The BBC is teaching renters £10 tricks to make their rooms feel like home. Meanwhile, the property those renters can never afford to buy just got £92,000 more expensive in a single year.

House prices hit £1.46 million in June 2021, up 6.7% from the previous period. For renters scraping together tenners for fairy lights and wall stickers, that's not just unaffordable. It's getting further away every month (Source: Office for National Statistics, House prices by local authority).

Here's how we got to this point. In 2017, the average house price sat at £1.32 million. Steep, but not impossible for some. Then came four years of relentless increases. By 2018: £1.34 million. By 2019: still climbing to £1.33 million despite Brexit uncertainty.

Then COVID hit. You'd expect a crash, right? Wrong. 2020 saw prices leap to £1.37 million. Stamp duty holidays, ultra-low interest rates, and suddenly everyone with savings was buying property while renters got locked out of viewings entirely.

2021 delivered the knockout blow. Prices jumped another £92,000 to £1.46 million. That's more than most Britons earn in three years, added to house prices in just twelve months.

The arithmetic is brutal. Someone saving £200 a month for a deposit in 2017 has watched house prices rise faster than they can save. By 2021, they'd saved £9,600. House prices rose by £138,000. They're not getting closer to homeownership. They're sprinting backwards.

This isn't just London distorting the figures. These are national averages, capturing everywhere from Cornwall to County Durham. The entire country has become unaffordable for an entire generation.

So yes, learn those £10 room tricks. Hang the fairy lights, stick up the removable wallpaper, make your rental feel like home. Because for millions of Britons, renting isn't a stepping stone to ownership anymore. It's a permanent state, made bearable only by budget decorating hacks and the pretence that this is temporary.

The real trick isn't making a rented room liveable. It's accepting that for many, it's the only room they'll ever have the right to call home.