You and Yours - 29/06/2010

Call You & Yours with Julian Worricker. Getting onto the property ladder is getting tougher. The number of first time buyers is dropping by the month. It will be a decade or more until we have paid back what we owe as a nation and the banks and building societies are unlikely to return to lending with quite the abandon of recent years. It's reckoned we need to be building a quarter of a million homes a year to meet the likely demand in 2030. This year new builds are likely to be around the 100,000 mark- the lowest number of new homes since 1923. Does this mean that home owning will become a luxury rather than commonplace in future, or at the very least difficult to achieve? If so, is this a bad thing? Elsewhere in Europe renting is more commonplace and does not carry the stigma that it does in this country. Do we need to develop a more positive attitude to renting? Will the next generation facing student loan repayments, less generous pension provision and more expensive energy bills have a choice?