Are Britons in their 60s financially ‘luckier’ than younger generations, as has been recently claimed? Or is this a misconception?

Recently, in an interview with the Financial Times, former Conservative leader Lord William Hague described his generation (people in their sixties) as “the luckiest generation that has ever lived”. The reason for this? He says it’s partly due to living through a period where house prices went up, defined benefit pension schemes were available, and attending university before student loans. He also claims that young people today are “systematically losing out in the economy”.

On the face of it, his observations seem valid – after all the news is full of stories about unaffordable house prices, the cost of living crisis, and enormous student loans.

But is this really the case? Do young people today really have it worse than previous generations? I know of plenty of people in their sixties who don’t consider themselves financially fortunate. So I decided to look at what the data says to find out.

House prices have risen – but not as dramatically as the 1970s

Let’s take the first of Lord William Hague’s reasons: house prices. Is it less affordable today to buy a home than in the late 1970s and 1980s, when people in their sixties today were starting out?

Here are average UK house prices across the decades, and their equivalent in today’s money:

• 1970: Average price £4,480.03. In today’s money that would be £58,719.46.
• 1980: Average price £23,287.58. In today’s money that would be £131,258.19.
• 1990: Average price £57,683.31. In today’s money that would be £172,383.30.
• 2000: Average price £88,466. In today’s money that would be £169,689.19.
• 2010: Average price £165,000. In today’s money that would be £257,251.
• 2020: Average price £247,000. In today’s money that would be £316,699.96.
• 2025: Average price £292,000. In today’s money that would be £300,662.76.

Yes, we can see that the price of houses has increased significantly over the decades. But the recent rises we’ve seen aren’t as dramatic as the 1970s, when the prices increased five-fold, according to these figures.

How do house prices compare to wages over the decades?

Of course the cost of buying a house is only relevant when compared to what people are earning. If wages have increased along similar lines then in real terms it is no more expensive to buy.

So what have people earned in wages since 1970? To find out, I sourced data showing average weekly wages, and multiplied this by 52 weeks to get an annual salary:

• 1970: Weekly: £17.20. Annual: £894.40
• 1980: Weekly: £75.70. Annual: £3,936.40
• 1990: Weekly: £193.00. Annual: £10,036
• 2000: Weekly: £317.50. Annual: £16,510
• 2010: Weekly: £498.00. Annual: £25,896
• 2020: Weekly: £586.00. Annual: £30,472
• 2025: Weekly: £733.00. Annual: £38,116

When we compare these salaries against the average cost of a house, here is the percentage of your annual salary against the cost of a house:

• 1970: 19.96%
• 1980: 16.9%
• 1980: 17.4%
• 2000: 18.66%
• 2010: 15.69%
• 2020: 12.34%
• 2025: 12.68%

So for example, if your salary was 20% of the cost of an average house, a home would cost five times your salary. As you can see, although the gap has widened since 1970, the gap isn’t as dramatic as many people perceive; there’s only a 4.22% difference since 1980.

The cost of mortgages is much lower today

And what about the cost of buying your own home? While properties are more expensive today, getting a mortgage is easier and cheaper. It wasn’t until the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 that lenders were legally unable to refuse a mortgage to a woman based on her gender or marital status.

Even if you could qualify for a mortgage in the 1970s or 1980s, you would have probably paid a much higher interest rate than today. At the start of the 1970s, the Bank of England base rate was between 7-8%. In 1979, the government raised interest rates to 17% in an effort to combat inflation. Interest rates stayed high throughout the 1980s – the lowest rate during the decade was 7.38%. In 1991, rates rose again from 10% to 12%.

Compare this to the past 20 years, when we’ve seen interest rates as low as 0.10%. Since 2008, the base rate hasn’t risen above 2%. This means mortgages today are far cheaper than they were when people in their sixties now were attempting to get on the housing ladder.

As an example to demonstrate this, let’s say you took out a £200,000, 25-year repayment mortgage. Here’s what your monthly repayments would probably be, based on your interest rate:

• 2%: £848
• 4%: £1,055
• 6%: £1,289
• 8%: £1,544
• 10%: £1,817
• 12%: £2,106
• 14%: £2,407
• 16%: £2,718
• 18%: £3,035

If you borrowed £200,000 today, with an interest rate of 4% you’d pay £1,055 a month. But if you borrowed the same amount in 1986, your interest rate could have been approximately 12%. If you borrowed the same amount with an interest rate of 12%, your monthly mortgage payment would have been about £2,407 – more than double.

So even if properties were proportionally cheaper in the 1970s and 1980s, your chances of being able to afford the mortgage repayments were much lower.

The increase in house prices has meant that it takes longer today to save for a deposit. As a result, the average age of first time buyers in the UK has risen since the 1970s:

1974	26 years old
1984	28 years old
1994	29 years old
2004	29 years old
2014	30 years old
2024	33 years, 8 months old

It’s worth noting that this delay in getting on the housing ladder could be down to the higher rents people are paying today for properties – meaning it takes them longer to save up for a deposit. Making it more attractive for people to become landlords would help solve this problem, as it would increase supply, and is something I personally think the government needs to tackle.

Auto-enrolment means today’s young people should have bigger pension pots

Another point Lord William Hague makes is that there are fewer defined benefit pension schemes today. And he is right in this regard. According to the Pensions Regulator, there has been a yearly decline of 3% of the average number of schemes in the UK – dropping 7,300 in 2012 to 5,060 schemes remaining today.

On the plus side, young people today will benefit from auto-enrolment, which was phased in between 2012 and 2018. The minimum contribution for those who qualify for the scheme is 8% of your salary. This is usually made up of 5% from your wages (4% from you, and 1% from the government in tax relief) and 3% from your employer. This has helped increase the number of eligible employees now saving from 55% to 88%.

The average annual salary for someone aged 22-29 in the UK is £34,724. 8% of this is £2,777.92, which works out at £231.49 a month. If they maintained even just this level of investment, by the time they were 60 their pension pot could be worth over £262,000.

To compare, of those who do have a pension pot today, people aged 55-64 currently have an average of £137,800 saved, and people aged 65-74 have £145,900.

However, there is still progress to be made, as 45% working age adults are currently saving nothing at all into a pension. Particularly at risk are the self-employed (3 million self-employed are not saving into a pension) and low earners (only one in four low earners in the private sector are saving into a pension).

As a result, nearly 15 million people today are under-saving for retirement, and retirees in 2050 are on course for £800 or 8% less private pension income than those retiring today.

The people who are generally regarded to be most behind on pensions is actually Generation X: people born between 1965 and 1980. Analysis of data from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) reveals that 66% of Generation X will have inadequate savings at retirement.

This group is ofter referred to the “forgotten generation”, as they have missed out on both defined benefit pensions, which had mostly been closed to new employees, and on auto-enrolment from a young age.

More young people are attending university today

Lord William Hague points out that people in their sixties were able to attend university without relying on student loans. And it’s true. In the 1970s, students’ tuition fees were paid by their local authority, and they received means-tested maintenance grants.

In the 1980s, the government tried to have fees covered by loans, but a backlash meant this idea was quickly dropped. In 1998, the government introduced mean-tested tuition fees of up to £1,000, which was paid by students upfront. 

In 2006, fees rose again to £3,000 and, instead of paying upfront, students were able to take out a loan which would be repaid depending on their income after graduation. This was increased to £9,000 in 2012, to £9,250 in 2017, to £9,585 in 2025 and will rise again to £9,790 in 2026.

As a result, the amount of debt students in England take on today is significant. The average debt among borrowers who finished their course in 2024 was £53,000. This is “substantially higher” than in any other country included in an education analysis of OECD countries and partner economies.

But this hasn’t seemed to have prevented young people from taking advantage of the opportunities university offers – or made it harder for them to access education.

In 1980, only 15% of young people stayed in any kind of full-time education or training after they turned of 18. This had risen to 25% by 1990. By 2019, this had hit a high of 50%. And it appears to continue to have climbed. According to UCAS, in 2024, 316,850 UK 18-year-olds applied to university or college – an increase of 0.7% from 2023 and the second highest on record. This put the application rate for UK 18-year-olds at 41.3%, down from 41.5% in 2023, but up from 38.2% in 2019.

Unemployment is much lower today compared to the 1980s

And finally, what about the “bleak jobs market” that young people face today? While it is indeed a tough market job today to enter into as a graduate, it’s been worse. Much worse.

In the early 1970s, the UK’s unemployment rate was around 4%, rising to 5.5% by 1978. By 1984, it had risen further, to 11.9%. In 1990, the unemployed rate stood at 10.6%, and in 1997 it was 6.8%. To contrast, the latest UK figures show a current unemployment rate of 5.2%.

Here’s a visual of the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for people over 16 in the UK from 1971 to the end of 2025:

So yes, it’s a tough market today, but as you can see, it’s not as bad as the job market someone in their sixties potentially faced when they were trying to launch a career in the 1980s. And it’s not just graduates and school leavers finding it tough competing with AI today – job hunters in their 50s and 60s are struggling to find roles, despite decades of experience.

Are young people starting out today less ‘lucky’?

So is the world much tougher for young people starting out today? Are they less lucky than someone in their sixties? In a way, that question is impossible to answer, as we don’t have a time travel machine, so can’t see what they will be like and what they will have achieved by the time they retire. And without knowing that, we can’t do a like-for-like comparison with people in their sixties now.

The truth is that Lord William Hague may have forgotten, or may not have experienced personally due to a more advantaged background, but life is often tough when you are starting out as a young adult. You leave university (if you attended) without much life or professional experience, and often little clue as to what you want to do with the rest of your life.

Unless you are lucky enough to have direction, opportunity and contacts, and land a place on a graduate training scheme or dream role, you are likely to take on less than ideal jobs to make ends meet. You may find yourself living in a grim, over-priced rented flat, and no spare change at the end of the month.

This was the reality I faced when I was young, and it’s the same for my 23-year-old son and his friends today. I ended up moving to Hong Kong in the 1990s, as there was no decent employment when I left university, and I couldn’t afford to move out of home in the UK.

However, there are some things that are undoubtedly harder today for young people. While mortgages may be cheaper, the price of property has outpaced salaries. The cost of living is higher – utilities and rent especially (thanks to successive governments foolishly making it less and less appealing to own a buy-to-let). And, thanks to Brexit, today’s young people don’t have the option to work in Europe.

On the plus side, young people today benefit from more employment rights and many more opportunities to earn money online. My son and his friends are also more financially aware, especially about investing, than I and my friends were.

The truth is that there will always be barriers to achieving your goals, whether you were in your twenties in the 1980s or today. Personally I don’t think it’s helpful to dwell too much on what is more difficult, and instead find ways to overcome barriers, and embrace any opportunities you can find or make – whatever age you are.