Stay In Your Lane: Why Kirstie Allsopp Probably Won’t Be Moving Up North
“Are you still watching?” Or are you shattering all your dreams of ever owning a home and would you be better off staring at a blank TV screen and listening to the sound of that extra £5.99 a month lining your pocket, bringing you one step closer to the first rung of the housing ladder?
According to the authority that is Kirstie Allsopp, young people would be able to afford a home in no time if they’d only give up their Netflix accounts, along with a few other luxuries. Unsurprisingly, the Location Location Location presenter came under fire last week for speaking on topics that she has no experience of.
Speaking to The Sunday Times, Allsopp postured that there are so many “new drains on finances of young homebuyers,” like gym memberships, holidays, and the dreaded Netflix account. It enraged her to see said young people not making the sacrifices she made, namely walking to work, taking her own lunch, and having very rich parents, that helped her to afford her first home at age twenty-one.
After suggesting she understood that while some people could not afford a home, many could but just weren’t willing to make enough of a sacrifice, she rounded off by arguing that “It’s about where you can buy, not what you can buy,” adding, “If I had any roots further north and I was trying to buy [I’d move].”
As a northerner, I’d like to call bull on Allsopp’s suggestion she would ever have deigned to buy a house up north.
On a grey morning in late 2007, my registration class was abuzz. Word on the corridor was that Middlesbrough, our hometown, had been voted the worst place to live in the entire country. An episode of Location Location Location had been dedicated to it and had covered a whole host of the town’s shortcomings.
From drug abuse and binge drinking averages that soared above the national average to the highest level of crime in the UK and poor levels of health, the programme painted quite the grim picture of our hometown. At the time, it seemed like a bit of a joke, none of us really understanding what it meant to live in the worst place you could live in the country. And while it seems pretty negative now, there is one positive—and it supports Allsopp’s suggestion of moving further north too.
Middlesbrough has repeatedly been listed as one of the most affordable places to buy and live since that original broadcast. With the average property valued at just £131,000, house prices are well below the average for the rest of England, which currently sits around £285,000.
But while it would be more affordable for myself, and thousands of other working-class people like me, to simply stay put in our hometowns, there has to be something said for the prospects of remaining where we are.
According to the Tees Valley Combined Authority, the biggest industries in my hometown are energy, logistics, offshore, advanced manufacturing and engineering, life sciences, digital, and business services. Great news for those interested in and educated for careers in this kind of work, but not so great if you aspire to do something different.
My choice to move out of my hometown, like many others, was because of the lack of job prospects in the area. The creative industries thrive in bigger cities where there is real investment, and whatever the Tories say about levelling up northern towns, we’re yet to actually see those plans come to fruition. (Indeed, the most levelling up Middlesbrough appears to have had is the new LNER service from Middlesbrough to London that feels more like an escape route than adding anything of real value.)
But moving to a big city for work means moving to a less affordable part of the country and it means the chances of ever being able to buy a house in the city you work in are pretty low.
With fewer job prospects, and a long list of reasons why my hometown (and a lot of other northern towns and cities if the Worst Place to Live lists are anything to go by) is an undesirable place to live, why then, is Allsopp advocating for new homeowners to move up north where houses are cheaper?
To me, her message to working-class people is clear: stay in your lane. Buy houses in only in towns you can afford them, whether or not you want to live there or if there are any jobs for you there and do so by giving up all of the luxuries you continue to treat yourself to out of pure selfishness.
In her tirade against young people and their lack of sacrifice, Allsopp even made comments about young people’s decision to get a degree, saying, “I do think you have to ask yourself what your degree is giving you.”
Well, Kirstie, for most working-class people it is the opportunity to improve our prospects and have the chance to get better jobs where we earn more money and can move up the ladder quicker. Something she perhaps doesn’t understand having probably had plenty of family connections to get her into jobs where others, with degrees, may have missed out for simply not knowing the right people.
Her suggestion to young homeowners was to live at home, get a job straight from school and save as much as possible to buy a house as quickly as possible. For some people, this is what they want for their lives, but it isn’t what everyone wants.
For Allsopp, it appears that working-class people need to give up quite a lot if they want to buy a house. Among the sacrifices she seems to suggest are the aforementioned Netflix account, gym membership, and holidays, but also the chance at an education that could help you to get a better job and increase your earnings as well as the freedom to choose where you live.
The graft that Allsopp and her ilk purport to be the reason for their success rarely ever seems to come with as many sacrifices as it would were they working class. As they conveniently forget to mention their incredibly wealthy parents, proponents of the ‘everyone has the same 24-hours’ agenda seem to create endless lists of things that working-class people should give up to become as successful as they are, without ever addressing the system of class that means upward mobility is rare, and sometimes totally impossible.
One of the most annoying things about Allsopp’s comments is that anyone who currently pays rent is already proving, month on month, that they could keep up with mortgage payments. Renting, in quite a lot of cases, is actually much more expensive than monthly mortgage repayments, proving that we actually have the means, we just lack the deposit and the parents to gift us it.
With the cost of living set to increase by hundreds and hundreds of pounds, luxuries we once took for granted are likely to become impossible. Since saving £5.99 a month is unlikely to get us the deposit for a house any time soon—or indeed, in our lifetimes—keeping our Netflix accounts could mean the difference between freezing in silence and freezing while at least being entertained.
In the next year, gas and electric, student loan repayments, and national insurance tax are all set to rise, increasing the cost of simply surviving for most people. And in a time when many are worried about how they will manage to stretch their paycheque to cover these costs each month, it seems ridiculous to even be arguing over who can and can’t afford to buy a house. The difference between dealing with this huge jump in the cost of living in a rented property and in a house that you own is a £25,000 deposit. A 54% increase in heating bills probably isn’t conducive to saving up that amount. Nor is cancelling your Netflix subscription.
As a young person being told over and over again that I am selfish for not giving up the things in life that make it a little better, I have a question for the likes of Allsopp: why should we?
Why should we give up our oat-milk lattes and our gym memberships and our subscriptions when I would hazard that, had Netflix been around when Allsopp was buying her first home, she would probably have had a subscription too?
What is holding young, working-class people back from getting onto the housing market isn’t a Netflix account but a system that serves the wealthy while keeping the poor in their place for the sake of profit margins. The graft isn’t real, capitalism and the British class system are.
Written Alex Ramsden
Hi, I’m Alex (she/her). I’m 25 and recently graduated from a Masters in International Multimedia Journalism at Newcastle University. I am currently working as a freelance writer and in my free time I have started a blog, which you can find here, where I write about sustainable fashion, books, and anything else that takes my fancy! I love reading anything from Sarah J Maas to Jane Austen and anything on feminism and I aspire to write fiction as well as non-fiction. You can find my portfolio here.
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