16 Monday June 13 2022 | the times
News
Baby boomers have some advice for
millennials struggling to buy a home:
cancel the Netflix subscription and stop
ordering takeaways.
More than half of baby boomers,
those born between 1946 and 1964, be-
lieve that “luxury” lifestyle choices
made by young people are to blame for
their inability to save enough money.
Among the lifestyle choices ident-
ified by baby boomers in a study by re-
searchers at King’s College London
were takeaway coffees and food, mobile
phones, Netflix and foreign holidays.
Bobby Duffy, director of the Policy
Institute at King’s College London, said
lifestyle expenses were “minor factors”
when compared with the “huge in-
creases in house prices and required
deposits”. He added: “The suggestion
that the huge challenges young people
face in buying their own home can be
solved by skipping fancy coffees and
Netflix entirely misses the point, but it’s
still believed by half the public. It also
reflects our general tendency to think
bad of today’s young people. Through-
out history people always think the cur-
rent youth are the worst ever.”
A quarter of those aged 25 to 34 on
average incomes own their own home,
down from two thirds in 1995. It is not
PETER TARRY FOR THE TIMESnewly commissioned buildings, inde-
pendent auditing of ventilation and air
filtration equipment and for govern-
ment departments to include infection
control when retrofitting buildings.
Professor Peter Guthrie, a fellow of
the Royal Academy of Engineering,
said: “In the past when you designed
buildings, you said if somebody was
sitting at a desk in a building and could
feel the air moving past them it was
moving too fast.... I think we might go
into a situation now where actually if
you can’t feel the air moving past you
are worried.”Baby boomers say
struggling young
should cut Netflix
only baby boomers, however, who
blame this on a mix of youthful laziness
and poor financial decisions. Young
people themselves, according to the
study, are more likely to agree than
disagree with the statement that “take-
away coffees and food” are the reason
their generation cannot afford to buy a
home.
The study suggests that 48 per cent of
millennials, those born between 1980
and 1995, believe that young people are
too careless with their money when
trying to save, just below the 52 per cent
of baby boomers with the same view.
At the same time there was a high
level of recognition among the public
that economic factors were preventing
young people from buying a home. The
study found that 76 per cent of people
agreed that adults aged under 40 could
not afford to buy their own home
because of issues such as high house
prices, stricter lending rules and
stagnant wages.
Duffy said: “We also tend to think of
young people as lazy, with half of people
again saying they are less motivated at
work than older people. But we think
better of young people from our own
youth: only 29 per cent think young
people were less motivated than older
workers when we ourselves were
young.”Kieran Gair
Head in the game David William-Ellis with his sculpture The Ram, one of several to adorn Royal Ascot when the event returns
at full scale for the first time since 2019. About 600,000 people are expected to visit the racecourse from Tuesday to SaturdayHopes for revitalised high street
Forcing landlords to rent out empty
high street premises could bring tens of
thousands of shops back into use.
Analysis by the centre-right think
tank Onward found about 58,
shops empty across the UK. London
had 13,500 and the north of England
13,200, even though it had fewer shops
overall. The midlands had 9,000, Scot-
land 3,000 and Wales 2,700.
Will Tanner, director of Onward, said
the figures showed the impact that
compulsory rent auctions could have.
The government’s proposals, part of
its levelling-up bill, would give councils
the power to hold a rent auction where
a town centre shop had been empty for
more than a year. The landlord would
have to accept one of the bids. Tanner
said: “Empty shops... aren’t only a very
visible sign that the local economy is in
dire need of levelling up, they are also a
blow to civic pride.”
His report said that two types of own-
ers — financial institutions and over-
seas investors — accounted for half of
all empty properties because they had
little incentive to accept lower rents.
“The costs of holding vacant retail prop-
erty, in the form of business rates, will be
minuscule within a multibillion-dollar
investment portfolio.”Just as past pandemics such as cholera
and plague led to improvements in
public sanitation, the present one
should cause a focus on infection-
proofing buildings, a report commis-
sioned by the chief scientific adviser has
concluded.
Billions of pounds a year in lost prod-
uctivity could be saved if the number of
no-touch surfaces were increased, ven-
tilation was improved and clean air was
treated with the same importance as
clean water, the authors estimated,Tom Whipple Science EditorPost-Covid call for infection-proof buildings
after being asked to investigate by Sir
Patrick Vallance.
The report, published by the
National Engineering Policy Centre
and endorsed by Professor Sir Chris
Whitty, the chief medical officer for
England, argues that there is an oppor-
tunity to rethink buildings to give pro-
tection not only from future pandemics
but also from seasonal infections. It
argues that given what we know about
how respiratory diseases spread it is
anomalous how little regulation there
is regarding air quality. It recommends
improving the ventilation standards for