Cost of buying average home in England now unaffordable, warns ONS
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Only richest 10% can afford to buy as figures show average household needs 8.6 times disposable income to meet asking price. Only the richest 10% of households can afford to buy an average-priced home in England, according to official figures that lay bare the scale of Britain’s broken housing market.
Highlighting the result of decades of house price growth that has outstripped household incomes, the Office for National Statistics said the cost of buying a home was “unaffordable” in every part of the UK except Northern Ireland. It said it would take as many as 8.6 years of average annual household disposable income in England, of £35,000, to afford an average-priced home, worth £298,000 last year. That is almost double the ratio recorded in 1999.
The equivalent ratios were 5.8 in Wales, 5.6 in Scotland and five in Northern Ireland, where the average property is only just considered within reach for most families. The ONS defines affordability as a local average house price costing less than five years local average income.
On that basis it said only households with disposable incomes of at least £69,677 – placing them within the top 10% in England – could be considered reasonably able to afford an average-priced home in the country. In Wales, this applied to households in the top 30%, and in Scotland for the top 40%. Only in Northern Ireland was an average-priced home affordable for a household with an average income.
