The proportion of 25-year-olds living with their parents in Britain has surged from 25% in the 1990s to 42% today, according to analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) commissioned partly for the BBC. The research shows that “co-residence” among those in their 20s and 30s has increased by more than a third over two decades.
Drifting towards a southern European model
While the UK rate remains below Italy and Spain, where leaving home is often tied to finding a partner rather than turning 18 or starting work, the Guardian editorial warns that “Britain appears to be slowly drifting towards a southern European experience without the family culture that makes this feel normal.” Young Britons struggle to move out of the “hotel of mum and dad” due to falling employment for 25-year-olds, stagnant real earnings, and a dramatic drop in home ownership—from 43% in the mid-1980s to 15% today.
Housing affordability drives co-residence
The IFS notes that changes in age, education, ethnicity, or migration would have been expected to reduce co-residence rates. Instead, the “declining affordability of housing” has driven them up. Young adults are not simply choosing a cheaper arrangement to save money; they are submitting to it because they have less control over their lives as options for housing and work narrow.
One 26-year-old man who moved back with his parents told the BBC’s Today programme: “I’m not going to bring a girl back to my parents’ house. So it would have 100% affected that part of my life, which does get me low.”
Inequality reinforced by family support
Richer parents often help their adult children become independent; among the wealthiest fifth of households, about 15% gave or lent money to their children in 2018-20, compared with under 5% among the poorest fifth. Lower-income families help by keeping adult children dependent at home, which may save rent but reduces privacy and autonomy for young adults and increases housing and living costs for parents. This trend reproduces inequality not only in wealth but in the ability to establish an independent life.
Policy solutions needed
The editorial argues that these outcomes reflect institutions that suppress wages, let landlords capture housing scarcity, and allow the wealthy to buy opportunities denied to others. It calls for a social democratic programme to build more social housing, strengthen wages and job security, and shift taxation from work to rent extraction. Andy Burnham has argued: “If you don’t give people a good home, what chance have they got of having a good life?” Before becoming prime minister, he promised “the biggest council housebuilding programme since the postwar period.” Without bold change, the government will keep subsidising the consequences of social and economic failure while leaving the causes intact.
