The failure to get on the property ladder used to be the modern-day bogeyman for young adults. It was used as a constant reminder for young adults to be good. Save money, stop eating avocados and drinking takeaway coffees so that they could someday climb the highly aspirational property ladder. God forbid you’re stuck renting for the rest of your life.

That being said, today is the ‘cost of rent day’ for everyone renting in London. Renters in London, up until today, have spent the first 152 days of the year earning nothing but their rent. And this number increases year on year. So, again, save as much as you can and buy.

But if this generation ever had hopes of getting on the property ladder, they were sorely misguided. The fear factor was once that the ladder was hard to get on. Nobody said it would disappear altogether. The myth that you could scrape together a deposit in your twenties, buy somewhere small, let it build up equity as prices rise and then trade up, that each rung funded the next, has been debunked. It was how your parents did it and their parents before them.

Nobody mentioned the possibility that the ladder would simply vanish or that you’d spend a third of the year’s wages waiting at the bottom for a rung that never appears. That model relied on two things: a supply of affordable houses and prices that reliably went up after they bought them. Neither can be taken for granted any more.

It’s unfair and rotten that governments for the last decade have poisoned the housebuilding market

The average first-time buyer is now in their mid thirties, compared to the mid-1990s when they were in their twenties. The average deposit is now above £60,000. And even after meeting that barrier to entry, there is no guarantee that the ladder will hold your weight. That your investment pays off. An estimated half a million properties in the UK are currently in negative equity, meaning homeowners owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. Last year, 15 per cent of Londoners sold their property for less than they bought it for. So after doing exactly what they have been told to do through the ages – save, sacrifice and buy – the market has instead punished them.

The system is broken. If your home is worth less than what you paid for it, you cannot sell without taking a loss, you cannot remortgage onto a better deal and you certainly cannot climb to the next rung. And that’s all before the stamp duty kicks in. You are not on a ladder. You are in a trap created by a supply shortage.

The government’s response has been to talk a big game and then firmly bury its head in the sand. Just over 200,000 new homes were built in England in the year to September 2025, well below what is needed to reach the government’s 1.5 million new homes promise. Planning permissions are falling too, down 15 per cent year on year. Housing starts plummeted to their lowest levels in over a decade. England has not built 300,000 homes in a single year since the late 1960s, when local authorities were doing more than 40 per cent of the building themselves.

So why aren’t we building? There certainly isn’t a shortage of reasons: land costs, labour shortages, a planning system designed in the age of the telegram. But one of the least understood and most damaging is Section 106.

Through Section 106 agreements, councils can attach punitive obligations to planning permission. Simple enough in theory and something that, when devised, was likely seen as a masterstroke in guaranteeing affordable housing in this country (i.e. by forcing developers to pay for it). Build a proportion of affordable housing or pay up.

In practice, Adam Smith Institute research shows it has become a hidden tax on housebuilding that slows development and increases the cost of housebuilding. Between 2020 and 2025, Section 106 accounted for over half of all affordable housing completions in England. By accident, it became the backbone of affordable housing delivery. A backbone that is now buckling.

However, the moment the market weakens, the whole thing seizes up. London needs roughly 43,000 affordable homes a year. In 2023/24, just seven affordable housing starts in the capital were tied to Section 106. Seven.

It’s unfair and rotten that governments for the last decade have poisoned the housebuilding market, forcing young people to buy into a system that fundamentally doesn’t work. It is not because we have squandered our money or failed to see the value in frugality. The beaten track that we were trained to walk on has been muddled by policies that make it harder to build homes and guarantee positive equity. Until the policies that make housebuilding too expensive and too slow are reformed, the property ladder will never exist in the same capacity it once did for our parents.