Is there anyone out there ready to do something about house prices?

What do we think about the property bubble? Are you bubbling under, hoping to make a killing, or are you bubbling over with joy having just secured a 100 per cent return on your investment? Or are you waiting for it to burst?

But what it you are one of the millions of young people in Britain unable to afford so much as a one-bedroom flat in an area once thought bottom of the heap but which estate agents now assure you is gentrifying and crying out for a punt?

It’s not as if high house prices are making everybody rich. You only get the profit when you sell, and then you still need somewhere to live that now costs as much as three times what it did in 2001. Instead of sinking everything you had into bricks and mortar, would you prefer to live in a house that cost you £100,000 at the turn of the millennium, then rose in value gradually over the next 20 years to, say, £125,000? The effect of this would be not only that your children would be in with a reasonable shout of owning their own home but that you and your wife could afford to eat out twice a week and exchange that ageing Nissan Micra for a brand-new all-electric Tesla.

A friend of mine lives in one of the choicer parts of South London. He is a recently-retired teacher; his wife is a civil servant. They bought their house – large and rambling, with an attractive garden – for thruppence 30 years ago and raised their family there. Their three grown-up children still live at home. All three of them have jobs, which should enable them, over time, to pay off their student loans.

The house, in a sought-after location, is reckoned to be worth around £1.1 million – a sum so vast that for many people it seems unreal. And it’s all theirs. They paid off their mortgage during the Blair years.

My friend – let’s call him Jacob – now faces a dilemma. He and his wife would like to sell up and buy a smaller place, probably a flat somewhere in the vicinity, where they have friends and are not strangers to the local pub, leaving them with sufficient cash to buy a second home either in the country or in France, plus money in the bank.

And why not? I hear you say. They have worked hard all their lives and are entitled to a bit of good fortune as they plan for their twilight years.

Yes, but what about the children? They would have to be turfed out and forced to make their own way in the world. Again, I hear you murmuring your assent. They are in their 20s; they have been given good educations and have since found work. It is surely in the natural order of things that fledglings should flee the nest, leaving the parents to worry about Brexit.

The problem is that two-bedroom flats in half-way decent areas of south London (or just about anywhere else in the capital) start at around £500,000. Most cost a lot more – up to £750,000. A garden? That’ll be extra. A garage? Are you kidding? The garage was incorporated into a second apartment in 2007.

But Jacob and his wife want to do the right thing. They don’t want to see their children landed with mortgages in excess of £400,000. Such debt might be affordable now (just), but what about when interest rates start moving up again at some point, which we are constantly assured is inevitable eventually. So, instead of gifting £100,000 to each of the three as a deposit, the amount of capital from the BMD (Bank of Mum and Dad) could easily soar to more like £250,000. Even then, the monthly outgoing for each of our first-time buyers, based on current low rates, would be £1,252, rising to £1,462 even if rates settle at a historically modest 5 per cent. In each case, the repayment period would be 25 years, taking the mortgagees potentially into their late 40s and early 50s.

The parents, meanwhile, would have spent three quarters of a million pounds on housing their children, or at any rate helping them to get a well-shoed foot on the property ladder. They themselves would have to give up their crazy notion of a house in France. Instead, they would be left with just enough, after capital gains tax and agent’s fees, to purchase a small one-bedroom flat in a less-favoured part of the area in which they have lived all their adult lives.

Now ask yourselves how these same three young people (graduates, remember, with jobs) would fare if they did not have generous parents with money to spare. What if you and your partner are in your late-20s, with a joint income of £65,000, but savings of just £30,000? To buy a flat for half a million pounds without parental help, you would need a mortgage of £470,000, meaning a montly repayment at present rates of £2,354, or £28,248 a year. This would be on top of your repayment of student loans. Fully half your joint income would be spent on servicing debt, leaving you, after national and local taxes, with no more than £20,000 between you to spend on all the wonderful things London has to offer.

And what happens when children come along, or if there is any kind of crisis? You are already living close to the edge. It wouldn’t take much to push you over.

I should concede straight away that it has never been easy or straightforward for most people to enter the property market. Each generation faces its own challenges. If all works out for our sibling hopefuls, they could be sitting pretty by the time they hit 40 (with children who will then need to find a million pounds just to purchase a bedsit). But in the UK, as we head towards the third decade of the twenty-first century, and especially in greater London (home to some 12 million people), homeowners under 30 are increasingly few and far between. Margaret Thatcher’s idea of a property-owning democracy has gone up in smoke.

More and more of the capital has been bought up over the last 20 years by overseas investors. There are whole streets in which only a minority of the houses are owned by those who live in them. Investors from Russia, China, India, the Middle East, even Africa, have spent billions on buying up flats and whole houses (which they then turn into flats), making billions more in the process, either from rent or from selling them on at inflated prices.

In 2001, my wife and I sold our house in Clapham, for which we had paid £120,000 in 1995, to an entrepreneur from Asia for £305,000. The house has long since been converted into three “luxury” flats which, according to the website Zoopla, would sell today for more than £570,000 each, with a rental value of some £2,100 per calendar month.

Did my wife and I do okay out of the deal? Actually, not bad – though, of course, we could never afford to move back to London. But what with one thing and another, we now live modestly in France, where our house, which we bought for £14,000 in 1999, is now worth (after considerable restoration and extension) no more than £70,000.

This doesn’t bother me. The house is our home. It’s where we live.

By contrast, the two-bedroom north London flat rented by my son and his wife would apparently fetch around £600,000 on the open market. It is one of a number owned by a gentleman who has never visited the property and is irked by requests for repairs. Such circumstances are increasingly commonplace. My son and daughter-in-law, both in their 30s, are keen to buy, but will be looking at a mortgage of at least half a million.

All we talk about these days is Brexit. But what about the property market? What about the sheer unaffordability of London for a growing majority of its native inhabitants? Help to Buy? Tweaking rental agreements in favour of tenants? Don’t make me laugh. The party that actually does something about house prices, as distinct from deploring longstanding trends, would win the subsequent general election at a canter.