Davies is right: taking the plunge is not easy – but it’s not impossible By Clive Aslet

Young people can be very sensitive about property. It’s understandable – they think that Baby Boomers like me have eaten all the pies, being comfortably ensconced in over-large homes bought at what now seem to be bargain prices. Having three boys in their 20s, none of whom yet owns a flat, I’m sympathetic to their plight. But as Sir Howard Davies, chairman of NatWest has reminded us, it isn’t impossible to buy a house, even at today’s prices. And, actually, it was never that easy.

In the early 1980s, property may have been cheaper but salaries were pathetic, at least if you were a magazine journalist like me. The number of mortgage products available was a small fraction of those on offer today. That meant little flexibility in the way your bank or building society calculated what you could borrow, based on a strict multiple of two and a half or three times salary.

Twenty years later, the lending taps were turned on and a freelance income was assessed at whatever level the prospective borrower claimed it to be. There was room for some wishful thinking. But it was not like that when I scrabbled on to the lowest rung of the property ladder in about 1979. I can hardly believe that the Bank of England’s base rate was then 17pc. Imagine what would happen if interest rates reached that level now. In those days, though, we were used to it. When I got married in 1980, we soldiered on in the same small Battersea flat, in the lower half of an artisan’s cottage, whose garden, or rather yard, was principally occupied by a concrete air raid shelter.

Fortunately, having two incomes, we were able to cross the river to Pimlico – lighter and airier, with broader streets and more trees. Our original flat had,

‘In the 1980s, homes were cheaper but salaries were pathetic, at least for a magazine journalist’

with inflation, gone up in value, but that was only because the market had moved: it did not make the new purchase more affordable.

We loved it – two floors at the top of a tall house, with sunlight streaming through the windows. There was a bomb site opposite and a long stretch of derelict terrace but the area was still struggling to rise above the reputation it acquired after the Second World War. The estate agent Roy Brooks summed it up in one of his unvarnished ads, later gathered into a book: Brothel in Pimlico.

By 1990, with hopes of starting a family, we were anxious to move. Once the punitive mortgage rates needed to tame inflation had been brought down, the Thatcher decade was good to home buyers. Nigel Lawson’s “Big Bang”, which liberated the financial markets in 1986, unfettered the imagination of lenders. I got in with a financial adviser who could pull many a rabbit out of the hat (until, many years later, he went bust and we got stuck with a valueless investment in Dubai; to our relief, the FSA bailed us out.)

For all that, we had to stay put for some years. We couldn’t sell for a price that would allow us to trade up. Then came Black Wednesday, record interest rates and a crash that knocked 30pc off London property. Alas, by the time we had found a buyer, there seemed to be no houses to move into. But eventually one came up, not on the best street, and we grabbed it. It had belonged to a wine merchant who should not have been running his business from it and was forced to move. A bit of luck for us, but since the previous owner went on to great things, we were all happy.

Thirty years later, we’re still here and intend to stay put. The cost of stamp duty and removal charges make it too expensive to move on. Besides, our children would have nowhere to live if we did. The amount that we paid for the house in 1994 wouldn’t now buy a one-bedroom flat. Remember, though, that London has become a world city. This makes it tough on young people who want to buy homes – but would they really want to go back to the world of limited opportunity, rubbish public transport, early closing hours and no coffee shops that oldies like me experienced at their age? I doubt it. High prices are a penalty of success.