We earn over £100k and we still can’t afford to buy a house in London

When I was a child, my mum and I had a favourite hobby. At night, after tea, probably with Corrie playing in the background, we’d sit cross-legged on the living room floor of our little house in Lincolnshire making mood boards. The process was simple: potential dreams were ripped from piles of magazines and hopes meticulously pinned on a corkboard from Woolies.

Some nights we “redecorated” the house, or planned out what our lives would look like when we were finally rich. We’d have a car, for example, she wouldn’t have two jobs, we’d go on holidays that weren’t bought via coupons in The Sun. And sometimes, mum would clear the board, hand me the pins and say: “So. You’re 30. What does it all look like?”

I had no doubts. I would live in London, I told her, working as a writer at a big magazine or newspaper. I would be happy – I’d perhaps have a partner, maybe I’d have children, too; more certainly I would have a flat, or my own little house to decorate. It was all, objectively, a bit unlikely.

But having come to political consciousness to the sound of D:Ream and Tony Blair promising that “Things Can Only Get Better”, it made sense: I was raised in a generation taught to believe that, regardless of where I came from, hard work reaps reward and, if I really put my mind to it, that predictable rhythm of adulthood – work hard, earn enough, buy a place, build a life – would come. So that’s what I did.

I am, then, what you might consider a success story. Over the years, I’ve done everything that I was told would lead to stability: I studied hard, got an expensive degree, built a career now 16 years strong, lived within my means wherever humanly possible and gained that coveted status of “working class done good”.

Now aged 37, I work in a job I adore and live with my partner, an electrician, in a two-bedroom home in a lovely part of southeast London. I am five months pregnant. Together we earn more than £100,000 per year; more than I could ever have imagined from where I sat on mum’s living room carpet, more than my boyfriend – whose similar upbringing meant he thought that £15,000 per year was nothing short of a fortune when he left school at 16 – once thought possible. We have some savings and decent credit scores. The unlikely dream came true.

Yet, despite all that hard work, despite our successes and our sacrifices, it’s another picture from the mood board that has, for decades now, felt like a child’s fantasy: owning a home.

For millennials like me who graduated into a recession in the early 2000s, decades of political negligence and economic short-termism – boom and bust cycles, deregulation after deregulation, stagnant wages, sky-high rents and chronically under-supplied housing – have conspired to render us the financially immature generation, never quite reaching that very British apex of what it means to be adult; to be the king of your own castle.

Instead, we’ve done the hard work we were told to do and been told to be grateful for the opportunity. Without the roots of a stable home, one in four millennials are putting off having children and those without family money have long been priced out of London.

While our household might earn just over £100,000 per year – allowing us, in theory, a mortgage of around £400,000 – first homes in London cost an average of £511,0514 and require an average deposit of £144,000. Houses are now 8.1 times the average income, a figure that has, over the years, horrified our parents – mine a nurse (a single mum) and a mechanic, my partner’s a barmaid and a milkman when he was young – who believed that it would be easier, not harder, for us after they saved up their wages to get on the housing ladder.

Instead of the stable foundations they started from in their twenties, we have spent years stuck in adultescent flatshares with mouldy bathrooms and greedy landlords, watching trust fund babies buy two-bed terraces as “starter-homes” while posting about “grit” and their “working-class grandmother” on Instagram. Recently interest rates have been so high that a mortgage on a basic two-bed flat would be at the very top end of what we could afford anyway but, ironically, for the most part rent we pay (for me, at least a third, at times almost half of my salary over the years) is often way above what the bank might look for in a good borrower. It figures: money comes to money, as mum would always say: it’s expensive to be poor.

Homeowning has become simply an inheritance, passed down to the lucky ones. And this, for my partner and me at least, is the crux of it, really. Gifts, loans, or “early access” to their future, all quietly received with a lot of chatter about savvy financial planning.

For us, realistically only the deaths of our parents mean access to homeownership – a truly grim reality that just shouldn’t be the case. Social mobility is no longer measured by hard work but by proximity to wealth, and Rachel Reeves’ plan to target savers with offers to invest in shares is unlikely to take off in my experience – when it’s taken you more than five years to save up £20,000, there’s little chance you’re going to take any risks with it.

And while those who point to millennials frittering their money on nice-to-haves, no amount of avocado toast or flat whites could negate a housing market rigged in favour of our predecessors – those who got in early and stayed to ride the property boom. The have-nots are trying hopelessly to buy at the peak of that boom.

Now, Rachel Reeves is offering a kind of soft intervention – looser lending rules, the (very good) idea that rent counts toward mortgage eligibility. Her reforms aim to bring in 36,000 additional mortgages for first time buyers in a single year, achieved by lowering the minimum salary required for an individual to £30,000 from £35,000 as it is now, and to £50,000 from £55,000 for couples on a joint income, and making mortgages for over 4.5 times a buyer’s salary available. Could it help? Or are we being handed slightly longer ladders to reach the same crumbling ledge?

Certainly, there’s a good chance that this could be at least a short-term boost for the housing market – at least some people will be helped, and rent-proofing is sensible and long overdue. An optimistic ear might hear Reeves’ attempt to “cut the financial red tape” as opening up homeownership in a sustainable, inclusive way.

To be honest, anything that makes it possible for people frozen out of the buyer’s market feels like a positive at this point. If the so-called Leeds Reforms also work to boost regional economies and create greater financial equity as the Treasury hopes, all credit to her.

There are obvious risks, however – over-egging demand without addressing supply, for instance, that could just make everything even more expensive (just like George Osbourne’s Help To Buy scheme did in some areas). The clear danger of relaxing caps on loan-to-income ratios (as we learned during the 2008 crash), especially since real incomes rose roughly £400 slower than costs between 2020 and 2025, while house prices jumped 4 per cent year on year – basically, even if we get the mortgage, we might not keep up with it. Compounding that is a lack of new housing, without which, inflation is inevitable.

It would all matter a lot less – and help first-time buyers save more readily, or at all – if the rental market wasn’t ready to squeeze the life out of us. It’s exhausting to continually see every pay rise gobbled up by rent inflation, or to wonder if your fertility will survive another year of trying to gain stability or consistently paying more for less.

We’ve all had to accept that rent will, for many, now take up half of our income. But there’s no fix without serious investment in social and affordable housing, proper rent controls and little regulation on the wild west of landlords – all of which should be at the top of Reeves’ agenda. Right now, the insecurity of renting is only driving the pressure to “escape” into homeownership – but that’s little more than an emotionally-loaded symbol of stability in a system that, really, offers none. It wasn’t supposed to be a luxury to want stability, to want a small patch of the world that doesn’t depend on a letting agent’s whim or a landlord’s mortgage rate.

All those years ago on the living room floor, Mum had blind faith in me that I might beat the odds to get to work at my dream job in London – that belief is probably the biggest gift she ever gave me before she died a few months ago. But struggling to buy a starter home at 37 with a baby on the way? Back then, we could have never imagined it. Not even with the most elaborate mood board.

Yellow weather warning for thunderstorms and torrential rain issued by Met Office

A yellow weather warning for thunderstorms has been announced across large parts of the UK for Friday and Saturday, with heavy, thundery rain likely to lead to disruption.

London, the Midlands, and the North East and West of England can expect torrential rain with potential flooding, with the warning in place from 9pm on Friday until 6pm on Saturday.

The forecaster said: “Thundery rain will reach the south of the warning area later Friday before spreading north to affect much of England through Saturday.

“Rain will likely be locally torrential, bringing 20-30 mm in less than an hour in many places, with 60-90 mm in less than three hours possible in a few places.

“Whilst rain will clear from the south of the area by early Saturday afternoon, further thunderstorms are likely to develop here. As well as heavy rain, impacts from frequent lightning, gusty winds and large hail are also likely.”

Across other parts of the UK, temperatures will climb to 28C with a chance of 29C on Thursday, before peaking at a potential 30C in London on Friday in another burst of hot weather.

Met Office meteorologist Jonathan Vautrey said: “This heat is not going to be as widespread as what we’ve just come out of, areas to the north aren’t going to be seeing the same highs.

“The heat we had last time was home grown, it wasn’t that humid, but because this heat is coming in from the south westerly direction, it is more humid. It’s going to be feeling more sticky.”

In Northern Ireland, a yellow weather warning for thunderstorms is already in place from 11am on Thursday until 8pm this evening.

It comes as Southern Water has become the latest company to bring in a hosepipe ban, to protect rare chalk stream habitat, as England battles exceptionally dry weather.

The company said restrictions on hosepipes for activities such as watering gardens, filling paddling pools or washing cars would come in for households in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight from Monday.

It is the latest announcement by water companies bringing in hosepipe bans in response to the driest start to the year since 1976 for England.

Rainfall across England was 20 per cent less than the long-term average for June, which was also the hottest on record for the country, with two heatwaves driving unusually high demand for water, the Environment Agency has said.

Drought was declared in East and West Midlands on Tuesday, with the region joining swathes of northern England in drought status.

Yorkshire Water became the first major water company to bring in a hosepipe ban which came into effect last Friday.

South East Water has announced a hosepipe ban in Kent and Sussex from Friday, and Thames Water is bringing in a ban from next Tuesday for customers in Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, most of Wiltshire and some parts of Berkshire.

Tomorrowland festival still scheduled to go ahead despite stage fire

The Tomorrowland music festival in Belgium is still scheduled to take place this weekend despite a huge fire that destroyed the event’s spectacular main stage on Wednesday (16 July).

Images shared on local news sites and social media showed flames and plumes of black smoke engulfing the stage, which took two years to build, and spreading to nearby woodland. Nearby residents were urged to close all windows and doors until the fire was under control.

With the festival due to begin on Friday (18 July), spokesperson Debby Wilmsen has reassured those attending that the fate of the event rests with authorities, according to the Belga News Agency.

“There’s a lot of fake news going around, but we’re definitely expecting 38,000 visitors at the Dreamville campsite tomorrow. They’re looking forward to it, and we’re looking forward to it, and we’re going to give them a warm welcome,” Wilmsen said despite a site employee describing “an apocalyptic scene”.

“The festival will go ahead, albeit without the main stage,” Wilmsen said. “I can’t yet say how we’re going to handle that.”

In a separate statement, Wilmsen added: “Our showpiece, which took two years to build, is gone. Fortunately, the other stages are intact. The intention is truly for the festival to go on. But we can’t work magic, so it will be without the Mainstage. Our production team will now do everything to make something beautiful out of it.”

She continued by declaring that “cancellation was never considered” but said organisers are consulting with authorities about whether the site is safe enough for people to attend.

“If tomorrow it turns out that the site is not safe and we receive instructions from the authorities, we will follow them. Safety is always the priority,” Wilmsen added.

“We suddenly heard bangs and saw fire near the stage, a huge amount of fire,” an unnamed onlooker told Het Nieuwsblad newspaper.

“We were just putting the finishing touches on it. One more day and it would be finished.”

Dozens of emergency teams were seen rushing through the festival grounds just after 6pm in an attempt to extinguish the flames and evacuate those inside the grounds.

There were no members of the public present at the time, but around 1,000 staff members were working on site.

The annual electronic music festival is held in the town of Boom, north of Brussels, draws tens of thousands of visitors from around Europe.

Some of the world’s most popular DJs are due to appear on the stage over the weekend, including Martin Garrix, David Guetta, Fisher, Swedish House Mafia and Steve Aoki.

Back in 2017, the festival had to evacuate over 22,000 people after another major fire. The crowds at Barcelona’s Tomorrowland Unite were forced to flee just hours before Steve Aoki was due to headline the event.

Germany to allow police to seize small boats in Starmer migrant deal

Germany have agreed to close a loophole that will allow police to seize small boats being used in the Channel as part of a “friendship treaty” with the UK.

Sir Keir Starmer and German chancellor Friedrich Merz are due to sign the deal on Thursday, just one week after the prime minister struck a “one in, one out” migrant return deal with France’s Emmanuel Macron.

While there is no similar returns deal with Germany, it does include a pledge that they EU country will make people smuggling to the UK an offence by the end of 2025.

While people smuggling into fellow EU countries is a crime under German law, trafficking migrants into the UK has not been illegal since Brexit.

The majority of asylum seekers who cross the Channel embark from the French coast, however Germany is viewed as a transit country for migrants and is frequently used as a storage hubs for boats and transport equipment.

At least 22,000 people have already made the journey since January, putting 2025 on course to be a record year for crossings.

Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, had won German agreement to change the law to criminalise assisting the smuggling of migrants to the UK in December with Mr Merz’s predecessor Olaf Scholz

However, a change in government in Berlin meant that it had to be renegotiated and will now be announced on Thursday.

Prior to his visit, Sir Keir said: “Chancellor Merz’s commitment to make necessary changes to German law to disrupt the supply lines of the dangerous vessels which carry illegal migrants across the Channel is hugely welcome,” Sir Keir said.

“As the closest of allies, we will continue to work closely together to deliver on the priorities that Brits and Germans share.”

During Mr Merz’s visit, the leaders are expected to unveil an agreement to jointly produce defence exports such as Boxer armoured vehicles and Typhoon jets and commit to developing their deep precision strike missile in the next decade, with a range of more than 2,000 kilometres.

The chancellor and Sir Keir will also sign a bilateral friendship and cooperation treaty that includes plans to set up a new UK-Germany Business Forum.

Sir Keir said: “The Treaty we will sign today, the first of its kind, will bring the UK and Germany closer than ever. It not only marks the progress we have already made and the history we share.

“It is the foundation on which we go further to tackle shared problems and invest in shared strengths.”

A series of commercial investments are being announced to coincide with the visit, worth more than £200 million and will create more than 600 new jobs.

These include defence tech company Stark setting up a production facility in Swindon, its first outside Germany, and conversational AI firm Cognigy investing £50 million and expanding its UK team from 13 to 150.

Diane Abbott facing suspension from Labour again over race row letter

Labour MP Diane Abbott is facing suspension from the Labour Party again after she said she has no regrets about comments on racism which led to her being suspended by the party.

The Hackney North and Stoke Newington MP was suspended by the Labour Party in 2023 after a writing a letter to The Observer comparing racism experienced by people of colour with that seen by other groups in which she implied antisemitism and prejudice against groups such as travellers was not as serious.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Reflections programme, she said she did not look back on the incident with regret.

But her remarks are now to be investigated by the party with the possibility she could have the whip suspended again in parliament.

Ms Abbott, who was readmitted to the party before the 2024 general election after a concerted campaign by supporters, told the programme: “Clearly, there must be a difference between racism which is about colour and other types of racism because you can see a Traveller or a Jewish person walking down the street, you don’t know.

“I just think that it’s silly to try and claim that racism which is about skin colour is the same as other types of racism.

“I don’t know why people would say that.”

She apologised for any anguished caused by the remarks which drew criticism from Jewish and Travellers groups.

But a Labour Party spokesperson said: “There is no place for antisemitism in the Labour Party. We take these comments incredibly seriously, and will assess them in line with Labour Party’s rules and procedures.”

The threat comes less than 24 hours after the suspension of four leftwing rebels as Keir Starmer attempts to reassert his authority.

The longest-serving female MP in the Commons, who entered Parliament in 1987, said she got a “bit weary” about people labelling her antisemetic and said she had “spent a lifetime fighting racism of all kinds”.

She said she was “grateful” to be a Labour MP but was sure the party leadership had been “trying to get me out”.

Ms Abbott is a close ally of former leader Jeremy Corbyn who is now an independent MP having been expelled from the party. He is currently setting up a new party with another former Labour rebel Zara Sultana.

When my friends were facing cancer, a community of people stepped up

When I was younger, I used to worry incessantly about my parents getting cancer. I’d lay awake at night, ruminating on what would happen to my brother and I if they did. Who would support us? Thankfully, both are still cancer-free, well into their seventies.

However, now that I’m a parent myself, I worry about my children. Many people believe that cancer only really happens to people in old age, but that’s just not true. One beloved friend’s daughter died of leukaemia in 2020, aged just five; an unthinkable horror that changed the lives of everyone who knew her and her family.

And with Macmillan Cancer Support reporting that almost 3.5 million people in the UK are living with cancer, I also worry about my friends – parents themselves, their lives touched by cancer. One friend sat me down in our favourite local café, our toddlers playing at our feet, to break the news that she was about to undergo a double mastectomy. We cried together.

Another friend, Sarah, a single parent to two teenage girls, was diagnosed with breast cancer the day before we heard that King Charles had cancer, and a month before the Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton, announced her own diagnosis in March last year. It seemed like cancer was everywhere.

As a result, Sarah put 2024 on hold – she missed her daughter’s last sports day and last concert at primary school and had to find a whole new way of co-ordinating family life.

“I’m lucky in some ways that my children are teenagers, so they are able to look after themselves to some degree – but I’m also a single parent, so there are some things that they can’t do, or struggle with, due to their age,” she tells me.

“I have even set up multiple alarms on our Alexa reminding them to put their packed lunches in their bags or leave for school, just in case I can’t get up.”

Sarah says she thought she knew quite a lot about cancer prior to her diagnosis, but now admits she “really didn’t”. She explains: “There are so many terms and procedures to understand – stages and grades, not to mention over 100 different chemotherapy drugs.”

Sarah tells me about the exhausting cumulative effect of chemotherapy, which she endured every three weeks during her cancer treatment: “After the very first lot, I slept for a few hours and felt much better pretty quickly. For my last rounds, I slept for 48 hours solid and even days later, I needed to have a nap in the middle of the day and was in bed by 8pm.”

Sarah’s now finished chemotherapy and, a year on from her diagnosis, is turning 50. She’s throwing a huge party to celebrate not only the birthday milestone, but getting over this “annus horriblis” – a year she couldn’t have gotten through without the people around her.

“People can do so much for us when we are unwell – and I am forever grateful,” she says. “I’ve been really overwhelmed by the support that my friends have given me; from ferrying around my children to and from after-school events and sleepovers when things get bad, to my 75-year-old neighbour mowing the lawn. One friend popped round with a huge pot of pasta sauce and I even had a gift box from a recruiter at work.”

What talking to my strong, resilient friends about their cancer journeys has made me realise most, is the power of community: for when we receive the worst news imaginable, what we need is people around us to see us through. A community of other women: friends, school mums, neighbours.

They had people willing to make them food, pick up their children, go shopping for them or to just sit with them and listen. They had support when they decided to raise money for cancer support charities, when they did fundraisers such as hosting a Macmillan Coffee Morning.

It takes a village to raise a child – and that village will be with you every step of the way when you need them most.

Find out how you can help raise vital funds by hosting a Macmillan Coffee Morning. Sign up now on the Macmillan website

Macmillan Cancer Support, registered charity in England and Wales (261017), Scotland (SC039907) and the Isle of Man (604). Also operating in Northern Ireland.

New push to save key HIV programme Pepfar from Trump’s aid cuts

The US Senate has moved to spare the world’s biggest HIV treatment and prevention programme – which funds drugs and research in more than 50 countries – from $400m (£298m) of aid cuts imposed by Donald Trump.

The proposed cuts to the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) were part of a wider request from Trump to Congress to claw back $9.4bn (£7bn) in funding already allocated to projects around the world. Eight billion dollars of that coming from foreign aid.

Pepfar is estimated to have saved 26 million lives and prevented 7.8 million babies from being born with HIV infections.

The amendment passed by the Senate agreed $400m should effectively remain in Pepfar’s bank account rather than being sent back to the US Treasury. The bill will now go back to the House of Representatives – which passed a version of the bill allowing Pepfar to be cut – for a vote by the end of the week.

On taking office, Trump cut roughly 80 per cent of foreign aid spending virtually overnight, closing swathes of clinics and severing access to lifesaving medicines and tests. Thousands of lives are thought to have been lost already.

If the clawback – or rescissions – bill passes, this money will remain available to spend on the HIV programme, but it doesn’t guarantee any cancelled projects will be reinstated.

Dr Kenneth Ngure, the president-elect of the International Aids Society, said it was “very exciting news” which, if confirmed, meant “there will be more money available for the HIV response”. But he cautioned that there were still policies that had been put into Pepfar which, “don’t favour the HIV response, for example prevention or pre-exposure prophylaxis [PrEP] is currently only being provided for pregnant women,” he added, rather than to all high risk groups as before Trump launched his cuts.

Solianna Meaza, director of policy and advocacy at global health non-profit FHI 360 said: “It remains a concern for us that, at least right now, what we are allowed to do as the implementer of the Pepfar program is only administer certain prevention services to a more limited number of populations,” but she added she was “hopeful” that a greater emphasis could be put back on prevention.

It also remains to be seen how much money is allocated for the programme in future, with it facing possible cuts.

Dr Ngure said, “I would encourage that [the] HIV response is well-funded because we have made a lot of progress over the years. And we had reached a place where we are starting to see the end of HIV as a public health threat. So, we just needed a few more years of funding”.

The majority of the cuts to foreign spending, including $500m taken back from other global health programmes, remain in the bill. These are expected to fall on maternal health, TB and malaria programmes among other areas. They may also still hit some HIV programmes.

“A lot of this funding doesn’t just work in silos, they work hand in hand,” Ms Meaza said. The $500m pot “still did have HIV funding. So HIV still could be impacted… but it’s just hard to say without the details,” she added.

The amended bill is, “a double-edged sword,” she said.

“It’s definitely a big celebration that Pepfar funding has been protected,” Ms Meaza – before adding that she remained “concerned at the overall remaining proposed cuts”.

Mitchell Warren, executive director of HIV advocacy group, the Aids Vaccine Advocacy Coalition (AVAC) said: “Congress should still reject the full package of proposals subject to rescissions. If this package passes, this will establish a dangerous precedent for the administration and Congress to push at will, additional rescissions packages that could rescind and defund other programs across the government.

He added passing the cuts would, “codify [the Department of Government Effiency] DOGE’s unlawful cuts to USAID and foreign assistance overall, essentially giving the administration clearance to continue to operate without any accountability”.

This article is part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project

The Open 2025 live: Leaderboard and McIlroy updates from first round

The Open 2025 begins at Royal Portrush with Rory McIlroy given a hero’s welcome as he returns to Northern Ireland with the Green Jacket.

McIlroy claimed a famous win at The Masters this year, to complete the grand slam, and now hopes to banish the demons of 2019 at the course just 68 miles away from his hometown in Holywood.

Shane Lowry won the Claret Jug that year, while Scottie Scheffler, the world No 1, enters as favourite in the final men’s major of the year, having discussed his overarching philosophy towards his profession and what fulfils him in life in what some have described as a ‘crisis’ speech.

McIlroy is joined by Tommy Fleetwood and Justin Thomas in his first and second tee time, while Scheffler is joined by Lowry and Team USA colleague Collin Morikawa, who will both be part of this September’s Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black, New York.

Follow all the latest updates, scores and analysis from day one at Royal Portrush below, with Padraig Harrington and Team Europe Ryder Cup hopefuls Nicolai Hoejgaard and Tom McKibbin out first at 6:35am BST: