Who are the biggest mortgage lenders in the UK?

There's Barclays, Nationwide, Santander.

But add to that, the Bank of Mum and Dad.

Parents make up the sixth largest mortgage lender in the UK. While the median

inheritance for those who receive one is £11,000, so a tidy sum, but not exactly a King's ransom,

inheritance and lifetime gifts from parents are playing an ever-increasing role in determining people's

life chances. What does this mean for millennials and

Gen Z who are locked out of property ownership and saddled with debt? Did baby boomers kill meritocracy?

And do Hooray Henrys have a role in the revolutionary class? With me to discuss all of this

and more is historian and author Dr. Eliza Philby. We'll be mostly talking about her book in Heritocracy. It's time to talk about the bank of mum and dad. Eliza Filby, thank you so much for joining us. Absolutely pleasure to be here. Welcome to Downstream. Thank you. I'm loving it here. It's very snug. It's a very, very snug room. So you're a historian by trade.

How did you become interested in the idea of generational inequality and the idea of generations, you know, in the first place?

I think the short answer to that is I'm a millennial. Like, how could you not be interested in intergenerational unfairness?

And to be precise, I'm a geriatric millennial.

And I think I remember David Willits is the pinch coming out.

And that's sparking the conversation throughout the 2010s, actually,

really intensifying, I think, pre-Brexit

about how expensive it was to buy a house and how much cheaper it had been for our parents

and the costs of education and perhaps the depleting rewards on that education. And all of this

dialogue that really was part of a national conversation,

but never really trickled down to politics and policies, actually.

And I think that's because of the sort of stranglehold that the baby boom has had over the Conservative Party.

But essentially, I was so sort of immersed in it.

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