Money Matters Festival: The Dream of Homeownership is Broken with Vicky Spratt
🏠 Vicky Spratt is a journalist and author of Tenants. Her 2016 campaign ‘Make Renting Fair’ led to letting fees in England and Wales being banned. In this talk, Vicky explains why the British dream of homeownership has faded and the social consequences. But she’s also fighting for radical steps to give everyone the chance of ownership.
Interviewed by Carmel Dickinson who is managing our partnerships at Vestpod, passionate about financial feminism and the founder of Worthy.
*This is the recording of Money Matters Festival held on Oct 9th, 2022 at The NED in London.*
The housing system is broken
There is a gender housing gap. There's a brilliant independent campaigning organisation called the Women's Budget Group. A couple of years ago, they looked at data across the country of whether it was affordable for women to buy or rent homes. What they found is that there is nowhere in this country where it is affordable for a woman on her own, on an average income, to buy or rent.
In the same way that we have a gender pay gap, we have a gender housing gap. But of course, the two are linked because on average, women earn less than men, so it's more difficult to save, and women more likely to have caring responsibilities. This has created a situation where access to housing is really unequal.
If you have a mortgage right now, and you're coming to the end of a fixed rate, rates have gone to 6%. Of course, men are impacted by this too, but women will especially feel the burn.
It’s not just tenants, but landlords are really worried too, because many of them are in situations where they actually don't have that much gear in their budgets, so they're passing on costs to their tenants. Some people are seeing 30 or 40% rent hikes, but people's wages aren't going up at the same rate.
House prices have also been going up and up in recent years, and while we talk a lot about the cost of living crisis and focusing quite rightly on the pinch points like energy bills and your food shop, but housing costs are out of control as well.
Times are hard, but don’t lose hope
“The Women’s Budget Group found there is nowhere in the UK for a woman on an average income to buy a home" - Carmel Dickinson
There is always something you can do in your community or someone you can help, so don’t lose hope and lean into others for help and vice versa.
If you're a renter and your landlord is trying to put your rent up, you can negotiate and push back. You don't just have to accept it. The housing charity Shelter has great resources and template letters on their website that you can look into.
Mortgages are far more complicated, but it’s advisable to speak to a mortgage broker ASAP. Rates will probably go a bit higher and what's going to happen with house prices is also not necessarily straightforward, so get ahead of it and speak to an expert.
It’s also important that we open up the conversation about where our money has come from and financial privilege, so that our friends and people around us don’t end up having a sense of misplaced shame.
Write to your MP - this point is so obvious that it almost gets forgotten. Somebody in that office reads all of them and everything gets responded to. Writing to your MP makes a difference because if an issue comes up enough, they will realise that it's hurting their constituents, and they will raise it.
Vicky maintains that now is the time to start getting political and actually doing something — what we’ve seen in recent weeks is that people do challenge their Prime Minister if they think they're going to lose their seats.
“We’re living through a game-changing moment but I remain incredibly hopeful. As a journalist, I meet people who are taking the situation into their own hands. There’s always something you can do in your community, or someone you can help” - Vicky Spratt