Wales is in the midst of a housing crisis, with Shelter Cymru estimating that one in every three people are negatively impacted. SC Cook went to Blackwood, south Wales, to talk to young people about the problem of high rents, low wages and why the housing system needs to change.
Image: Blackwood, all images by SC Cook
Keeley and Sadie, 21 and 22 respectively, are standing outside the Maxime cinema in Blackwood, thumbing through their phone in an attempt to get a Covid pass so they can watch the latest release.
It is a cold day in late November, Both have travelled down from Ebbw Vale where they live with their parents. After finishing university in July, there seemed little option other than to move back home.
For Keeley, this isn’t a situation she wants to continue but she feels she has little choice.
“I’d love to move out personally, that’s something that I’m looking into a lot,” she says. “But because of the lack of well paid jobs around here I’m going to struggle to be able to finance moving out. It’s gonna be delayed for quite a long time, I think, unfortunately.”
After studying psychology at the University of South Wales in Pontypridd, she has been unable to find anything approaching a ‘graduate job,’ let alone in the subject she specialises in. Instead she has had to settle for a job in dog grooming, which she can’t help but laugh about.
The Maxime Cinema, Blackwood.
But Keeley feels stuck, and even though she pays her parents some rent, the thought of moving out and having to pay rent, plus a hefty deposit and bills at current market rates seems an impossible step up. The idea of owning her own house is even further away. “In terms of getting a mortgage, it’s not gonna happen for me anytime soon,” she says.
“I think it’s been made a lot more difficult for our age group in terms of getting a job that’s well paid enough to live in a nice house… The prices of everything are going up but the support and the availability of good jobs to finance aren’t going up with it.”
Her friend Sadie agrees, and says that the housing situation was easier for their parents’ generation.
“When my Mam and Dad bought their first house, it was less than £100,000. Now, to get a startup house it’s like over 300,000,” she says.
“Wages coincided more with the prices of things,” Keeley says of the labour market decades ago. “I don’t think the living wage has gone up enough for people to keep up with the increased price of moving out.”
She says that for young people in places like Blackwood and Ebbw Vale, it’s mostly low paid work that’s available and she says that people get “sucked into jobs that are minimum wage.”
“Unless you’re working silly hours, they’re not sufficient.”
Sadie works in retail, a job she feels “stuck in” but admits that she has little choice after graduating from Swansea University,
“It’s very hard to find a job that you’ve done your degree in. Very, very hard and very limited.”
“And people don’t tend to take on people who just left Uni because they think they have no experience.”
Keeley wants to move into educational psychology, but admits that it’s a long, arduous and expensive journey even after her degree.
Both Sadie and Keeley are in a situation that they think is all too common for others of their generation. Keeley tells me how her university tuition fees were £9,000 per year for a three year course, and that’s just for the university course, on top of that comes student loans needed for food and a social life.
Barely over 20, they both have a debt of at least £30,000 that they have to start repaying as soon as they earn over £22,000, meaning if they do get out of minimum wage work, money that could go towards moving out will instead be spent paying back a mountain of debt.
As things stand, they are stuck in minimum wage jobs and forced to live with their parents. And if they do find the money to move out, going to somewhere like Cardiff, where rent is even higher, is an even bigger step up.
This is a situation that Lina – not her real name – knows all too well. A 22 year old who lives in nearby Newbridge, Lina lives in a small, one bedroom flat. She says she is constantly looking for somewhere bigger but it’s impossible.
Even though Lina works full time in a nearby gym, she says the cost of living is unsustainable.
“I really don’t have much left over [each month],” she says. “I really have to save to spend anything other than my bills, food and stuff like that.”
She says that the “general situation facing everyone in this country is pretty bad at the moment,” but for her generation, many feel completely trapped.
“A lot of young people, unfortunately, have to stay for a long time with their parents,” Lina says.
Of course, living in the home you grew up in might be fine, but Lina thinks people have a choice: either they have an ok standard of living or they move out. Having both is impossible.
“If they [young people] still want to buy clothes, shoes, have a car and all of that, it’s basically not possible to do that while you have a flat or a house, pay bills, pay council tax, water and all that.”
Out of the seven people I spoke to, all between 20 and 25, five were still living with their parents even though they wanted to move out, and the majority of these were in full time work.
One, a 20 year old supermarket worker called Alicia, said that she struggles sometimes as it is and can’t begin to think about the huge cost of moving out, and only then to hand over a huge chunk of her wage to a landlord.
“I still live with my parents,” she says. “And I do worry about what it’s gonna be like in the future when I have my own house and my own bills to pay.”
The only jobs available are generally minimum wage and unless she works lots of overtime in her current job, which often isn’t even possible, she’s stuck.
I also chat to two young men, 19 and 21, one of which works in a local factory but still can’t see how he’s going to be able to move out of his parents house, pointing to the fact that one family member bought their house for £16,000 years back, yet now the prices have soared in a way that wages haven’t.
In reality, the only option for most people is to try and find somewhere to rent. Towns in the south Wales Valleys may be cheaper than other areas, but a look at the Caerphilly Private Landlords Facebook page indicates that demand in the borough has been high over the past 12 months. In fact one article which highlighted rising demand and rents in the sector was shared with the line, “all promising news for Landlords.”
Recently Lina’s landlord put her rent up by £10 a month with no explanation. This might not sound like a lot, but her budget is so tight it really matters. But it’s also the principle of it.
“The reason was just basically the Covid crisis,” she says. “Which for me, it’s not a reason. Nothing changed in my flat, nothing was improved. I haven’t noticed any struggle of the landlord during the Covid crisis, and yet the rent went up, if anything, we struggled.”
Lina worked at McDonalds throughout the lockdown in a situation that will be familiar to many: going out to work in a key industry whilst having to give over a huge chunk of your pay to a landlord, only to see the rent rise as the housing market spirals.
She says she looks at other places to live almost daily, but in her budget of £500 on rent, nowhere ever comes up nearby and if it does, it’s gone immediately.
The idea of going somewhere like Cardiff is completely off the table, but so too is Newport, somewhere else she’s been looking at. “That’s not affordable, either,” she admits.
She also studies criminology at the University of South Wales in her spare time, making the situation even more difficult to navigate.
Asked about the idea of enforced rent caps, meaning landlords can’t charge what they want and must instead stick to an national agreed rate, Lina replies, “Yeah, I think that’s a good idea.”
The idea of rental control rose up the political agenda this week in Wales as the cooperation deal between Plaid Cymru and Welsh Labour specifically mentioned them, but the language was vague and non-committal.
It simply said the aim was to “publish a White Paper to include proposals for a right to adequate housing, the role a system of fair rents (rent control) could have in making the private rental market affordable for local people on local incomes and new approaches to making homes affordable.”
This is already at least two degrees away from any action, as it only commits the Welsh Government to publish a paper that includes ‘proposals’ that only look at what impact rent controls ‘could have.’ It’s not surprising that campaigners are not getting their hopes up.
Any serious attempt at making rents affordable will involve a confrontation with landlords, some of which have large property portfolios. But it’s hard to imagine Welsh Labour, or Adam Price, having a showdown with big business. The fear is it’s a promise that either never gets delivered or is watered down to almost nothing.
And it’s not only rents that are the issue- Lina says that wages need to rise and the cost of living needs to fall dramatically as well. Born and raised in Poland, she has been living in Wales for the past 5 years.
She laughs about the fact that people in Poland often think that living standards in Britain are much higher but in reality, the situation facing workers in both countries is the same
“The housing situation in Poland isn’t very great. It’s not affordable, you get your wages and basically everything goes on bills, on petrol, whatever you need, and then you’re left with barely enough money for food. But here right now it’s exactly the same. So it doesn’t make a difference if you live in Poland or if you live here.”
Unsurprisingly, the crisis facing young working class people will have a political effect, even if it’s not obvious.
One is the idea of strike action, both in terms of a rent strike and in the more traditional sense of collectively withdrawing your labour.
Blackwood itself has recently been hit by a strike by bus workers, in what became one of the longest running disputes in the area in recent years as workers fought for a £10.50 minimum wage rise.
The strike and the way in which it highlighted the scourge of low pay clearly had an impact.
All seven of the young people I spoke to were in support of the workers who went on strike.
“They’re well within their rights to do it,” said Keeley, her friend nodding in agreement. “And if that’s what they’ve got to do to get listened to then that’s what they got to do.”
Both Billy and Alicia also backed the strike, saying workers fought for what they deserved.
The strike impacted Lina as she had to drive her boyfriend’s mother around when the busses weren’t running, but blamed the company Stagecoach for not conceding to the demands sooner. “They could have done it earlier,” she said.
Blackwood
When it comes to mainstream politics however, there was less interest, with no one I spoke to having voted in either the 2019 Westminster election or the 2021 Senedd election.
“I didn’t feel informed enough to kind of make that decision,” says Keeley. But this doesn’t mean that she’s disinterested, and says that the political and economic system we have is ‘flawed’.
“I think there is still quite a lot of inequality within politics and just generally,” she says. “I guess the rich get richer and the poor just stay poor.”
Asked if the political or economic system is working, Lina replies, ”No. Neither of them definitely. There needs to be some real changes.”
She is particularly angry about the possibility of Covid restrictions being brought back in, another thing she thinks has affected young people’s future. If protests and riots erupted in this country against new measures, as witnessed in parts of Europe, Lina says she would be excited to join in.
“I’m absolutely not like on any right or left side [in politics],” she says, saying that she doesn’t vote in elections, “it’s about human rights for me.”
But she says she would also join a street movement over the things we’ve been discussing: wages, rents and the general failures of the system.
“I think it affects people’s mental health, the fact that we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future and everything is so uncertain,” Lina says of the society we’re living in. “The housing situation, the political situation, economic situation, everything.”
