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From The Sunday Times

June 10, 2007

Struggling first-time buyer in Cornwall

Caroline Brannigan

Claire Welch’s life sounds idyllic. She lives in a flat overlooking a Cornish river, and has a charming five-mile cycle to and from her job in a pretty coastal town. But she is stressed. Buying a home seems out of her reach, even if Welch and her boyfriend, Lewis Cole, club together.

Welch, 24, earns up to £18,000 a year workingfor a wine merchant in Padstow – or “Padstein”, as it’s known, thanks to the ubiquitous chef Rick Stein.“That’s a good salary for Cornwall,” she says. “Many young people are on the minimum wage.” Cole, 21, is a head chef on £14,000 a year.

Those salaries won’t stretch to a property purchase. The cheapest place in Padstow on the Rightmove website, for example, is a £95,000 studio flat. Described as a “bolt hole”, it is 14ft x 9ft, with room for a bed and a shower, no kitchen, and a “characteristic outside WC”. A two-bed cottage near the quay costs £239,950. So the couple rent a tiny one-bed flat in Wadebridge for £450 a month. They can’t afford to buy there, either. The cheapest flat on Rightmove in this popular Camel estuary town is £129,950.

Welch says that anger about affordability is growing among her peers. As private tenants, they have little security, and face the prospect of raising children in homes where they could be given a month’s notice to quit.

Why not ask mum and dad for help? “Why is that fair, to expect them to give you money when they have already supported you for all those years? Many can’t afford to do it, anyway. I expect to have to work hard for things, and to wait for them, but there are no cheap places any more. The clay-pit areas around St Austell used to be cheaper, but the Eden Project has pushed up prices even there. Property is completely out of reach, and I can’t see an end to it.

“The answer is to build more homes that only first-time buyers can have, and that are genuinely affordable. If they don’t, there would have to be a huge housing crash for us to afford anything. Prices would have to drop by £100,000.”