We're now going to talk about your podcast, which is related to people's living standards, of course, because it's about the housing crisis, which defines so much of the lived experience, frankly, of a lot of people, particularly under the age of 40, 45,

a generation driven into an unregulated ripoff private rented sector, where they hand over massive amounts of their often low wages to private landlords to pay off their mortgages and generally to make money.

It's called Crash Course with Michael Walker. Let's have a little clip here of Michael Walker debating there. What's his title, Private Landlord's Association guy?

Private is that the residential letting agents association who's a president elect, and then he's also a letting the director and a state agent, and he's also a landlord of free properties.

Can I just say for those who are not listening on the podcast, he looks like you expect him to look. So that's a really personal thing to say, but I'm just saying.

Now personally, when landlords talk about profits and losses, they say, oh, I'm only, you know, the rent is only a few hundred pounds more than my mortgage repayments.

I'm not, I'm not rinsing this property for money. I'm not exploiting these tenants because I'm not making a massive profit.

I might not be making a massive month-to-month profit, but the end of this whole process, you've got someone else to pay for your mortgage, and at the end of this whole, you know, rigmarole, where someone has been paying 50% of their earnings to you every month, you have a very valuable asset.

You're sitting on a big asset. So I don't really see why landlords expect to both make a month-to-month profit and acquire a very valuable asset at the end of it.

It seems like they want their cake and to eat it. You say, I want someone else to pay my mortgage, and I want them to pay above and beyond that as well.

Now, to me, that doesn't seem particularly fair. That's not a fair relationship, and that's why I'm, you know, very frustrated as a rent, because I feel like I'm giving so much of my earnings to someone to buy them a flat.

So firstly, why is it that you're not a propitiona? Why am I saying you? I mean, why is this hypothetical tenant not a propitiona? Why don't they buy their own property and pay off their own mortgage?

So that's point one. Point two, I agree that when there are profits, we can have this conversation, but when there is an 850 pounds a month loss that the landlord has to subsidize somebody's rent by every single month, in a market where house values have fallen, and the prediction is that they could fall further.

Why would a landlord stay in this market? Why would they not just sell and maybe return to the market when conditions become more favorable?

Yeah, Michael, why isn't the tenant just buy a house? No, I immediately asked that into you actually I decided it was silly that I was paying rent to someone to buy a flat. So I got a mortgage bought a house, and I've been happily paying my mortgage ever since.

Just go and buy a house. Just, oh, oh, I didn't really like I could just, oh, you just buy a house. There was a spare 200 grand in my bank account, which by the way is the average deposit now for a house in London.

I think or 150 200 grand. It's not ballpark. It's interesting because obviously what's happened is the gap between the average earning and the average house prices massively gone up the gap between the two obviously.

But I mean, even when people talk about like, well, you know, you know, you'll inherit this or that from your parent, it's interesting. The average inheritance age for those who are do have any inheritance, which is obviously a small number.

Well, it's a relatively privileged section of younger people, but apparently even that is the average age is 55 and it's like something like 10 grand, not a deposit.

So it's really interesting because this is so structural and embedded, isn't it? That actually, you know, it's not like all of a sudden there'll be this massive surge in the right in homeownership rates as millennials get older.

Yeah, well, unless something significant changes, no. I mean, I think what the conservatives want to do.

And I think on this count, unfortunately, labor is sort of lent into it is they want to restore consent for the system as a whole by allowing a top slice of millennials essentially to join the property market and get on the housing ladder and enjoy the sort of speculative gains that the housing market has given.

...