Introduction

Britain is home to a greater concentration of dollar millionaires than anywhere else in the world. Western Europe has the most millionaires in the world and it is within Britain, especially in and around London, that the greatest cluster of the richest people on earth live and, at least for part of the time, are housed. In this chapter we show how, despite the economic crash, the housing wealth of the very richest continues to climb at ever increasing rates.

Over time in recent decades a greater and greater share of total housing, of floor-space, of bedrooms and of gardens, has been acquired by a small but increasingly affluent group of people: the rich. The rich have become much richer in Britain and were best placed, initially, to weather the arrival of economic hard times. Some have picked up great bargains. Residentially the rich have done well out of the crash, they have seen the value of their homes rise while most others have fallen.

Beneath the rich are the affluent, who have tended to copy the rich but on a smaller scale. Some have sought to buy more than one home. Many are concerned over the rate of inheritance tax and worry that the value of their property might at some point exceed the inheritance tax threshold and that they will be taxed on a proportion of that wealth at death.

Britain has had enough housing for all for some time, but every year the homes we have are shared out less and less efficiently as more and more of them are bought and sold through the free market. Even as prices have been falling for most homeowners in recent years, rates of repossession of the homes of those unable to pay their mortgages have been rising.

People who were persuaded to buy homes they can now not afford did so because, as residential inequalities rose, it became more and more vital to pay as much as you could to live as near as you could to the affluent so that you could enjoy their low crime rates, so that your children could mix with their children at school and so that you did not ‘waste’ your money on rent or on buying a home in an area where prices might not rise quickly.