If there’s anything more British than talking about the weather, it’s obsessing about house prices. This is a country where it’s taboo to ask someone their salary but perfectly acceptable to ask how much their house is worth (and look it up on Rightmove if they won’t tell you).

In recent years, it’s been harder to avoid talking about house prices than ever because, in many places around the country, they’re so out of control. According to the Office for National Statistics, the median price paid for a home leapt by 259% between 1997 and 2016, while earnings only rose by 68%.

This has created the demographic known as Generation Rent – young adults who are stuck renting, locked out of homeownership and, as we’re so often patronisingly told, are really into avocado-based brunches. In the 1990s someone aged between 25-34 had a two in three chance of owning their own home. By 2016, it was one in four. In a nutshell, your chances of buying a house of your own if you’re a young person on a middle income have more than halved over the past two decades.

This has forced ever greater numbers into the private rental sector where tenancies are too short and rents too high.

The only thing more overpriced than buying a home right now is renting one. In more than half of the local authorities in England, housing charity Shelter says that rents are unaffordable for ordinary working families. It’s now thought that more than a third of millennials will be renting forever, unable to save for a deposit to buy because so much of their earnings go straight into the pocket of a private landlord.

They’re trapped. So, it’s not hard to see why some people are prepared to do anything if it means they can get off the private-renting hamster wheel, even if it means taking out a 100% mortgage. I have contemplated selling a kidney more than once.

Capitalising on this crisis, Lloyds Bank has announced its “Lend A Hand” deal for first-time buyers. It is a 100% mortgage which requires no deposit and means buyers can borrow up to £500,000 for a home.

Sounds great, right? How kind of Lloyds to want to help and come to the rescue of Generation Rent like this. Nobody would blame you for jumping at it.

Instead of encouraging people into more debt, we need to have conversations about what is genuinely affordable housing

Sadly, though, like other “radical” suggestions that have been put forward to help young people get on the housing ladder, such as Help to Buy, this merely reinforces the status quo. On closer inspection, 100% mortgages will only help those who can access another bank – the “bank of mum and dad”.

In order to get Lloyds to lend you a hand, you need a family member who is able to put a sum equal to 10% of the value of the home you want to buy into a Lloyds savings account. Given that average house prices are about £200,000 across the country, we’re not talking pocket change here.

Young people whose parents own property are almost three times more likely to become homeowners by the age of 30. The bank of mum and dad has created a two-tier society – those with a family who can help and those without. Today, whether you can buy a house really depends on your family’s wealth unless you earn an above-average salary.

As David Cameron himself put it, help to buy was intended “to get the market moving”. With it, the government underwrote an out-of-control housing market (some argue, inflated it further) and lined the pockets of developers, helping those who were gifted deposits or earned enough to save.

And 100% mortgages are no different. This is an attempt by banks to prop up unaffordable prices by asking first-time buyers to get into astronomical amounts of debt by buying homes they can’t afford in order to boost the bank’s own business.

According to the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, the market has slowed down because of Brexit fears. It’s at its weakest since 2012 because fewer people are buying. But it’s not just Brexit holding people back. People aren’t buying because they can’t afford to – houses are too expensive after years and years of price inflation. And 100% mortgages will only reinforce the housing problems we already face.

We are in the middle of a housing crisis because we allowed homes to cost more than the people who need them can afford to pay. The solution cannot be to preserve this ludicrous new normal with more of the same.

We haven’t seen 100% mortgages since the financial crisis of 2008. As they make a comeback we shouldn’t forget it was subprime mortgages in the US which helped bring about that crisis.

Instead of finding creative ways to encourage people into more debt to sustain the unsustainable, we need to have ambitious conversations about what is genuinely affordable housing and how we help those without wealthy parents to access it.

Generation Rent is a misnomer. It implies young professionals from families who might be able to stretch themselves to help their kids, but renters are also low-income families, single-parent households and people without help. Who will guarantee their 100% mortgages?

• Vicky Spratt is a freelance journalist, housing campaigner and author of Tenants: Stories of Britain’s Housing Shame which is being published in 2020