Property price stress 'wrecks marriages'

The rising cost of housing is helping to push up divorce rates, lower birth rates and encourage women to marry later, it is claimed today.

A report by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) found that the financial burdens of buying a home are forcing people to work longer hours and put off their retirement.

The ESRC found that the pressures of clambering up the property ladder can also lead to more relationships breaking down.

The ESRC found lifestyles of single people also affected, with young women in London often choosing to rent in better neighbourhoods rather than becoming homeowners in poor neighbourhoods. But young men are more likely to buy their first home in a rough area in the expectation of moving on to somewhere nicer later.

Young people's chances of home ownership and their ability to live in smarter neighbourhoods are enhanced if their parents are homeowners, especially in London and the South-East.

The report's author, Dr Michal Lyons of South Bank University, warns that cities like London risk losing their poorer residents and becoming a "playground of the rich". Londoners who are not earning enough are being forced out to make way for the upwardly mobile.

Dr Lyons also looked into the social effects of house prices in Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle and Sheffield. He found big difficulties in becoming a homeowner in all the cities, although it was worst in London. The ESRC report confirms earlier studies which found that financial difficulties were causing women to delay having families, often at a cost to their fertility.

The average age of the firsttime mother has risen from 24 in the late Sixties to over 27 now, while recent research has established that female fertility begins to decline in the late twenties.

Ceridwen Roberts, former director of the Family Policy Studies Centre, said: "Women know about the biological clock and that it's better to have babies when they're younger, but still think that it's easy to have a child at 45. It's not."