More than one in five young households are caught in a trap of earning too much to get government help to rent a home but not enough to buy one, research has shown. The study for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation identifies a league table of the 40 least affordable districts where the problem is at its worst. Weymouth and Portland comes top, followed by Bournemouth, South Buckinghamshire, Carrick and Kensington and Chelsea. The study found that 2 million people under 40 are caught in the “intermediate housing market” trap. With the figure growing by 60,000 households each year. Professor Steve Wilcox of York University, the study’s author, said: “At the very least the figures justify some new and creative thinking on ways that the current range of intermediate housing products could be expanded to appeal to the growing number of young, working households who simply cannot afford local house prices.”