Earlier this month, IF Senior Researcher Conor Nakkan delivered the keynote speech at the 2026 CHASM conference. The speech explored how financial insecurity takes different forms across generations, and what this means for intergenerational fairness. The full text of the speech is reproduced below.
I want to begin by introducing you to three people: Sarah, Viraj and David.
Sarah
Sarah has just turned 22 and recently moved to London.
She lives in a somewhat dilapidated flatshare in Walthamstow with three other people she met through SpareRoom.
She recently graduated with a degree in business and management, and left university with around £53,000 in student debt.
After applying for more than 100 jobs, she eventually secured an entry-level role at a professional services firm. Her annual salary is just over £31,000.
After income tax, National Insurance, student loan repayments and pension contributions, Sarah’s take-home pay is just over £2,000 a month.
Of that, around 70% or £1,400 goes on the essentials: rent, energy bills, food, transport and all the other unavoidable costs that come with starting adult life in an expensive city.
This leaves her with around £600 a month, or roughly £140 a week, for discretionary spending, any irregular costs, debt repayment and saving.
Sarah has around £2,000 set aside in cash savings. She has used buy now, pay later a few times over the past year, and occasionally carries a small credit card balance.
Now, by many metrics, Sarah is doing reasonably well. She went to university, secured a graduate job in London, and has some savings. Compared to some of her friends, who have had a much tougher time in the jobs market, she feels lucky.
But she does not feel financially secure.
Spending on the essentials takes up almost three-quarters of her take home pay. Her savings would cover only a little over two months of rent, or less than one month of income. One large rent rise, one period between jobs, or one broken laptop could wipe out her buffer.
And now there is a new anxiety too. Sarah has heard that her firm has just introduced a hiring freeze, and that some of the routine work once given to junior staff may soon be done by AI.
For someone with limited savings, high rent and only a few months in the labour market, the possibility of redundancy or slower career progression makes the future feel much less secure.
Viraj
Viraj is 40 and lives in Manchester with his wife, Lucy, and their two young children.
Viraj works full time in IT, while Lucy works part time. Together, they have a gross household income of around £64,000 a year.
After income tax, National Insurance, minimum workplace pension contributions and Child Benefit, that gives them roughly £4,500 a month coming in.
On paper, that looks relatively comfortable. And in many ways, they are doing pretty well. But their monthly budget is tight.
Their mortgage is just under £1,200 a month. Their other regular costs, including energy bills, food, transport, insurance, council tax, childcare, and clothing come to around £2,900 each month.
After which, Viraj and Lucy have only around £400 a month left for everything else: savings, emergencies, home repairs, holidays, debt repayment, or increasing their pension contributions.
And this is where these pressures start to compound.
Lucy is thinking about reducing her hours. Not because she does not want to work, but because the household logistics are becoming harder to manage. Nursery drop-offs, school pickups, sick days and school holidays all have to be fitted around two jobs.
If Lucy reduces her hours, the family saves some money on childcare. But at the same time, her earnings fall, her pension contributions fall, and her career progression slows.
Viraj worries about this too.
He and Lucy have workplace pensions, but they are defined contribution pots. Their balances still feel modest compared with what they might need in retirement. They know they should probably be saving more. But the mortgage, childcare and family bills all arrive first.
David
David is 75 and lives with his wife, Linda, on the outskirts of Norwich.
David and Linda own their home outright, which is a semi-detached property worth around £290,000. They have a disposable income of around £34,000 a year after tax, mostly from the State Pension and occupational pensions. They also have around £40,000 in cash savings.
So, David and Linda are relatively financially secure.
But their home is also their main asset. It is worth more than anything else they own. But that kind of wealth is clearly not the same as money in the bank.
The house also needs some work and David has considered whether they might be better off downsizing to a smaller property. The boiler is old. The garden is getting harder to manage. The stairs are becoming more difficult for Linda, whose arthritis has worsened over the past two years.
There is another change too. Linda has recently been diagnosed with early-stage dementia. For now, she is still very much herself. She can hold a conversation, see friends, and enjoy a good day out. But she is becoming more forgetful. She has missed a few appointments. She sometimes gets confused by letters from the bank, the council or the NHS.
So David has slowly taken on more and more of the practical work of daily life.
He does most of the cooking and sorts the medication. He now keeps track of appointments. He deals with online forms, bills, passwords, bank letters and phone calls.
David would never describe himself as a carer. He would say he is just looking after his wife.
But caring has changed his financial outlook.
He worries about the cost of adapting the bathroom or installing a stairlift.
He worries about whether they will eventually need paid help at home. Even a few hours a week would add up. And if Linda ever needed residential care, the costs would be far higher again.
He worries about whether he understands the benefits system properly. He worries about being scammed, particularly because so much of daily life now happens online and so many financial decisions feel more complicated than they used to.
Three portraits
Now, I should come clean with you all.
Sarah, Viraj and David are not real people. I invented them.
But they are, for the most part, statistical inventions. Many of the details of their lives are drawn from data about people with similar demographic characteristics or in similar situations. Where possible, I have tried to use evidence about the median or average circumstances of someone in Sarah’s, Viraj’s and David’s position.
They are three portraits of the kinds of financial pressures facing different generations in Britain today: one at the beginning of adult life, one in the middle of working and family life, and one in retirement.
Each of them has financial vulnerabilities. But they are also vulnerable in different ways and to different extents.
Sarah’s vulnerability is about getting started: high housing costs, student debt, thin savings and the insecurity of early working life in the age of AI.
Viraj’s vulnerability is about being squeezed in the middle: housing costs, childcare, family expenses, work pressures and the challenge of adequately saving for the future.
David’s vulnerability is about later life: fixed income, health risks, care costs, digital complexity and the need to manage complex financial decisions during retirement.
These are not stories about people at the bottom of the distribution. In many respects, Sarah, Viraj and David are all doing reasonably well. That is precisely the point.
Many people will be much more financially insecure. They may have lower incomes, less secure work, fewer savings, higher debts, weaker family support, poorer health, higher housing costs, or greater caring responsibilities.
So, the point of these stories is not to suggest that Sarah, Viraj or David have the hardest lives in Britain. They clearly do not.
The point is that certain aspects of insecurity now reach deep into ordinary life.
Multiple insecurities
That brings me to the first lesson I want to draw from today.
Financial insecurity is rarely just financial.
That was one of the strongest messages from Abigail’s presentation and the wider Insecure Lives project.
The project is compelling precisely because looks at insecurities across financial, housing, work, health and caring domains, and considers the interactions between them.
Across the population as a whole, the levels of insecurity are striking and worth repeating. In 2022–23, 47% of UK adults were financially insecure, 27% were housing insecure, 46% were health insecure, 16% were caring insecure, and 36% of working-age adults were work insecure.
But the age profile matters too.
Young adults are especially exposed to housing and work insecurity. In 2022–23, housing insecurity was highest among 25–34-year-olds, at 48%, compared with 10% among adults aged 65 and over.
Being behind with household bills is also much more common among younger adults. Among 18–24-year-olds, the share behind with some or all household bills rose from 10.5% in 2009–10 to 16.5% in 2022–23. Among 65–74-year-olds, it remained around 2%, and among those aged 75 and over around 1%.
Health insecurity has also been moving in opposite directions across generations. Among 18–24-year-olds, health insecurity rose from 31% in 2009–10 to 41% in 2022–23. Among older adults, it fell: from 59% to 53% for 65–74-year-olds, and from 68% to 63% for those aged 75 and over.
That is good news for older people, and we should welcome it. But it also means some of the largest deteriorations are happening among younger adults, especially around mental health, housing and the ability to manage bills.
As the Insecure Lives Project demonstrates, these pressures can also be mutually reinforcing.
Now, a difficult start in the labour market does not automatically lead to a difficult life. Mhairi’s findings today are important because they complicate that picture. Her work suggests that early labour-market precarity does not always produce scarring in the traditional sense, and that many young workers who remain employed move into more secure work as they age.
That is a useful insight. But it should not make us complacent.
The latest ONS figures show that just over one million young people aged 16 to 24 are not in education, employment or training. That is 13.5% of all young people in that age group.
Behind that statistic are hundreds of thousands of young people who are not building skills, not gaining work experience, not saving, not contributing to pensions, and often not getting the support they need to re-enter education or employment.
Alan Milburn’s review has warned about the risk of a lost generation of young people becoming detached from work and learning.
Even for those who do find work, the quality of that work matters.
A young person can be “in work” and still be in an insecure, poorly paid, low-progression job. They can have a payslip and still have no route to independence. They can be working and still unable to leave home, save, move, or plan for the future.
The transfer of risks
That leads me to the second lesson from today.
Many risks have been pushed onto individuals and households.
This theme ran through Kris’ work on the private rented sector, Carl’s work on the gig economy, Adele’s work on income volatility and debt advice needs, and Matthew’s presentation on consumer finance risks.
But let’s focus on housing.
The private rented sector is often described as flexible. For some people, at some stages of life, it can be. A high-earning professional moving city for work may value a short-term tenancy. A student may expect to share a flat for a few years.
But for many renters, flexibility is a generous description of being stuck.
Kris’s research shows a private rented sector in which financial insecurity is often shaped by cumulative disadvantage across housing, work, income and financialisation. Many tenants are managing unaffordable rents, poor conditions, weak bargaining power, insecure work and limited savings at the same time.
That has an obvious intergenerational dimension.
For previous generations, private renting was often a short stage before home ownership. For many younger people today, it has become the main route through early adulthood and increasingly into family life.
In the mid-1990s, around 21% of households headed by someone aged 16–34 rented privately. Today, the figure is 43%.
A generation or two ago, a young person moving into work might reasonably have expected that stable employment would eventually translate into stable housing. That bargain has weakened over time.
Today, many young adults are told to be mobile, flexible and resilient while the housing system extracts a huge share of their income before they have had any chance to build wealth.
We’ve demonstrated this through some of our previous research at IF.
In our work on young people’s spending, we found that under-30s now spend around 70% of their total expenditure on essentials, compared with 56% for over-65s.
Under-30s spend far more on essentials than older households, despite having similar levels of total household expenditure. Housing is the main reason. Under-30s are spending around £80 more a week on housing and fuel than young households did twenty years ago.
In terms of living costs, there is increasingly a young people’s premium.
The pressure is about the basics getting too expensive, rather than young people spending too much on small luxuries like avocado toast or Netflix subscriptions.
This is also why the cost-of-living crisis has felt different across generations.
Everyone has faced higher prices. But younger households have had less room to adapt. They are more likely to rent and have lower savings. They spend a higher share of their budgets on essentials and have less housing wealth to fall back on. Their discretionary spending was already under significant pressure before the latest inflation shock.
Older households clearly aren’t immune from these pressures. But high home ownership rates among older cohorts mean that many have been partly shielded from the worst effects of rising rents and housing costs. Many also benefited from asset price growth over previous decades and their incomes are more relatively protected, including by the triple lock on the State Pension.
The point is not that every older person is secure, but that the route into financial security has become far steeper for the young.
Intergenerational inequalities
That leads me to my third lesson.
The balance between generations has shifted, and we need to be honest about it.
For a long time, the implicit promise of the British welfare state and post-war economy was fairly simple.
If you worked, paid taxes, contributed to society and made sensible choices, you could expect a reasonable chance of security over the life course.
You might rent when young, but home ownership was within reach.
You might have children, but median household incomes could generally comfortably sustain a family.
You might retire, but the combination of a state pension, occupational pension and home ownership could provide stability.
Of course, bargain was never universal. Gender, class, ethnicity, disability and geography shaped who could access it and to what extent. But the broad pathway existed for a much larger share of the population than it does today.
For younger cohorts, the pathway has narrowed.
Higher education is financed through debt.
Housing security increasingly depends on parental help, inheritance or very high earnings.
Retirement now depends more on defined contribution pensions, which are hardest to build during the very years when rent, childcare and student loan repayments squeeze incomes.
The labour market increasingly rewards those who can take risks, move cities, accept unpaid experience, retrain, or network. Those are much easier choices for young people with family support.
This is why intergenerational inequality and class inequality increasingly reinforce each other.
Some young people still do very well. Those with affluent parents can receive help with rent, deposits, unpaid internships, postgraduate study or childcare. They can take risks because someone else provides the safety net.
Many other young people face the same high-cost economy without the family buffer.
The result is a society where inheritance and parental wealth matter more, while earnings and effort matter less.
This should worry everyone, including those who do not normally think in intergenerational terms.
If young people cannot build secure lives through work, the underlying social contract weakens.
If home ownership becomes dependent on family wealth, social mobility weakens.
If one million young people are outside education, employment or training, the country is wasting talent on a huge scale.
Ultimately, the costs will come back through lower tax revenues, higher welfare spending, poorer health outcomes, weaker productivity and lower trust in institutions.
That is why advocating for younger and future generations is as much about the country’s future economic prospects as fairness.
Why policy matters
The fourth lesson is about policy.
One of the most important findings from the Insecure Lives project is that policy matters.
Housing policy shapes whether Sarah can find an affordable and secure place to live.
Labour-market policy shapes whether flexibility comes with adequate protection.
Education and skills policy shapes whether young people can move into decent work.
Childcare policy shapes whether Viraj and Lucy can both work without exhausting their income and energy.
Pension policy shapes whether today’s workers can retire with decent incomes.
Financial regulation shapes whether credit helps households bridge gaps or traps them in cycles of debt.
An intergenerational lens can help sharpen these policy debates.
It asks us to look at timing.
When do costs arrive in life? When do incomes rise? When do people build assets? When do they face shocks? When are they expected to care for others? When do they need care themselves?
It asks us to look at cohorts.
Did different generations face the same housing market, education costs, pension entitlements, tax burden, wage growth, public service quality and asset-building opportunities? Have government policies and priorities given equal weight to the interests of different generations?
And it asks us to look at transfers across generations.
How does insecurity move from one generation to another? How does parental housing wealth shape children’s opportunities? How do care needs in one generation affect work and pension outcomes in another?
So, what should follow?
I will not attempt a full policy programme at the end of a long day. But I do want to briefly suggest a few priorities, drawing on IF’s work.
First, we need to rebuild housing security for younger generations.
That means building more homes in the places where people need to live and work, including social and affordable housing.
But increasing supply alone will not solve the housing crisis.
We also need to use the existing housing stock more fairly and efficiently.
Britain has a serious under-occupation problem, especially among older owner-occupiers. Many older people would like to move somewhere smaller, more suitable, easier to maintain, and closer to services, but the options are often poor.
So IF has long argued for a better later-life housing. More attractive, accessible, age-friendly homes would help older people like David and Linda move where they want to move, while freeing up larger family homes.
We should also look seriously at the tax and planning barriers that make moving or downsizing harder. Stamp duty discourages mobility. Council tax remains badly outdated and regressive. Planning rules can make it too difficult to subdivide large homes or create mixed-age communities.
The goal should be better choices, not forcing older people out of their homes.
Younger workers and families need more homes. Older generations need better options. A fairer housing policy should able deliver both.
Second, we need a better settlement for young workers.
That means focusing on job quality, not just job quantity.
A serious youth employment strategy should include high-quality apprenticeships, better vocational routes, stronger mental health support, and early intervention for those at risk of becoming NEET.
It is worth noting that the current government seems to be making some welcome progress here, but there is still more to do.
Third, we need to reduce the tax and debt burden on younger cohorts.
Student finance now functions like an additional graduate tax on many young workers for up to 40 years.
IF has argued for easing the student loan repayment burden and restoring a more equal mixed-funding model for higher education. If higher education has public benefits, the public should help fund it through general taxation. The cost should not be loaded so heavily onto younger graduates at the precise stage when they are trying to build independent lives.
Fourth, social security should respond to need rather than age.
Younger adults often receive lower benefit entitlements despite facing high housing and living costs.
Those rules have been designed around outdated assumptions about youth, family support and shared living.
Finally, we need to measure insecurity better.
Income matters. Poverty matters. Wealth matters. But today has shown that we also need to understand volatility, exposure to shocks, subjective security, debt stress, caring pressures, housing conditions and the ability to plan for future.
This is why CHASM’s work is so valuable. It helps us move beyond averages and into the lived experience of insecurity. It shows how different risks are felt, managed, postponed, hidden and transferred.
Conclusion
So, I would end with this.
The stories of Sarah, Viraj and David are different. They are at different stages of life, with different resources, different risks and different levels of protection.
But, in many ways, they point to the same underlying issue. Financial security depends on the institutions around us as much as the choices we make as individuals.
The intergenerational challenge is to ensure that those institutions equally protect and support all generations throughout life course.
Thank you.
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