around without one. Some of my friends' have found this out to their cost.

olly300

IveSeenTheLight wrote: »

Another anecdote from the 70's.
My F-I-L back then developed a problem with his car and hard to work through the night in the rain to resolve so that he could get to work in the morning.

Who would do that nowadays? (hypothetically given that cars nowadays are computerised and the options for repair are limited)

Actually before virtually all cars on the road became computerised I caught 2 different male neighbours doing that. They looked very embarrassed being caught fixing their car by me. Even more so when they had later called a friend around to help. (They didn't realise I was impressed by their attempts to fix it.)

Also I prefer to have someone with an older car who has broken down in front of me on the road. Why? Because they know enough to get it pushed out of the way and to fix it on the road side. This means the traffic jam they cause will last about 15 minutes there as when a new car breaks down the traffic jam caused lasts a couple of hours.

ash28

IveSeenTheLight wrote: »

There probably wouldn't have been the BTL rental market place there is today if social housing hadn't been sold off.

Out of interest, does anyong have the graph showing owner occupancy back then compared to now?

Cheap credit helped people to become owners more than investors in the private rental market.

No but here is an extract from a Times article

The figures break the pattern of steadily rising levels of home ownership. In 1953, the proportion of owner-occupiers in England was 32 per cent. This rose to 43 per cent in 1961, 51 per cent in 1971 and peaked at 75 per cent in 1981, or 9.9 million households. Although the proportion of homeowners fell, the actual numbers continued to rise until 2005.

So about half of households were owner occupiers in 1971. -9.6 million owner occupiers, 3.7 million in private rented and 5.8 million in local authority housing.

In 2007 18.5 million owner occupiers - 3.3 million in private rented, 2.2 million in housing association and 2.5 million in local authority housing.

The number of households increased from 19.2 million in 1971 to to 26.6 million in 2007.

figures from here
http://www.communities.gov.uk/housing/housingresearch/housingstatistics/housingstatisticsby/stockincludingvacants/livetables/

The overall number renting appears to have stayed about the same but obviously a much lower percentage. In 2007 there were nearly as many owner occupiers as there were total households in 1971.

TBH as young person during the 1970s - owning a house was pretty much out of the question for me and my contemporaries - most people I knew who got married went into rented for a number of years, then looked at buying - we rented for 7 years. Getting a rented place was hard enough, there was a lot of competition and rentals weren't that easy to come by. Buying a property wasn't at the front of most young people's minds.

olly300

ash28 wrote: »

TBH as young person during the 1970s - owning a house was pretty much out of the question for me and my contemporaries - most people I knew who got married went into rented for a number of years, then looked at buying - we rented for 7 years. Getting a rented place was hard enough, there was a lot of competition and rentals weren't that easy to come by. Buying a property wasn't at the front of most young people's minds.

Rental rules where different then. It was difficult to get tenants out. Both my parents (separately) brought large houses with a sitting tenant.

Luckily for my parents the British intolerance to children is not a new thing.

IveSeenTheLight

olly300 wrote: »

Depends where you live and work.

Outside cities the UK has a poor and expensive public transport system.

If you live and work in London you don't need a car to get around. Yet move a few miles out to Surrey or Kent, and you will have a lot of difficultly getting around without one. Some of my friends' have found this out to their cost.

My wifes grandmother worked split shifts on the railway.
She used to walk (not catch a bus) the 2.5 miles there, back at end of shift 1, back to work for shift 2 and then back home again.

Who would do that nowadays? Walk 10 miles each day to go to work and back

IveSeenTheLight

ash28 wrote: »

No but here is an extract from a Times article

So about half of households were owner occupiers in 1971. -9.6 million owner occupiers, 3.7 million in private rented and 5.8 million in local authority housing.

In 2007 18.5 million owner occupiers - 3.3 million in private rented, 2.2 million in housing association and 2.5 million in local authority housing.

The number of households increased from 19.2 million in 1971 to to 26.6 million in 2007.

figures from here
http://www.communities.gov.uk/housing/housingresearch/housingstatistics/housingstatisticsby/stockincludingvacants/livetables/

The overall number renting appears to have stayed about the same but obviously a much lower percentage. In 2007 there were nearly as many owner occupiers as there were total households in 1971.

TBH as young person during the 1970s - owning a house was pretty much out of the question for me and my contemporaries - most people I knew who got married went into rented for a number of years, then looked at buying - we rented for 7 years. Getting a rented place was hard enough, there was a lot of competition and rentals weren't that easy to come by. Buying a property wasn't at the front of most young people's minds.

Thanks, backed up very nicely with facts that BTL is not the problem as it is perceived by some.
As you point out the number of rented properties is less than previous years. The number of BTL bought was less than social housing was sold off.

That said, I can foresee that private rental will continue to increase to the detriment now of owner occupiers.

morag1202

IveSeenTheLight wrote: »

It would be interesting to know more on this situation.
Did she have a lot of savings?

Just under 35 years ago (so circa 76), my F-I L was married had saved for years with the same building society and had a sizeable deposit (I think 20%) and essentially had to threaten to withdraw his money from the society before he received approval for a mortgage.

This is a notable difference both in the number of years after and he had double the deposit of your unmarried mother.

There are always exceptions to the rule and your mother certainly appears to fit into that category.

No offence, but I wonder if there are other factors which affected your mothers acceptance for a mortgage in 1968

lostinrates wrote: »

....but was at parties at least twice a week. My parents met at a party, and now think they both must have been drunk.:D

I was conceived after a press party on the last night of a Labour Party Conference in the mid 50's :rotfl:

ISTL She had me in her early 20's and refused to marry. We lived with her parents and she resumed working as a journalist until she realised she'd never be able to make a home for me with that career. She went to University, graduating in 1962 at which point we set up home together in a Housing Association flat (rent 35 shillings a month plus council tax/water rates of also 35 shillings a month).

She began by teaching part time and doing a PhD part time. She got her first full time teaching job in 1967 and started actively to house hunt. She had been saving regularly with the Woolwich for 5 years, £1 a week for the first 4 years then at £20 a month. When she'd saved £500 she had an interview with the BS manager and had a reference from her bank and was told they would lend her up to 3 times her gross wage without a guarantor. She chose to borrow less.

I don't think she was the exception to the rule. In those days mortgages were rationed depending on the total savings deposited and if the BS had funds they lent. It did not depend on individuals savings although saving regularly was needed to get you to the head of the queue. I suspect there may have been a greater demand for mortgages with fewer people saving in 1976 (a time of boom) than in 1968.

We bought in 1979 and had to wait 2 years until we got to the top of the Halifax's queue

A._Badger

blueboy43 wrote: »

There were thousands more pubs in 1970 than there are now.

Pubs for the wealthy ? Don't think so.

That's a perfect example of what I keep referring to. A statistic without any knowledge of the reference points.

Yes, there were pubs. They sold beer, cigarettes and crisps. The ladies got Babycham, sweet sherry or shandy.

In fact pubs weren't even really considered 'young person's territory'. Pubbing was much more a middle aged thing, until the marketing robots got hold of our old boozers, gave them silly names, and turned them into kindergartens, back in the 1990s.

There were no takeaways save a few Wimpy bars, fish and chip emporia and the odd Chinese or Indian takeaway. The only 'nightclubs' were either dives frequented by the Krays and their ilk, or West End palaces, enjoyed by dissolute aristocrats. Restaurants were for bank managers and above.

The amount routinely spent on entertainment by the average 20-something in the 1970s and before probably ran to a few beers at a few shillings a pint and cod and chips once a week.

There is simply no comparison between the levels of discretionary sending in the so-called 'entertainment industry' today by quite ordinary youngsters and that which took place in the past.

Why else do you think our town centres are no-go areas on Saturday nights for so many? Why do you think it wasn't like that in the past? Those 'yoof' pubs and clubs simply weren't there before, because there was no business to be had.