Younger people should be rewarded for lockdown via affordable housing

[Ordree]

As others have noted, young people (not just those in frontline roles) are making enormous sacrifices to protect others, mostly but not exclusively from much older age groups. They will be bequeathed a damaged planet, a ruined economy and they will have done further damage to their mental health by staying indoors for months on end. They are the ones paying older people's pensions when they won't have anything like the same financial security to look forward to themselves. Yes I know older people paid their elders pensions during their working lives, bit never has there been such an imbalance. As the economy is likely to be ruined short to medium term anyway, would it not be reasonable to start the biggest givernment-funded housebuilding programme ever, allow younger people who have just bought to write off negative equity losses against tax, and essentially redress some of the appalling imbalance between generations and classes?

@BubblesBuddy
Not sure if your last sentence means you are agreeing in principle with my concept? As for the rest of your comments I could explain my proposal to you again but I couldn't understand it for you.

DH is a consultant to the big house builders. Has been for years. My last sentence about housing (not the post on redundancy) refers to the fact that changing commercial sites to residential isn’t likely to provide enough homes. There will still be a need for additional sites. Brownfield sites are always expensive to develop for housing but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be. They are preferable to farmland in many areas. However there is quite a lot of poor quality green belt that could be released.

In general, we know the government wants more homes. There has never been sufficient drive and determination to build them. We never get anywhere near the targets. It impacts most on younger people and young families. There is also some evidence that young people don’t move away because 65% don’t go to university and many of these get jobs at “home”. Eventually they wish to live in their locality. In areas where houses are very expensive, this isn’t possible unless the state helps. These are not necessarily solicitors or doctors. They are doing the ordinary jobs that don’t pay as much but are still necessary.

My DD is nearly 28. Before she was born I attended a meeting of my parish council because they had been asked by the district council to allocate land for a housing association to build a few homes. There was a disgusting derelict “asbestos” barn on a big site which could have taken around 6 houses. There could have been another site too. It’s AONB and green belt. Councillors agreed that young people/families didn’t want to live in the village, they thought they should all live in towns and they didn’t want a single new house built by a housing association in the village. So fast forward 28 years - they have now reversed that decision. The barn site was developed for one large dwelling in the meantime. This demonstrates the huge difficulties of getting anything done. In the meantime, those with ordinary jobs have been forced out.

There was a scientist on the radio the other day saying that when we are let out of lockdown, it will be gradual and the 20-30s will go out first as they are both less at danger and disproportionately affected by the loss of jobs etc. Won't happen I imagine but was interesting

I have heard that idea too. Every economic analysis says younger people are going to be affected disproportionately. I would like some debate about whether this could work and whether any other country is trying it.

I think it will be hard to let people out by age just as we did not lock down London first as the logisitics are hard. Also a massive risk factor is being over weight too as far as I can see (or possibly BAME) and we certainly would not say if you are fat or black you cannot leave your house so a bit much to say if you are thin white but over 60 you are imprisoned at home.

The biggest issue we are going to have is we won't have a post war boom. We will have a massive retraction or depression, higher taxes even on nurses and teachers and no jobs so it will not be prizes for all after all the suffering but decades of suffering because we chose to protect old over young/fit.

I suppose we could abolish IHT so the young can inherit from dead covid parents/grandparents without giving 40% back to the state but I doubt that would go down very well?

Xenia: it’s difficult to see anything going down well by judging by the denial of the obvious on here!

IHT assumes they have an estate worth anything in the first place. As we know lovely homes in some places are not worth £300k. So creative schemes are necessary however this recession will mean huge problems with regard to public finance.

Given that only about 5% of estates are worth enough to pay IHT, that’s not going to help much.