Intergenerational Centre

Family matters

How concerns for younger relatives bridge generational divides

Report by Zack Grant, Jane Green & Geoffrey Evans of Nuffield Politics Research Centre, Nuffield College, University of Oxford, in collaboration with Molly Broome, Sophie Hale & Lord David Willetts of the Resolution Foundation.

This new report, a collaborative project between the Resolution Foundation and Nuffield College, Oxford, investigates people’s attitudes towards intergenerational inequalities in economic wellbeing, as well as public policies that might help to reduce them. The authors place a special emphasis on the opinions of middle-aged (40-59) and older (60+) Britons, who make up an ever-growing proportion of the national electorate. It shows who, within these older groups, is sympathetic to the difficulties facing younger adults and supports state investment in them. This sympathy and support is shown to derive from family ties which motivate older adults to support policies that benefit younger generations, and punish parties whose policies do not.

The full report Family Matters: How concerns for younger relatives bridge generational divides is available online at: www.politicscentre.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/research/family-matters

Key findings

  • Over half of under 40s (51%) believe that they will have worse living standards over their lifetimes than their parents.
  • 59% of adults aged 40-59, and 45% of adults over 60, believe  that current younger generations are worse-off financially than both middle-aged (40-59) and older (60+) adults.
  • Around one in four people aged 40 and over (24%), including one in five people over 60 (19%), have close relatives in their twenties and thirties that they think are struggling financially, a higher rate than have struggling family members aged 40-59 (15%) or 60+ (15%).
  • Almost one in three people aged 40-59 (32%) and 60+ (31%) thought it likely that they themselves would need to give significant financial or practical support to their younger family members within the next decade.
  • Majorities of those aged 60 and over support increased spending on policies aimed at young adults (even at the cost of higher taxes) with more free vocational education (65% support) and local affordable housing (61% support) being most popular. Support is similarly strong among those aged 40-59 (60% and 56%, respectively).
  • Among adults aged 60 and over with younger family members that are struggling financially, support for spending on vocational education and increasing affordable housing locally is 9 percentage points higher than average for their age group. Similar results are found for middle-aged people, as well as for other policies such as free childcare.
  • Older adults with financially struggling younger family members are 13 percentage points less likely to support the Conservatives, and 9 percentage points more likely to support Labour, than the average person of their age. For those in their forties and fifties these gaps are 7 and 5 percentage  points, respectively.
  • Differences in support for policies and parties between those with better or worse off younger relatives cannot be explained by differences in the financial wellbeing of these older and  middle-aged adults themselves.

Further reading

Housing hurdles
The changing housing circumstances of young people in Britain
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Iman Acharya, Molly Broome
An intergenerational audit for the UK
2024
·
Molly Broome, Sophie Hale, Hannah Slaughter
Unsung Britain
The changing economic circumstances of the poorer half of Britain
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Mike Brewer, Molly Broome, Nye Cominetti, Adam Corlett, Charlie McCurdy, Louise Murphy, Cara Pacitti, Hannah Slaughter, James Smith, Lalitha Try