“This is the house I bought off my parents,” Eliza Filby tells me as she opens the door. It’s a late-Victorian terrace in the heart of Tooting, south London – high ceilings, hardwood floors and bay windows. There are miniature apple trees out front and children’s toys in the hallway. Filby’s parents bought it for £28,000 in 1982, using a £5,000 grant from the council to entice people to renovate dilapidated properties. Four decades later, most houses on the street have been converted into flats. Those that remain intact sell for around £1m.
This is not the house in which Filby, a historian and visiting lecturer at King’s College London, grew up. That house – which her father inherited from his father, who won it in a bet – is two streets away. The home she lives in was purchased as an investment property by her parents. In 2018 her father died from cancer, leaving her mother to figure out what to do with their estate. Filby and her husband were looking for somewhere to “nest”; they had a two-year-old and were expecting, yet were still renting. Though both successful professionals, they could not afford to live in the area she was born. The solution? Buy her parents’ spare house from her mother.
The trend represented by this house, of parental wealth passed through generations, is at the centre of Filby’s new book, Inheritocracy: It’s Time to Talk About the Bank of Mum and Dad. It’s a familiar process, but one that we as a nation seem reluctant to confront. Inheritance touches almost every aspect of British politics, from the obvious (home-ownership, student debt and social care) to the abstract (business culture, workforce participation and even the birth rate). As Filby, 43, writes in the book, “the backdrop to our generational story is an economy increasingly built on generational wealth”.
The “Bank of Mum and Dad” is often referred to as one of the UK’s top ten lenders. Parental gifts and loans accounted for £9.4bn in 2023, according to property analysts at Savills.
But, as Inheritocracy details, the impact of the Bank of Mum and Dad goes far beyond the housing ladder. Filby argues that the trends of the past half-century – the shift from a wage economy to a wealth economy, plus an ageing population – have resulted in parental fortunes becoming more entwined in the lives of offspring than ever before. Routes of social mobility that were open to her parents’ generation, the much-maligned “baby boomers”, have been closed off. The promise of higher education now comes with a hefty price-tag, and for the majority of new graduates, a lifetime of debt, which wealthy parents can offset by paying fees or offering support upfront. And let’s not forget the £5.5trn of family wealth due to be passed down from boomers to millennials fortunate enough to be related to them over the next 30 years (presuming it doesn’t get hoovered up to pay for social care).
This generational imbalance is hardly news. It has been 14 years since David Willetts, the former Conservative universities minister, wrote The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future – And Why They Should Give It Back. Toxic arguments about generational unfairness – selfish boomers, lazy millennials addicted to Netflix and avocado toast – crop up every time politicians try to build more houses, or reform pensions, or suggest more tax must be levied on working people to pay for social care.
Inheritocracy is different. Though Filby has interviewed a host of economists, financial advisers and policy experts (including Willetts), this is as much a personal history as it is a policy tract. The book has been described as “a mash-up between Dolly Alderton and the Economist”. Filby told me her aim was to look “through my university experience, through my life as a 20-something living in London, through the men I dated, through my experience of marriage” and “try to basically hang my life on that washing line”.
Filby is refreshingly frank about how vital parental help has been to her, despite her working-class origins (her father was a stay-at-home dad and part-time decorator, while her mother worked for John Lewis). Aside from the house, the “safety net” of knowing she could fall back on family support shaped everything from her PhD to her career to her love life. “I was always in these rather dysfunctional relationships,” she said, attributing her “free-spirited” tendency to date artistic, deeply unserious men to the lack of financial pressure on her. (Her now husband, she stressed, is of a different mould entirely.) What she thought was feminist independence was a consequence of the inheritocracy.
“I was fascinated by women – and I was one of them, to a large degree I still am, sitting in a house my mum sold to me – where it paid to be more financially reliant on your parents than a man.” That dynamic has led to the rise of parents and in-laws as “economic stakeholders in marriage”, as Filby unromantically put it, keeping adult children infantilised into their forties and fifties. And they are the lucky ones. For those who don’t have the Bank of Mum and Dad, the milestones of “traditional adulthood” – a house, children, financial security – are increasingly out of reach.
This, though, is only half the picture. The most moving chapter in the book explores the role-reversal that occurred when Filby’s mother moved in with her after her father’s death. It explores the tension of wanting to give something back to a parent who gave you so much while also balancing motherhood and a career. “I really wanted to tell the follow-through of this story,” she said. “If we’ve had 30 years of over-parenting, we’re facing 30 years of caring for them.”
Care is the elephant in the generational wealth debate room. More people are living longer with more complex medical and care needs. “We tend to talk about social care like it’s an old people’s problem, and actually I don’t think it is at all.” Much of the so-called Great Wealth Transfer millennials are due to inherit will go towards care costs. Women quitting the workforce to be unpaid carers will only become more common as boomers age, unless a political solution can be found.
Filby’s mother lived with them for two years, three generations under one roof. Now, she lives round the corner. Inheritocracy is dedicated to her “for the best type of inheritance: an example”. Filby’s own children are seven and four. Has writing the book made her think about what she wants to pass on to them? Instead of mentioning housing or university fees, which have occupied much of our conversation, Filby talked of the lessons she learned from her interviewees, both those who had access to the Bank of Mum and Dad and those who did not. Among people who made it despite a lack of support “there was a level of grit, resilience, determination that came from that”. Whereas those who had received perhaps too much help (“and I probably would include myself in that”), lacked focus and were “ill-disciplined with money, ill-disciplined with time – and slightly resentful of themselves for essentially being lazy and a bit indulgent and overly privileged”.
It is hard to read Inheritocracy and not come to the same conclusion as Paul Johnson, head of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, who argues Britain has to find a way “to make inheritance matter less”. Filby admits she doesn’t have any solutions: reforming inheritance tax might be a start, but wouldn’t address the inequalities of ongoing support, nor an economy that privileges wealth over wages, nor the simple truth that it is natural and instinctive to want to pass down something to your children. But she is clear that we can’t fix any of it unless we all start talking about inheritance honestly and “get real” about the fact that, while hard work and talent do matter, other economic undercurrents dominate our society. “We’re all implicated in the inheritance economy, whether we’re inheriting or not.”
[See also: Britain’s lord of the purse strings]
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