Millennials are waiting longer to have sex, with one in eight still virgins at 26 years old, new research has found.

The sharp rise in the number of young people waiting longer to have sex may be because of a "fear of intimacy" and the pressure of social media, according to analysts.

The Next Steps project, the brainchild of the Department for Education which is now managed by University College London, has tracked 16,000 people born in 1989-90 since they were 14.

The interviews, conducted in 2016, discovered a rise in the number of Millenials waiting longer to have sex compared to previous generations, where one in 20 reported still being virgins at around the same age.

Susanna Abse, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist at the Balint Consultancy, told the Sunday Times: "Millenials have been brought up in a culture of hypersexuality which has bred a fear of intimacy.