Stephen Pollard

income workers had to save five per cent of their earnings for three years for a deposit on their first property. Today they need to save for the equivalent of 24 years. You read that right: 24 years.

No wonder they are angry. No wonder they are looking approvingly at Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, which appears to understand their anger.

And no wonder the number of young homeowners has collapsed from 64 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds a decade ago to 39 per cent today. To start to claw ourselves back to some sort of sensible housing market again we need to build as a minimum the 300,000 new homes a year that the Government has set as its target.

Experts agree that the shortfall is at least 2.3 million homes. To get an idea of how dire the situation is the number of homes built each year was 156,000 a year under Tony Blair, 143,400 under Gordon Brown and 123,560 under David Cameron. Even merely starting out on the road to dealing with this crisis requires the Government to push the very boundaries of radical action.

Last year there were 183,000 new builds, an increase on the previous few years. But this isn’t even close to being enough.

As we’ve seen Mrs May talks a good game of grasping this. At last year’s Conservative conference she spoke eloquently – amid the coughing and the collapsing set – about how “for too many the British dream feels increasingly out of reach… for many the chance of getting on to the housing ladder has become a distant dream”.

But the fine words haven’t been even remotely matched by action. Quite the opposite. Take one vital step: freeing councils to build social housing. The last time 300,000 new homes a year were built – in the 1970s – it was local councils that built 40 per cent.

But in last year’s budget Philip Hammond loftily rejected the idea that councils could borrow the money needed to build. Instead he cut stamp duty for first-time buyers – completely missing the point that we need new housing stock, not financial inducements to buy existing homes.

Or take the idea of new towns in the corridor between Oxford and Cambridge. Terrific. But they’re not remotely enough.

TO STATE the obvious: if you’re going to build a house you need land. And if you’re going to build lots of houses you need lots of land. Those houses can’t be built in the middle of nowhere. They need infrastructure and they need a sense of community.

That should mean – as happened in the 1960s when the government gave the go-ahead for a series of new towns such as Milton Keynes to relieve congestion in London – new towns being built.

Yes this needs money. But as the former housing minister Nick Boles has argued we just need to do what we did before: compulsorily purchase land at its current agricultural value. When planning permission is then granted and its value soars we can use that added value to spend on the infrastructure needed.

Labour, unsurprisingly, is having a field day. Shadow housing minister John Healey attacked Mrs May’s speech for its “feeble” measures. And he is not wrong.

At the moment the Tories are simply waving the white flag to Mr Corbyn.

‘Shortfall is at least 2.3 million homes’