Across a wide range of metrics, life in Britain has improved markedly in recent decades.
Young people benefit from a wide range of products and services that have become much more affordable or, in some cases, simply did not exist in the recent past. Medicine has improved with dramatic effects. In 1966, the number of deaths of under-18s was 5,541. In 1976, it was 4,154, in 1986 it was 2,884 and just 1,954 in 1996. That’s a lot of young adults who are alive today because of the advantages that weren’t available to older generations. With the number having fallen further to 1,157 in 2016, this most important of aspects continues to improve. Few young adults in the 1970s or 1980s had access to mobile telephones or internet access, and the world wide web and smart phones hadn’t been invented.
Ultimately, young people today enjoy many advantages that older generations never had at their age. Nonetheless, the weight of some policy failures is carried more by the young than by older people, and more by the young of today than in the past. In no area of policy is this discrepancy more acute than housing. This situation is deeply unfair and this report demonstrates how, why, and what to do about it.
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