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In among a spate of reports about the housing market Research from the National Centre for Social Research, on behalf of the Halifax, suggests Britain could become a nation of renters within a generation as potential first time buyers' mortgage applications continue to be turned down. Commentators debate whether this is good or bad news.

renting:

"Today, crippling levels of household debt, repossession and housing-related stress coincide with low wages, long hours, and extraordinarily few strikes. It's hardly a coincidence. A housing crisis, with millions in insecure or overpriced housing, doesn't necessarily lead to anger, to a demand for something better - it leads to fear, anxiety that even the Barratt Homes rabbit hutch you've acquired could be easily lost.
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"The UK's preponderance of home ownership is matched only by the poverty of its homes. The most expensive in Europe, they are also the most dilapidated when old, the smallest when new. And yet, from the London county council's arts and crafts estates of the 1890s to the Trellick Tower in the 1970s, we once had some of the world's finest low-cost rented housing. It was not owned by us as individuals, struggling to meet the instalments - it was owned by us collectively, as a public good. Rather than wishing cheap mortgages back, we need to be thinking outside of our own homes and lots."

there shouldn't be a stigma attached to not owning a house:

"Well within living memory it was quite normal for a newly married couple (when that was more conventional than now) to move in with their parents or in-laws for a few years while they saved up for a deposit on a house. That, in turn, would require the ability to demonstrate a determination to keep up regular savings (and thus regular repayments). Only then were the funds released. Buying a home in your 30s rather than your 20s never used to be a symbol of failure. So why is it now?"

The against "Generation Sofa" - people in full time employment forced to sleep on their friends' sofas because they can't get a place of their own. She suggests the Financial Services Authority should support mortgages with lower deposits:

"Amid this welter of views and recommendations, one organisation is strangely silent. The Financial Services Authority's lax boom-time mortgage policy, including its assent to the 125 % loan, inflated the housing bubble.
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"Now, the watchdog proposes curbs on the banks that would ensure that Generation Renters would be perpetual tenants: 95%, 90% and even 80% loans would be rarer than at present.
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"Such an overreaction would exacerbate, rather than tackle, the current inequality."

, arguing instead that allowing more mortgages could lead to another housing bubble and "there is nothing aspirational or equitable about courting another recession":

"We need to strike the right balance, allowing people to take out affordable mortgages while reducing the risk of excessive borrowing creating instability in the economy as a whole. Mortgages are usually a 25-year commitment and high loan to income ratios allow borrowers to take out large mortgages that appear affordable at very low interest rates, but with no guarantee that interest rates will remain low, heightening the risk of defaults and repossessions. A 90 per cent loan to value ratio allows for a 10 per cent fall in house prices before negative equity takes hold.
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As Shelter have found, this is an argument that first-time buyers support, even though it may make it more difficult for them to get onto the housing ladder. They recognise that loose lending and cheap credit is a recipe for future instability both in our housing market and our wider economy."

Finally, the people should lower their standards in the homes they wish to buy:

"Many feel like Bisto Kids, waifs locked out of unattainable territory.
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"More strangely, the price of houses (merely a peculiar kind of inflation) produces an allure that some people seem to think rubs off just by looking at appetising pictures of them. It is like devouring TV cookery programmes without ever cooking a meal.
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"If consumers of house-price porn remember the line 'there's no place like home', they forget the preceding phrase: 'be it ever so humble'."