Now my adult son’s moved back home, should I charge him £500 a month to live under the stairs?

SHOULD parents charge rent to their own grown-up children? It’s a question that has been preying on my mind for many months, but it was brought into sharp focus for me this week by a news item and a long-dreaded phone call from our eldest son.

First, the news i tem. This was the extraordinary story of the 23-year- old journalism graduate who answered an online advertisement for a ‘friendly, openminded and outgoing person’ to share a furnished house in Clapham Junction, South London, for £500 a month plus bills.

When Alex Lomax travelled from Nottingham to view the property, she was first shown the kitchen and then led to the vacant sleeping accommodation. Which turned out to be a windowless cupboard under the stairs, j ust big enough to accommodate a mattress on the floor. Think Harry Potter at the Dursleys.

I suppose I should have shed a tear for the plight of young people, desperate to find homes in the booming South-East. But I can’t have been the only homeowner in my neck of the woods whose immediate thought was: ‘Wow! I’m sitting on a gold mine!’

Salubrious

As it happens, our house is 15 minutes from Clapham — and we, too, have a windowless cupboard under the stairs, which could just about fit a mattress at a pinch.

Of course, we’d have to find somewhere else to put the ironing board, mops, buckets, brooms, paint-pots, SodaStreams unused since the Eighties, dust-encrusted popcorn-makers, rolled-up rugs and the boys’ cricket bats, tents, rucksacks, deflated footballs and guitars with missing strings.

Meanwhile, anyone who took up residence would have to be very open-minded indeed about sharing sleeping quarters with the electricity and gas meters, fuse boxes and burglar alarm control box …

But wait a minute, I thought. If cupboards under the stairs in the less salubrious parts of Clapham go for £500 a month, imagine how much more we could get for an actual bedroom, with a bed in it!

To my astonishment, the answer turns out to be an average of £784 a month. This is serious money, on a scale to turn dreams of retirement into reality.

Just one problem. For a blissful few months, after our fourth son set off for university and before boy number three boomeranged back from his, my wife and I had the house to ourselves. But now every bedroom is once again occupied by my own flesh and blood. Rent and board free.

Which brings me to that phone call, which came on Sunday from our 30-year- old, George: ‘Sorry, Dad, but the bulldozers arrive this week and I’ve got to get out of the flat. Can I move back home on Tuesday? And can I borrow the car to shift my stuff?’

Oh, well, it couldn’t last. I never inquired too closely how George came to be living in a vast block of condemned flats, paying rock-bottom rent to heaven-knows-whom. But I knew he’d be back before long, just as he was after his previous stint, living rent-free in the flat above an empty pub in return for keeping an eye on the place while it awaited refurbishment.

Poor old George. Like so many of his age, he’s spent the years since he graduated l eading a nomadic existence, seizing temporary offers as they’ve arisen but unable to afford anywhere in London to settle on his wages as a pub manager. It would be a hard-hearted father indeed who denied him his old bedroom when he needed it, and sent him off instead to hunt for a £500-a-month cupboard under the stairs.

Indeed, I reckon Jeremy Corbyn can thank the acute housing shortage for a large measure of his success in recruiting 160,000 new members — most of them young.

As Margaret Thatcher understood so well, nothing gives us a stronger stake in society — or more effectively dampens our enthusiasm for workers’ revolution — than a home to call our own. These days, a generation is growing up without even the hope of one, burdened with student debt and feeling utterly betrayed by the political class.

Genius

But can they really not see that, far from being the answer to their woes, Mr Corbyn and those who think like him are the root cause of their problem?

Leave aside the new Labour leader’s bonkers claim that the Government will make a fat profit by building 100,000 new council houses a year and renting them out for next to nothing. (His reasoning appears to be that cheap rents will cut the bill for housing benefit. But you don’t have to be an economic genius, surely, to spot the odd point that he’s missed — such as how to recoup building and maintenance costs.)

No, the reason why landlords ask £500 a month for cupboards under the stairs in the grottier parts of South London, leaving a generation in despair, can be summed up in two words: mass immigration. With the UK’s population already at 64.1 million, and predicted to rise to 80.1 million by 2060, there just aren’t enough homes to go round. Indeed, we’ll need many more than 100,000 new ones a year to bring homes back within reach of people on average earnings.

Yet to Mr Corbyn, it doesn’t seem to matter that mass immigration exacerbates the housing crisis, puts huge strain on public services, exerts strong downward pressure on wages — particularly at the lower end of the income scale — fragments society and imports other countries’ feuds and religious animosities to Britain.

In his view, as he put it this week, mass immigration is ‘nothing but a plus’.

Not that other politicians of the longer-established parties appear any more exercised by the issue that emerged from a poll this week at the top of the list of ordinary voters’ concerns.

Compassion

Indeed, all through the summer and the conference season, the parties have been engaged in a game of competitive compassion over Syrian refugees, outbidding each other to say how many they would allow into Britain. The higher the number, they seem to believe, the more we’ll think they care.

Thus, Labour’s Yvette Cooper opened the bidding with 10,000, only for David Cameron to double it. So back came Ms Cooper with 50,000 — and a doe- eyed promise she would give up a room in the Balls household to a refugee.

Not to be outdone, the new Lib Dem leader Tim Farron announced that the correct number of refugees to admit was 60,000, while for Labour dear old Diane Abbott chipped in that we should also throw open our borders to economic migrants from the Middle East and Africa.

This is becoming downright childish: ‘Look at me, I care most!’ ‘No, I do’. ‘No, me, me, me.’

As for the migration of EU citizens, already limitless, mainstream politicians don’t like to mention that. Nor do they seem to care a jot about the people their boundless compassion will actually affect — such as teachers struggling to control multi-lingual classes, plumbers constantly undercut for work or, yes, those of my sons’ age who can’t find anywhere to live.

But I’ve made enough excuses for the boomerang generation. Back, now, to the question I posed in my first sentence. Since my wife and I seem doomed to live in a house full of hulking young men, at least for a good many years yet, would it be right to start charging them rent?

I can see that for many families, struggling to get by, the answer will be Yes. But what about people like me, fortunate enough to be able to afford to feed and house our resident young, at least while we remain in work?

Perhaps I’m too wet by half, but I know I wouldn’t feel comfortable, on my fat salary, charging even a token sum to my own poverty-stricken, student-debt laden near and dear — let alone the market rent for a cupboard under the stairs.

And yet, and yet. Am I infantilising them by indulging them? If I stung them each for, say, £100 a month and stopped feeding them, would that encourage them to look for better paid work and flats of their own? Advice, please, from parents in my position.