I do not know about all of you out in the blogging world, but if you are unfortunate enough to live in the UK you face the third highest housing costs in Europe, with only Denmark and Greece facing higher rates. On average you will spend over 40% of income on living expenses including rent and mortgage payments. In France only 5.2% of the population face a 40% housing cost while in the UK it is closer to 16.5%.
This is hardly surprising as government over the last few decades have done little to invest in social housing, resulting in one in six being overburdened with mortgage, rent and utility payments. The lack of affordable housing only goes to driving up the cost of the private market only fuelling the problem which is only likely to worsen over the coming years. Just to give you an idea of the gap that needs to be plugged, in the 1960’s around 250,000 new homes were being built while in 2010-11 that number was closer to 121,000.
As we are all doing our bit to improve the economy during these difficult times, the situations seems bleak when families are forced to make trade-offs between paying utilities, the food bill or filling up the tank!