Jack Monroe says those who bought a house before 2000 have ‘no idea’ of cost of living for millennials

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Cook and anti-poverty campaigner Jack Monroe has revealed just how tough it is for people to get on the housing ladder in 2022.

It comes after Monroe quoted a tweet that said: “Who remembers living in a house without central heating, no double glazing, no loft insulation etc. and waking up and scratching pictures in the ice on the inside of the windows?”

Taking to Twitter, Monroe said those who use “back in my day” accounts of what life was like for them when they were younger are “romanticising the unimaginable struggle of an era when the average house cost one and a bit years of a single-person salary”.

She added: “For comparison, average house prices today are almost 9x the average wage!”

Adding two more tweets to her Twitter thread, Monroe showed the math behind her statement using figures from government records and Trades Union Congress wage reports.

She said that the average house price in the UK in the 1970s was £4,057 and the average wage was £3,594. Which means that for a single person to buy a house it would cost them 1.13 years of their annual salary.

Comparing this to 2020, Monroe stated that the average house price for that year was £268,349, whereas the average wage was £31,285. This means that it would take 8.58 years of a single person’s full salary to buy a house.

Monroe’s calculations reveal the average wage to house price comparisons for the past six decades. According to figures, for those buying a house in the 2000s it would cost 3.94 years of a single person’s annual salary, and for the 2010s it would be 6.46 years.

“If you bought your house before the dawn of the millennium, you have literally no idea about ‘the cost of living’ for my generation and beyond,” Monroe added.

“Sincerely, a millennial whose rent, energy and council tax costs 94 per cent of their monthly income.”

Twitter users quickly agreed with Monroe, with one person writing: “Worth noting it was a time when they all got final salary pensions too, the NHS wasn’t overloaded and you were actually paid to go to university!

“As a middle aged man I grew up being convinced pensioners had it hard. I now think it is the youth that are really the worst off.”

However, one person disagreed, writing: “Ridiculous. It’s not romantic. In 1985 I’d saved the deposit for a flat. Earnings £5k cost of flat £17k. Then interest rates rose, I walked to work and relied on food handouts from family. But I’m lucky compared to my son born in 1987.”

The cost of living crisis has been at the forefront this week, as many prices of everyday items rose on 1 April. Energy prices in particular have seen a stark rise, with bills estimated to increase by 54 per cent for UK households.