NEVER trust averages. The difference between the mean and the median can be truly startling. For some people, it can seem like a matter of life or death. Are they doomed to be below average, or blessed and above the herd?
It matters in odd ways. When Hay Group, management consultants, report that the average salary in Scotland is now £26,304, I find my mind wandering in much the way it wandered when they decided that Higher maths was not for me: so how many Scots earn exactly £26,304?
Something about the precision of that £304 makes me suspicious. I’d rather know about the number of those who earn less than the average, and the number who earn more. I’m guessing, but only guessing, that the latter category contains a minority of Scots, a minority whose earnings are comfortably greater than £26,304. If thoughtful, they will sometimes ask one another how anyone could live on such an amount. Many of their compatriots can only wonder if they will ever get their hands on that sort of money.
What the average disguises, of course, are those widening inequalities in income which have been the sour fruit of the Labour years. The minority have done very well indeed; the majority less so, year after year. But the real object of the Hay Group study, released last week, was one of those nuances of inequality that is about to have, is already having, profound social and political effects.
The housing market may not yet be unsustainable, as the bankers and economists and estate agents continue to insist, but the dream of home ownership is beginning to look impossible for a great many people. They have been taught to believe that the greatest aspiration is a mortgage and their own rectangle of Scotland. They have come to believe that bricks and mortar will always appreciate in value, and always provide. They have subscribed, above all, to the near-mystical British belief that home ownership justifies every effort in life. Now, far from “poor” in the stereotypical sense, they are tasting real inequality.
Even a modest house is becoming unaffordable. In Lochgelly in Fife, where property is cheapest and the average mortgage is £64,905, monthly payments consume 22.6% of income. In Livingston, the dream will take 34.7% of that average salary; in Stirling, 39.5%; in Inverness, 42.4%; in Edinburgh, an unbelievable 50.2%.
Truly unbelievable, obviously. Earnings in the capital, aggregated, exceed the Scottish average easily, after all, but that is small comfort to ordinary workers in a city in which the average – that word again – mortgage is £144,242, and the average property is selling at £180,303. The 50.2% figure drops a bit, meanwhile, when both partners are working to keep the bank in business.
Still, the pattern is clear and ominous: houses costing 4.62 times the Scottish average wage, rising in the cities to 5.16 times in Aberdeen, 5.3 times in Glasgow, and 6.85 times in Edinburgh. If average means anything, it means that an ordinary young Scottish couple, with no inherited wealth or hope of parental help, have less and less chance, if any, of buying that average property.
Factor in, as they say, all those mounting unsecured debts for our bits of plastic over which government frets before urging us to consume for the economy’s sake. Don’t overlook the pension funds going down the tubes. Don’t forget all the young graduates emerging, blinking, with debts (another average) of £13,000 on their backs. Some of these people even have the impertinence to want children one day.
Everyone needs a home. Yet when we hear sage talk of the housing “market”, of bubbles and booms and sustainability, it is as though we are being asked to anaesthetise ourselves against what is human. A great deal of greed is now woven inextricably into the idea of home ownership, it is true. Who can resist a good deal? Who cares if the other party suffers as long as you come out ahead? Who resists the idea of free money? But everyone needs a home, and the need is more than physical.
If trends continue as they are, a great many people will begin to feel disenfranchised and angry. Once upon a time they would have taken a council house and scrimped for their deposit. Mrs Thatcher, she of the property-owning democracy, put paid to that. The hole in the social fabric has never been filled since, despite some noble efforts. If you are contemplating those multiple earnings, perhaps stuck in the last, unwanted remnants of municipal housing stock, you might therefore wonder about all the talk of affordable social housing. There is some, but nowhere near enough: that’s what keeps the market bubbling nicely.
Still, if your income and wealth make average earnings sound like a vague, theoretical proposition, none of this need be a problem. You will not have to ask yourself who owns Scotland. Chances are, it’s you. The armies of the desperate are not your affair. Their dream of a little rectangle to call their own belongs to another world entirely. You, and a handful of others, have the title deeds to most of this part of the British island.
Euan Snowie is a modest landowner by the standards still tolerated in Scotland. Just the 70 acres, and a few million in the bank honourably acquired – a couple of pollution offences aside – from the family firm. That company made part of its pile disposing of countless carcasses during the foot-and-mouth outbreak while farmers sank into despair. These days Mr Snowie has only two problems: people who may wish to stroll over his 70 acres at Kippen, Stirlingshire, and the 2003 Land Reform (Scotland) Act.
That piece of law was a long time in coming. In the shorthand, it represents “the right to roam”, though the verb is misleading given the restrictions placed on ramblers straying over private land. It did not, as some of the wilder landowners suggested at the time, amount to Stalinist collectivisation. Instead, it attempted, inadequately, to address an old grievance. The grotesque accumulation of land into private hands down the decades meant that most Scots had no access to the greatest part of their own country. The act said that they could at least go for a walk, if they behaved responsibly.
Not good enough for Mr Snowie. He wants 70 acres worth of privacy so that his family can ride unobserved, shooting can continue undisturbed and housebreakers can be deterred. The act allows for exemptions, but no landowner has attempted previously to demand protection for every blade of grass at his or her disposal. Stirling Council thought this unreasonable – no-one was being given the right to ramble through Mr Snowie’s formal garden – and a sheriff must now decide.
Next month a court will also hear the pleas of Ann Gloag, she who made her very large pile, with brother Brian Soutar, from all those attractive privatised buses and bold business practices. Less ambitious than Mr Snowie, she asks only for 12 restricted acres around her castle near Perth. David Murray of Rangers, and others, have been involved in similar skirmishes. The downtrodden landowners of Scotland are fighting back.
You can see their point. Imagine strangers strolling through your back garden, even if you required binoculars to seem them. Would you be any different, if you were rich? Property-ownership does funny things to people. People, that is, for whom property is more than an abstraction. While Scots in their thousands fall from the bottom rung of that famous ladder, landowners are reasserting what they take to be their rights.
Mr Snowie once donated £5000 to the Scottish Labour Party, a fact that may cause a little discomfort in some quarters, and amusement in others. Last week his lawyers asked Stirling Sheriff Court to rule that the exclusion of the public from his modest estate was “essential”. Does he mean that his life would otherwise become unbearable? Or has the idea of ownership, the thing that drives all those first-time buyers, reached its logical conclusion in his indignation at the thought of strangers coming – and this is more than literal – within a mile of him?
Seventy acres is a lot of backyard. To those unable to hope for a semi or a one-bedroom flat, it must seem like the wide open prairie. Perhaps one day they will contrast and compare: their housing crisis and Mr Snowie’s grievance. Bit of a difference, I would have thought. Or do I mean gulf?
