For millennials like me, the prospect of owning a home is a pipe dream. Soaring rental costs and crippling bills make saving for a deposit impossible. The reality is that, as a friend said to me recently, our best chance of getting a foot on the housing ladder is when a home-owning family member pops their clogs. We’re far from alone. Yet the Tory leadership contenders have nothing to offer those who hope one day to buy a house.

Perhaps it’s not much of a surprise that this is an issue the Tories are ignoring: Boris Johnson’s government was elected, in part, on a manifesto pledge to build 300,000 new houses – something former housing secretary Michael Gove ruled out while he was still in post. The country is facing a housing crisis – but the Tory leadership candidates have yet to speak with any real urgency about it. Rishi Sunak has pledged to ‘do whatever it takes to build housing that is affordable and plentiful’, but only after previously saying he would tighten up green belt building laws, at a time when Britain is crying out for a surge in affordable housing. And Liz Truss – who once championed building on the green belt – has pledged to scrap housing targets in favour of ‘simplifying regulations’.

The Conservatives have presided over a near-50 per cent rise in the average house price since they came to power. While this may be good news for the party’s traditional base, the longer younger voters are kept off the property ladder, the harder it’ll be for the Tories to win them over in years to come. As my colleague James Forsyth wrote in the Times earlier this year, the Conservative party ‘cannot expect people without capital to be capitalists’.

Figures published last month by the Office for National Statistics show that in between 2020 and 2021, the average-priced home in England sold for 8.7 times the average salary: the worst affordability ratio since the ONS started measuring it in 1999. The eight-times-earnings level has only been breached twice in the past 120 years: just before the 2008 financial crash, and at the beginning of the 20th century. The average age of a first-time buyer is now 34. In the 1990s, it was 29.

All of this has a knock-on effect. It’s no wonder birth rates are in decline: living in a rental property with no idea if your landlord will terminate your contract or raise the rent to incredible levels is a perilous position to be in when deciding whether to start a family. A drop in the number of babies born is a further blow to the Conservative party, which traditionally values family, a sense of community and the collection of assets: all of which are very difficult when you’re forced to live a nomadic lifestyle by rising rents and precarious housing. A quarter of millennials have moved house ten or more times since leaving home; a further quarter expect to move another five times before finding their permanent residence. It’s hard to build a life in such instability. Meanwhile, the over-50s are likely to have lived in fewer than five houses in their lifetime.

One young Tory member likened the party’s current strategy – of consistently prioritising the interests of older homeowners – to eating the seed corn from which it needs to grow its future voters. He said:

‘While the party will be able to chalk up electoral victories in the short term by subsidising its client voters, its policies are leading towards a less prosperous, less equal, less conservative society that will be demographically less likely to vote Tory in the future.’ 

He added:

‘The party needs to ask itself what the whole point of being in government is, beyond power for its own sake.’

I’ve been a renter for ten years. I’ve never missed a payment, despite paying a higher sum per month than the mortgages of many people I know. I can afford a mortgage, but the deposit is painfully out of reach. Of the few peers of mine who have managed to buy, I don’t know a single one who has done it without a significant helping hand from their parents.

The Conservative party has long been the political home of homeowners. But unless it can get to grips with the housing crisis and the obstacles to ownership faced by younger voters, it will find itself surrounded by a nation of renters unlikely to turn the country blue.<//>