A chronic shortage of affordable two-bedroom homes is shutting first-time buyers out of the market, analysis shows.
Fewer than a fifth of homes on sale in England would be suitable and affordable for a working family trying to get on the property ladder, a study found.
In 35 local authority areas, there are no affordable homes at all suitable for a family on an average income, housing charity Shelter said.
They analysed asking prices for hundreds of thousands of homes with two bedrooms or more in England and calculated how many of these a couple with children could afford on an average income of £30,700.
The charity found just 17 per cent of these were affordable, dropping to 0.1 per cent in London. In the Capital, just 43 homes across the entire city deemed within reach of a typical working family. This number would have been even lower if researchers had not included houseboats and a mobile home, Shelter said.
The North East of England was the most affordable, with 42 per cent of advertised homes within the grasp of first-time buyer families.
For single first-time buyers, it was even tougher to buy a home, as the number of affordable houses on sale dropped to 7.5 per cent of the total on the market. Couples with no children fared the best. With an average combined income of £43,400, they could afford 32 per cent of homes on sale.
The charity based its research on asking prices listed on website Zoopla, one of the UK’s leading online property portals.
Campbell Robb, of Shelter, said: "Over eighty per cent of homes on the market are off limits for a typical family, and this is nothing short of a scandal.
"Decades of failing to deliver the homes we need is leaving millions trapped in expensive and unstable private renting, or in their childhood bedrooms, with barely a hope of saving for a home of their own.
"For the next government, whoever that may be, it’s time for the talk to stop and the work to begin. Politicians need to act swiftly to deliver the plan that will build the 250,000 homes a year we need, or millions more people will be forced to kiss their dreams of a stable and affordable place to live goodbye."
Shelter said the country’s most unaffordable areas were in London and the south-east, naming Cambridge, Chelmsford, St Albans, Stevenage, Croydon, Kensington and Chelsea, Kingston upon Thames, Windsor and Maidenhead as among the worst.
The average property bought by a first-time buyer now costs £205,000, according to the Office for National Statistics.