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Digested week: claims of Carrie’s crimes against humanity are sexist rot | John Crace
The government has run out of ideas on Brexit, it’s demob happy on Covid rules, and the PM’s wife is under fire
The Location, Location, Location presenter Kirstie Allsopp has some advice for young people wanting to buy their first home. Think twice about going to university and racking up student debt. Move back in with your parents for three years if you can. Stop going to the gym, watching Netflix, buying coffee from Starbucks and taking a couple of easyJet flights abroad each year. And be prepared to move to a cheaper part of the country if necessary. For someone who has made a living out of telling people how to get the best value for money out of their property, Allsopp’s maths is a little suspect. Assuming you are paying your parents no rent, you are probably saving yourself about £7,000 a year. Given that the average deposit, according to Halifax, is £59,000, you are going to have to stay with your parents for eight and a half years – assuming house prices don’t rise during that period. And if staying with your parents isn’t an option, it will take you 37 years to save for a deposit if you’re relying on cutting out coffee, the gym, streaming TV and overseas holidays. Nor does Allsopp seem to have thought through how moving to a cheaper part of the country might work if your job is in the south-east. Then there is the knock-on effect. If young people from London all move to the north to find affordable housing, where are those living in the north supposed to buy? There will always be someone who loses out. Though not Kirstie. She walked to work, went without a foreign holiday or two and soon had cash spare to buy her own house. That was in 1981, when the average house price was £51,000. And she was helped out by her parents.
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