When people are born into money it’s like they’ve stepped on an up escalator, borne effortlessly upwards while the poor go down

In the last few decades, an apparently ordinary financial institution has assumed an importance that could hardly have been foreseen. It is not a finance company, a payday lender or even a crypto-currency. It is, rather, the Bank of Mum and Dad. Barely a day goes by without a media story about the struggles of young people to afford a first home, and their experience is rarely free from some kind of parental influence. Even the young grafters who have supposedly pulled themselves up by the bootstraps into homeownership often turn out to have lived rent-free with their parents or received some other kind of family support. Even more often, of course, they have simply relied on a large deposit from mum and dad.

This is, in one sense, innocuous: parents want to assist their offspring financially, and have surely been doing so for as long as money has existed. But it is also insidious, because it allows some young people a significant – and completely unfair – advantage over others. And because those who can help their children into homeownership are themselves more likely to be homeowners, it ensures that advantage and disadvantage are passed down the generations. The economist Shamubeel Eaqub, with his eye for a well-turned phrase, calls this “the return of the landed gentry”.