I was going to come on to that later, but I will deal with it now. Excluding London—I absolutely appreciate that London is a different case—the average price of an affordable home
will be £145,000. A couple on the mean wage in this country, £26,000, would be well able to afford a starter home or an affordable home. The point I am trying to get at—and I appreciate that not everyone is on the mean wage, because by definition there will be a lot of people under it—is that there are other products available, such as shared ownership. Outside London, it is estimated that the deposit required for a shared-ownership home is approximately £1,400, but there may be people unable to access even the shared-ownership home market. We have announced £1.6 billion to put into 100,000 affordable homes for rent. They are examples of what products are available within the various affordability brackets.
7.15 pm
I think the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, said that we need to build more homes. My noble friend Lord Horam also said that. We do need to build more homes; there is absolutely no doubt about it. This Government have elected to build 1 million more homes by 2021. The spending review announced a doubling of the housing budget of £20 billion to deliver those homes across a mix of different types of tenure. Yes, we are focusing on starter homes because there is a demographic that has been particularly precluded from home ownership—the young buyer—which has gone down from 61% of home ownership back in the 1980s to some 38%. That is why there is such an emphasis on the starter home, but it is not to preclude other types of tenure. In fact, in the spending review noble Lords will see the various funding streams that the Government have put forward to deliver those different types of tenure.