Almost two million families in the UK are unable to climb on to the property ladder and are being forced to rent according to new research.

Charity Shelter says that rising house prices have created a generation of ‘forgotten families’ and that the Government’s Help to Buy scheme is still leaving many people priced out of the market.

The study revealed that millions of middle-income families earning between £20,000 and £40,000 could find themselves stuck on the first rung of the property ladder or facing the prospect of years of private renting.

It says monthly mortgage repayments on a family-sized home are simply too much for those on low or average salaries.

Shelter said: “This means that the only option for many will be years spent bringing up children in private lets, paying out dead money in rent and facing the insecurity of short-term tenancy contracts of just six or twelve months.”

It comes as a report by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors showed house prices were rising at their fastest rate in seven years.

Having found that 95% of families on low or middle incomes could afford mortgage repayments for a shared ownership home, Shelter is now calling for a major new house building programme.

It says an investment of £12bn could build 600,000 new shared ownership homes.

But housing minister, Mark Prisk argues the Government is already doing this.

He said: “Shelter’s report fails to take into account the billions of pounds we’re investing to getting Britain building, leading to the fastest rate of affordable house building for two decades, on top of the 19,000 shared ownership homes we’ve delivered over the past two years.”

Kay Boycott, director of campaigns and policy at Shelter said: “So far, years of piecemeal policies and an alphabet soup of confusing schemes have meant that shared ownership has failed to reach its potential, leaving it nowhere close to meeting the needs of England’s forgotten families.”

She added: “For the many young people desperate to do what generations have before them and find a stable home of their own, a national shared ownership programme is the bold and radical solution we need.”

Blog courtesy of Sky News.