Home buyers now need to pay on average 7.8 times their annual earnings to get on the property ladder, figures suggest.

Data from the Office for National Statistics shows on average a full-time worker could expect to pay around 7.8 times their annual salary on purchasing a home in England and Wales in 2017, up 2.4% on 2016.

The affordability ratio increased from 7.6 in 2016,

The median figure makes for even more dreary reading as it is at 9.7 times earnings on a new build and 7.6 times for an existing property.

In contrast, typically a mortgage lender would only provide a home loan based on 4.5 times income.

Kensington and Chelsea was the least affordable local authority in 2017, with median house prices being 40.7 times median salaries.

Copeland, in the North West of England, was the most affordable local authority in England and Wales in 2017, where the median figure was 2.7.

The East of England saw the biggest change in the affordability ratio, with an increase from 9.0 in 2016 to 9.7 in 2017.

The South East had an increase from 9.8 to 10.3.

of the 10 least affordable local authorities in 2017, seven were in London, led by Epsom and Hackney at 17.8 and 15.9 respectively.

Commenting on the figures, Andy Sommerville, director at Search Acumen, said:  “The statistics on housing affordability show us that the UK housing crisis is truly a generational crisis.

“People in their twenties and thirties now have to earn twice as a much as their parents did to be able to afford to buy any property type in England. And, as house price growth has continually outstripped anaemic wage increases over the last two decades, home ownership has been thrown firmly out of reach for a whole generation.

“Worryingly, the solution to the crisis has always been to find more land to build more affordable homes. But the new homes being built in England and Wales are anything but affordable. In fact, newly-built homes were less affordable than existing dwellings almost every year over the last two decades.

“Clearly, we need to do more to find space to build truly affordable homes up and down the country. We’re buoyed to see the government’s concerted efforts to make information on UK land more transparent and open and we believe this will help developers find the space to build more homes that will drive down the affordability chasm our younger generation currently faces.”