History Will Not Judge the Boomers Kindly

Every generation suspects the next one has become soft. Usually the evidence involves music, trousers or an unfamiliar way of holding a telephone. The baby boomers have added something more ambitious: the suspicion that younger people lack financial discipline because they cannot afford houses the older generation would struggle to buy on its own advice.

The resulting conversation is rarely improved by arithmetic. A young person explains the relationship between their salary and local property prices. Someone who bought before either number became alarming recommends making sandwiches. The sandwiches are perfectly sensible. Their proposed role in financing a two-bedroom flat is less clear.

This is the problem with turning a fortunate historical position into a personal philosophy. Eventually, somebody asks whether the philosophy still works at current prices.

A ladder with excellent resale value

The conventional account of prosperity is built around work, thrift and patience. People did work difficult jobs, raise families on tight budgets and endure recessions. Nobody standing in a freezing kitchen in 1978 thought, “One day, this will look terrific on a graph.”

But personal effort and historical advantage can coexist. In research published in 2016, the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that 40% of people born in the early 1980s owned their homes at thirty, compared with at least 55% of each of the four preceding decade-of-birth groups. The comparison is at the same age. It cannot be dismissed by observing that older people have had longer to save.

That does not establish that every older homeowner had an easy life. It establishes that access to ownership changed. A person can work hard for something that later becomes much harder to obtain. Acknowledging this does not confiscate their achievement.

If your home becomes considerably more valuable without acquiring an extra bedroom, somebody else must now pay more for the same bedroom. The market has not discovered that the bathroom became more deserving. Yet appreciation is often discussed as though it were a reward for character. The owner waited, behaved responsibly and occasionally replaced the boiler. The house responded by becoming wealthier than several people with postgraduate qualifications.

The inconvenience of building somewhere

There is a respectable argument for protecting places from bad development. Infrastructure matters. A planning system ought to consider more than whether a developer has brought an optimistic drawing of a tree.

But scarcity has consequences. In its 2018 analysis of young adults’ access to housing, the IFS argued that loosening planning constraints could increase ownership and reduce prices and rents. It also warned that helping buyers without increasing supply could push prices higher. Giving everybody a larger bidding paddle does not produce another house.

This does not prove that older residents caused the housing shortage. Planning decisions, credit conditions and construction capacity cannot be reduced to a generation’s personality. It does expose a conflict between wanting housing to remain scarce and wanting it to become affordable.

New homes are often welcome in principle, provided the principle can be exercised somewhere else. The objections may be legitimate individually. Collectively, they can produce a place whose defining character is that nobody new can afford to live there. It is an appealing vision of community, apart from the community’s need for accommodation.

Public provision, privately remembered

Education offers another concrete comparison. The House of Commons Library’s history of student support records a system of means-tested maintenance grants from 1962, with student loans introduced in 1990. Tuition fees arrived in 1998. Someone who attended university under the earlier arrangements faced a different financial proposition from later students.

Access was unequal, and this was never a benefit received by every boomer. A graduate’s experience cannot stand in for the life of someone who left school and went straight into low-paid work. The point is narrower: public provision helped some people achieve the independence subsequently attributed entirely to their own resourcefulness.

The state can disappear from an autobiography without disappearing from the accounts. “I managed without assistance” is a difficult position to sustain when the assistance was embedded in the price.

Security becomes a family business

The difference also extends to pensions. That same 2016 IFS research found that fewer than 10% of private-sector employees born in the early 1980s belonged to a defined-benefit pension scheme in their early thirties, compared with nearly 40% of the 1960s-born group. Auto-enrolment broadened participation, but the report found less generous provision. The old instructions came with benefits that were no longer in the box.

Inheritance may compensate, but selectively. In projections published in 2021, the IFS estimated that inheritances would represent a larger share of lifetime income for younger generations and increase inequalities between people with richer and poorer parents. These are projections, not a count of money already received.

An inheritance is welcome to its recipient. As a national answer to insecure living standards, it makes the choice of parents look like an increasingly important careers decision. The bank of mum and dad has excellent customer service, but a rather restrictive admissions policy.

The wrong people in the dock

“Boomers” is a crude category. It places a wealthy landlord beside a retired cleaner and asks them to answer the same charge. The Department for Work and Pensions’ pensioner-income analysis for 2022/23 shows how different those circumstances are: benefits were the largest income source for pensioner couples and singles in the bottom income fifth. An age group is not a bank balance.

Nor do these findings establish how every older person voted, what motivated them or whether they opposed new housing. Evidence of unequal outcomes is not evidence of collective intent. The argument is about the defence of accumulated advantage, not a conspiracy conducted through garden centres.

Younger owners are perfectly capable of joining that defence. A mortgage sometimes supplies opinions that years of political discussion failed to produce. The test is what people protect once the system begins working in their favour.

What they leave behind

History will not judge a generation solely by whether its members worked hard. Most generations did. The more revealing question is whether the routes to ordinary security remained available to those who followed. The evidence on ownership and pensions gives that question substance, even if the title’s verdict remains an opinion.

A country can become more expensive without becoming better. Its homeowners can feel richer while younger workers feel increasingly temporary. Once that conflict is visible, defending every arrangement that sustains it becomes harder to pass off as neutral common sense.

Somewhere, a parent is telling an adult child that money is not everything. They are sitting in a house whose value has become the principal reason the child cannot afford to live nearby. The kettle goes on. There is another suggestion about sandwiches.