The Bank of Mum and Dad becomes more important

The Council of Mortgage Lenders has reported that 31% of aspiring first-time buyers anticipate needing to receive financial help from their parents.

But even more than that, say 35%, said that they would need financial help to be able to enter the housing market.

Among those who are already own their own home, 23% said that their parents had helped them to buy their first home. The younger, more recent buyers, the figure is much larger. 39% of those aged at 30 or less have received financial help and that applies to more than 40% of those who jumped onto the property ladder since 2004.

The survey provided clear evidence that financial help is more necessary in London and the south east, than anywhere else in the UK. 32% of all London home-owners said that they had needed their parents to help; otherwise they would not have been able to get started.

A number of findings can be drawn:

- Generally, there has always been some kind of financial help from parents and relatives, but it has become much more necessary and common in recent years among younger households.

- Parental help tends to exert a significant influence on when the first home is bought, and particularly for recent young buyers. Three quarters of those under 25 (76%) say they would not have been able to buy without financial help.

- Of those who currently live at home or rent, 38% expect to be home-owners within the next five years. 57% of under 30's expected to buy their first home within the next five years, and these younger people were also much more likely than others to anticipate financial help from parents.

- Young people are probably under-estimating the difficulty of entering the housing market. For those currently aged 18-24 to fulfil their 5-year home-ownership dreams, it would mean them achieving a much greater rate of home-ownership (58%) than their current 25-29 counterparts have done (43%).

- At the individual level, there is a clear mismatch between the help that people need and the help that they will actually get. Those who believe that they would need financial help to become home-owners, only 62% anticipate they will actually get it and 28% say that due to the financial pressures of modern life, they probably won't.

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