Official figures released in April have revealed that home ownership in the UK has fallen for the first time in a hundred years, as more and more people are now renting rather than buying their own homes.

According to the Office For National Statistics, the rise in the number of renting households could well be “linked to the decline in the number of households getting on the housing ladder, usually through a mortgage."

The statistics show that in 1918 around 75% of people in the UK owned their own homes, with the remaining percentage renting. In the years that followed home ownership in the UK began to rise faster, with an acceleration in the 1950s and another in the 1980s through initiatives such as the selling off of council housing. However the difference between home ownership figures for 2001 (69% of the population) and 2011 (64% of the population) show a 5% decline in home ownership. Whilst this might not seem particularly monumental, it is the first decline in almost a century. The situation is particularly stark in London where more than half the population of the city was renting in 2011 and where the prospect of buying a property is fairly unlikely for most of those renters.

Given this increase in the UK rental market, it might come as no surprise that the number of buy to let property purchases is continuing to grow in the UK. The Council of Mortgage Lenders released some statistics this month that revealed that the sector had grown from making up 13% of mortgages in the previous quarter to 13.4%.

However, there is some good news, as a separate set of figures released by the Council of Mortgage Lenders this month indicates that the number of repossessions taking place in the UK has fallen over the past year. 8,000 properties were repossessed in this first quarter of this year, a figure which is 17% lower than the numbers for this time last year. Figures were up slightly on the last quarter, although this was put down to an annual seasonal upturn, rather than an independent increase.