YEARS of housing market madness mean that there is now only one tiny patch of Britain where an average home is in reach of a local on an average wage — the sparsely populated borough of Copeland in Cumbria.

The miserable legacy of ministers’ failure to clamp down on decades of property speculation was laid bare yesterday by a new Trades Union Congress (TUC) study based on official statistics.

TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady blamed a “toxic combination of rising property prices and falling real wages” and added that people who did not own a home were being “clobbered by soaring rents.”

In the past 16 years the number of local authority areas where an average house price is cheaper than three times an average local income — what the TUC labelled “easily affordable” — has plummeted from 72 to one.

In 1997 one in five local authority areas had homes priced within reach of local people.

Now millions of ordinary people might do better to give up any dream of owning a home, with a dismal arc of housing unaffordability stretching from south-west England right across to the east coast.

Across the entire south of the country an average worker faced house prices that were five times more than their wage.

Wealthy London borough Kensington and Chelsea topped the unaffordability list, with average prices standing an eye-watering 32 times more than earnings.

But Ms O’Grady said that “horror stories” over sky-high prices were no longer confined to London.

“Houses and flats in traditionally affordable areas of the country — from Kirkless to Great Yarmouth and Plymouth to Oldham — are now out of reach for many local people,” she warned.

The TUC issued an urgent call for “an ambitious programme of home-building to get house prices back under control.”

It added that ordinary people’s flatlining wages were compounding the problem.

“There is a lot of ground to make up before we return to the kind of salaries that people were earning before the crash,” Ms O’Grady said.