Picture the classic British housing ladder. Now imagine it coated in grease and stretched another rung higher each year. Barclays' latest mortgage snapshot, covering completions from late May to late June this year, captures the resulting comedy of errors with merciless clarity.
Average prices for those moving up stand a eye-watering 59.5 per cent above what first-time buyers are paying. That gap has widened by another 1.2 per cent in just 12 months. Deposits for movers have meanwhile tumbled 24.8 per cent year on year, pushing more of them to borrow at loan-to-value ratios above 75 per cent. The share doing so has climbed from 18.2 per cent to 22.1 per cent. In plain English: people are stretching themselves thinner to climb the same ladder their parents once strolled up.
The family safety net tightens
Into this mess step mum, dad, grandparents and the occasional generous aunt. More than one in five second-step buyers, 22 per cent of them, openly admit they expect to need family help for their next purchase. Another 34 per cent have simply concluded that moving home has become too expensive altogether. These are not abstract percentages. They are exhausted couples staring at estate agent particulars and realising the bank of mum and dad is no longer optional.
This is what the family looks like in practice: the basic unit of society quietly doing the heavy lifting that endless housing schemes and subsidies never quite manage. While politicians tinker with stamp duty tweaks and demand-side gimmicks, parents and grandparents are transferring wealth, offering deposits, and providing the intergenerational glue that keeps the market from seizing up entirely.
Affordability has been gradually improving as pay growth outpaces house prices and rates come down from their peak, but the outlook from here is unusually uncertain.
So says Lee Chiswell, head of mortgages at Barclays, in the report published on 24 July. He notes the Bank of England sitting at 3.75 per cent with a split committee and "elevated policy uncertainty" making buyers cautious. Fair enough. Yet the deeper story sits between the lines: demand has paused rather than vanished, and when the fog clears, it is family resources, not fresh Whitehall initiatives, that will likely provide the solid base.
Solo buyers made up 36.9 per cent of Barclays' mortgage completions in June, a trend that speaks to younger cohorts going it alone more than previous generations. Yet even here the data hints at hidden parental gifts propping up the solo act. The message is consistent. When the state steps back, or at least stops pretending it can solve every affordability riddle, families fill the gap with practical, private initiative.
