Why your expensive home will make carers of your kids

The way in which society has been organised since the 1980s has meant that for all but the most able and determined young people without inherited wealth, will have the income they need to buy their own home.

The reasons for this are complex, but put simply, while building costs have risen because of a shortage of trained labour and resources being used up by rapidly developing countries, the main reason houses are so expensive is because successive governments have created a shortage of housing to artificially elevated house prices.

To achieve this shortage the first thing the government did was to sell off large chunks of the public housing stock. So worried we're they that those living in their Council House would be reluctant to part with housing security, they sold off the public assets at a discounted price. After a short while the responsibility for housing passed shifted away from from Local Authorities to private builders and landlords.

At the same time as selling off the publicly owned housing stock on the cheap, successive governments have further exacerbated the shortage of housing by making it easy for those that can afford it to buy as many houses as they like.

Demographic changes and out of control migration have played their part too, but engineering a housing shortage is the primary reason why young people are unable to buy a home of their own.

There is however, a silver lining in that as a consequence of government policy to keep property prices high, more people will now be forced to live at home until their 40s and 50s and will be available, therefore, to look after their elderly parents. Care that would otherwise have had to be funded by the state through Adult Social Care will increasingly be off-loaded to children of those too frail to look after themselves.

This hoodwinked generation, mesmerised by Social Media and the fantasy-world provided by their games consoles, may grow up to think otherwise, but it's a win-win for government and the elites they represent.

I'm arguing that the current housing crisis, rather than the supposed headache it's presented to be, will be a huge fiscal benefit to government because not only is government abrogating responsibility to house the population, they'll no longer have the cost to care for the elderly either.

In a democracy, we get the governments we deserve, but that doesn't mean that future generations won't feel conned by the governments that failed satisfy their basic need for shelter, or look after mum and dad when they get old.