When I first started looking at buying a house 30 years ago you couldn't get a mortgage unless you'd been with a building society for a few years, had a large deposit saved with them and were prepared to grovel. My first house cost £7000, at the time I was on less than £1000 a year. I was brought up in an era where if you wanted a house you didn't have a car, or a foreign holiday or dare I say it, a bloody expensive hi-fi. Its always been hard to get a foothold on the housing market and the poor have never been able to buy property. This is why people work bloody hard to better themselves. If they succeed they buy a house. If they don't, they don't. They rent either in the private sector or in the diminishing council sector. House prices for a long time now have  reflected the typical buyers as a couple both earning average salaries. If you're single you're up against it straight away. I've read some utter twaddle here about draconian measures to make things 'fairer'. Its never going to happen, we live in a free market economy. A consequence of such markets is that you either win or lose. I've got three teenage kids of my own and yes, its going to be very hard for them to buy their first house but the last thing I want is some state, ie other tax payers, subsidy for them. There has never been a permanent crash in the property market. I tried to sell a house in the late 80s. It took 3 years and accepting much less than I originally wanted. That house would now fetch 3 times what I accepted then. To be perfectly blunt we have encouraged a society that gives people totally unrealistic expectations for themselves. If you are at the lower end of the salary scale get out, get on or forget aspirations of property ownership.

Rant over.

Bob