Home is where the heart is…

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‘Let’s not go with the flow for this story…’

During 23 years with the BBC, and a 41 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, it has always been paramount to look at key events differently, and this is now underlined by figures about home prices in Wales released this week.

 

Let’s try and look at things a bit differently.

Homes as here in Ceredigion are unaffordable for most first-time buyers

New statistics show how difficult it is for first-time buyers to get on the property ladder in parts of Wales – indeed they are the worst places in Britain.

A home affordability index report published by Skipton Group building society found six out of the 10 least affordable areas of Britain were in Wales.

These figures have some weight too, because the index is based on data from the building society itself,  the Office for National Statistics (ONS), Bank of England (BoE) and Land Registry (LR).

The prices of houses in Cardiff are unbelievably high

The areas which top the list are:

  • Ceredigion – where only 2.7 per cent of first-time buyers can afford to buy

  • Powys – where only 2.7 per cent of first-time buyers can also afford to buy

  • Pembrokeshire – where only 2.9 per cent of first-time buyers can afford to buy

  • Cardiff – where only 3 per cent of first-time buyers can afford to buy

  • Vale of Glamorgan – where only 3.1 per cent of first-time buyers can afford to buy

  • Monmouthshire – where only 3.3 per cent of first-time buyers can afford to buy

I don’t blame the mainstream journalists for seizing on the worst possible result of this index as the heart of the matter because I was trained to do exactly that.

As the BBC have reported: ‘”(Ceredigion has) the seventh lowest median income in Great Britain” (but)…less than 3% of potential first-time buyers living in the area can afford to buy…’

Now Phil can look at things differently from other journalists

There is, however, another way of looking at this, and now I am much older and wiser I can examine these events in the round.

Obviously these figures are extremely bad news for younger people wanting to get started on the property ladder now (in for example the Welsh capital Cardiff), but for those who own their homes they are not bad at all, and may actually show that these parts of Wales are becoming more prosperous, which could in the long run actually HELP first-time buyers!

There has been a big increase in the price of houses in Wales

Home prices generally have gone up massively over the last decade.

Let’s take the case of one of those areas cited in the report – Cardiff.

The average property price in the city’s postcode area is £241,000, the median price is £210,000.

The price of homes to buy increased by one per cent over the year, on top of huge increases in the years before that (not least during lockdown).

Cardiff’s economy is booming

Together Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan (another of the areas mentioned in the survey) have the highest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Wales.

The economy of Cardiff and adjacent areas makes up nearly 20 per cent of Welsh GDP and 40 per cent of the city’s workforce are daily in-commuters from the surrounding South Wales area, spreading prosperity into the valleys.

Good reading material…

So it may not be as simple as saying ‘Wales is the worst area of Britain for first-time buyers’!

I know that now…

 

The memories of Phil’s astonishing, decades long award-winning career in journalism (when he always looked behind the headlines) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in the book ‘A Good Story’. Order it now.