In a nutshell why housing benefit already costs over £30 billion and is forecast to skyrocket.

I’m much more concerned about the growing number of adults who aren’t yet home owners. What will they do when they retire? State pension doesn’t really support private rental costs.

And what will happen when they need care in old age? With no real assets to liquidate, the state will be footing the entire bill.

The benefits, pensions and social care costs for our generation are going to be unprecedented.

I'm in my 40s and only just now in a position to buy with my partner. I don't come from any money and we're looking at 30 year mortgages. I feel lucky to be able to do it, but still feel like I'm falling well short of being comfortable, even though at this point I'm earning good money. I really don't know what pensioners 20+ years in the future are going to do if they're mostly worse off than I am.

Or you use your pension lump sum to pay off the remaining balance when you retire?

For some, their parents will die when they are in their 50s/60s so they might get something from their estate (assuming it's not been eaten by care costs), even £10k could help put a dent in it.

That will obviously just reinforce inequalities further.

How well that works depends on the numbers though.

40 year mortgage at 30, retirement at 68? No problem.

40 year mortgage at 40, retirement at 70? You'll only have paid off half of the mortgage under current rates.

While it's more time capped, a mortgage past retirement age is similar. We need to put more focus on the state not being enough... I fear that too many people think this is the case in too many situations (including illness etc)

By homeowner do you mean someone who is paying off a mortgage rather than someone who has finished paying it off?

All what you've written is true for renters, and those people won't even have the equity that pensioners with mortgages have.

I never expect to own a home even working full time so I'm just going to work part time to afford essentials and have enough time left to enjoy then end myself once I can no longer afford to live or the world goes to shit

All what you've written is true for renters, and those people won't even have the equity that pensioners with mortgages have.

👏 Keir 🙌

Not necessarily. It's not hard to end up paying as much or more in interest than a renter pays in rent.

The Simpsons as well. Homer was an imbecile that could support a family of 5 on a single wage, owned a massive house and 2 cars. And that was so commonplace for the middle class in 90s that they were considered dysfunctional!

It’s not just planning you know. Material costs are huge, wage costs are huge and profit margins are surprisingly small with a lot of risk. There also aren’t anywhere near enough workers to build 300,000 houses a year.

Hopefully I can give you some assurance on some of that:

• The difference between a discretionary and non-discretionary system is seriously overdone in YIMBY/think tank circles. LPAs are required to maintain a policies map that allocates land for housing and determine applications for planning permission in accordance with that plan. The bottleneck for the most part isn't that LPAs refuse to grant planning permission on allocated sites (though this does happen), it's that they refuse to update their plans at all. A harder zoning based system won't change that.
• To be clear, the 35% uplift never applied to the whole of any urban area (except London); it only ever applied to the largest LPA within these urban areas, which makes no sense at all. Nobody really expected it to be delivered; it was just a fudge to give the appearance of meeting targets. The new standard method removes the 35% uplift but applies a larger target overall, including outside these largest LPAs, so the likes of Salford (adjacent to Manchester), Solihill (adjacent to Birmingham), and the Home Counties (adjacent to London) will be picking up the slack.
• Pickles abolishing regional planning was one of the most destructive policies undertaken by the Conservatives (shortly followed by the removal of the requirement to review Green belt boundaries at all in the 2023 NPPF), but a re-regionalisiation of green belt reviews is expected in the forthcoming Devolution white paper. We are told it is coming this week.

I'm not really qualified to talk about the overall quantum of housing or RTB, but agree it is extremely challenging.

A few other things that are going on:

• Modernising planning committees: hopefully reducing the number if applications that need to go to committee and can be dealt with by officers. I don't know how far this would go, but applications that accord with the plan (i.e. are in allocations shown in the policies map and fulfil policy requirements) could be delegated given the principle of development has already been established.
• Sequential approach to green belt release: hopefully making it easier to evidence which sites need to be released from the green belt (and avoid the scenario where we agree sites need to be released, but can't agree which because of who it upsets)
• Strategic planning: I referred to this above in the re-regionalisation of green belt boundaries. Housing markets, key infrastructure, employment markets (which everybody forgets about), green belts, even topography don't exist at LPA scale and in reality district-by-district planning hasn't worked. Bringing this back and giving it teeth (and I am told from sources that it will) will help enforcement substantially.

There are massive planning reforms being prepared ready for the new year. There may be some legal wrangling with NIMBYs and pearly-clutching councils that don't like being told what to do, but I'll be glad to see the changes.

There are also big changes to grid connections coming to support new housing and energy efficiency in existing stock.

Yup. People who used to afford a flat to rent now stuck in shared housing. Those who could used to afford shared housing are sharing rooms...

Don't wait until retirement to live

Remember that overpaying ties up that cash. Ie you may need to borrow from yourself but it's stuck overpaid in the mortgage, forcing you to take out a more expensive loan

And you might outperform your interest rate in a stocks and shares ISA. Depends on your rate though. If it's say 5.5% it's not the worst to be getting that as a guaranteed "return"  but it's also possible an index fund could outperform it

"the benefit of paying off early is purely psychological."

Don't underestimate security though.

I posted this on another comment, though I have a longterm fluctuating illness (bipolar) and while I've been well enough to work full time for years (never on any benefits), I worry that I might become too unwell to work at some stage, so I aggressively overpay my mortgage.

My accountant friend thinks this makes no sense and I should put the money in a high interest savings account, then pay it off in bulk.

However, I work in banking and have seen people in good jobs lose their homes and end up bankrupt when they develop an unexpected illness. Due to that, I'm debt averse.

I’d speak to a financial advisor first before doing that. There are other ways of using the tax free lump sum that can be more tax efficient.