It used to be a rite of passage: leaving school, finding a job, saving for a deposit, moving out. For millions of young Britons, those steps are now a distant mirage. A stark new report, titled ‘Lost generation’, dropped this morning like a stone into the stagnant pond of Westminster. Its message, delivered with clinical urgency, is that opportunities for those under 30 are not just dwindling, they are vanishing at an alarming rate.
The report, compiled by an alliance of think tanks and youth charities, paints a picture of a cohort sidelined by rising rents, stagnant wages, and a housing market that favours the already-propertied. The headline figure is that real earnings for graduates have fallen by 12% since 2007. For those without degrees, the picture is bleaker still: nearly a third are in insecure work, cycling through zero-hour contracts and gig economy gigs. The word ‘precarity’ has never felt more concrete.
But it’s the detail that stings. The report tracks the ‘life milestones’ of two generations: one born in 1970 and one in 2000. By age 30, the older cohort had a 40% homeownership rate. For the younger, it is just 25%. And that gap is widening fastest outside London, in places like Blackpool and Wrexham, where ‘opportunity’ has become an abstraction. Anecdotes from focus groups are woven through the data: a 27-year-old trainee teacher in Manchester living in a houseshare with three strangers, saving nothing. A 25-year-old in Barnsley who has applied for 200 jobs in six months and had three interviews. A 24-year-old graduate in Bristol who says her career plan has been replaced by a ‘survival plan’.
The report calls for a ‘New Deal for the Young’ – a policy bundle including rent controls, a living wage for under-25s, and a massive council house building programme. The Government, already bruised by a cost-of-living crisis and industrial unrest, has been told to act now. The Children’s Commissioner has described the report as ‘a fire alarm for a generation’. The Opposition agrees, with shadow ministers queuing up to say ‘we told you so’.
Yet this is more than a political football. What the report captures is a social shift that has been happening quietly for years. The term ‘lost generation’ first emerged after the 2008 crash, but this feels different. That was about jobs. This is about the whole architecture of young adulthood. The assumption that each generation will do better than the last – the bedrock of the British social contract – is crumbling. The report’s authors call it a ‘generational betrayal’.
And the human cost? It is not just in the statistics. It is in the delay to adulthood. The deferred dreams. The growing sense among the young that the system is rigged against them. At a coffee shop in Hackney, I spoke to a 26-year-old barista with a first-class degree in history. He earns £22,000 a year and lives with his parents in Croydon. ‘I feel like I’m in a waiting room,’ he said. ‘And the wait keeps getting longer.’
That waiting room is now crowded. Young people are postponing children, marriages, careers. They are radicalised by rent and disenchanted by the promise of hard work. The report offers a roadmap out, but the political will is uncertain. In the meantime, the loss is not just economic – it is the erosion of hope itself.
As the sun sets on the report’s launch, the young gather at a tube station. They check their phones for applications, for bills, for any sign of a way out. This is a generation watching its future shrink in real time. The question is not whether they will be lost, but whether we will reach out before they are.
