‘Move to Germany if you can’t buy a house’, says Kevin McCloud

First-time buyers should “move to Germany” to get on the housing ladder, TV presenter Kevin McCloud has said.

The Grand Designs presenter said that his advice to younger buyers would be to move to a country with a “healthy and resilient” housing market.

Mr McCloud told political website JOE: “I look at the UK market and I see nothing good here. My advice is move to Germany, maybe that’s the way forward.”

The average house price in the UK in January 2024 was £281,913, according to the UK House Price Index, a rise of 0.5pc from December 2023. But it was a drop of 0.6pc compared to January 2023.

In London, the picture is worse, with an average house price of £730,885, according to property portal Rightmove.

The most expensive area to buy is the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, where there is an average price of £1.2m.

A first-time buyer on an average salary in London must now save 10pc of their take-home pay for 31 years before they will be able to put down a deposit. The equivalent figure in 2003 was just 15 years, according to a Telegraph Money analysis.

The Government was reportedly considering “99pc mortgages” before Jeremy Hunt’s Spring Budget, but the policy was dropped and no other support for first-time buyers was introduced.

Despite this, first-time buyers have bought a record 50pc of homes sold in London this year, spending £108,710 less than in 2020, when mortgages were cheaper, estate agency Hamptons said.

The 64-year-old property presenter also questioned why Britain is “obsessed” with ownership, pointing to France and Germany as places where renting is the norm.

In Germany, 50.9pc of residents are tenants, compared to the European Union average of 30.1pc, according to statistics from the European Commission.

Mr McCloud said that housing had been “weaponised” by Margaret Thatcher’s government, adding: “As a result, people look at housing simply as a means to make money”.

The television presenter, who was speaking ahead of Grand Designs Live, which is being held at the London EXcel in May, said that the profits of developers had increased tenfold, and that companies were focused on profits, rather than meeting Government targets.

His comments come after Location, Location, Location presenter Kirsty Allsopp, 52, said in January that detached houses should be banned for being “environmentally impractical”.

She said that the gap between houses was a “waste of space” and that they lessened community ties, in an interview with the Daily Mail’s Weekend Magazine.

It comes as Michael Gove proposes an extensive overhaul of planning rules in order to help younger buyers on to the housing ladder.

The Housing Secretary will scrap the size and time limits on turning office blocks into homes for residential use and order failing councils to build more houses on brownfield land.

He will also allow for larger extensions on existing properties to help families stay where they are.