1997: Our House - Episode 4

This is Capitalism

How might a young couple, unable to buy their first home today, have fared in previous decades? Tacita and Charlie are in their mid twenties. They live near Brighton on the south coast and are desperate to move in together. But buying somewhere in that part of the country is out of their reach. They believe earlier generations had it easier than they do. In part four of five programmes Tacita and Charlie travel back to 1997; the Labour party has just won power in a landslide victory, the Conservatives claim to have left the economy in better shape than ever before. Just a few years earlier a property crash had left hundreds of thousands of people in negative equity or suffering repossession. So, what sort of difficulties might a young couple, trying to get on the property ladder back then, have faced? And how might they compare to the situation Tacita and Charlie are in today? The experts who guide our couple through 1997 are economist Jonathan Cribb from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Professor Sharon Collard from the University of Bristol and Professor Claire Langhamer from the University of Sussex.

Producers: Paul Kerley and Rosamund Jones