Can Theresa May really find time to be her own housing supremo?

Theresa May has belatedly taken the advice I offered her here last May and named a supremo to tackle the housing crisis — which has been getting steadily worse since her campaign promise to ‘fix the broken market’. But the supremo isn’t Sajid Javid, the Communities Secretary who is, the prime minister says, doing ‘incredible work’ in this area; so incredible, she might have added, that she and the Chancellor have had to bin Javid’s more radical ideas. And it isn’t Boris, who was my own cunningly crafted suggestion for the job. No, here’s what she said in her speech on Monday: ‘I’ve taken personal charge of meeting the housing challenge, leading a taskforce that brings together ministers and officials from every corner of Whitehall to attack the crisis on every front.’

Oh dear. We’re back in the Tony Blair mode of ‘eye-catching initiatives [with which] I should be personally associated’. But that can only play badly for Mrs May while her energies are overwhelmingly taken by Brexit. The housing story was barely even making headlines by Tuesday, apart from some mischief-making about a fake-brick lectern that made her look as if she was speaking out of a chimney.

But still it’s worth asking: what on earth can central government do to accelerate the number of new homes available at the low end of the price range? In political terms, this is the issue most likely to alienate voters in their late twenties and thirties, who in any previous decade since 1945 would by now be first-time homeowners and thereby natural Tories. They’re currently more likely to vote for the catastrophe of Corbyn, and that’s a big reason why the housing shortage matters to all of us. But are there any quick-fix solutions or has Mrs May set herself up for another failure?

Her approach was to take swipes both at developers for ‘land-banking’, or sitting too long on unbuilt sites for which planning has already been granted; and at local authorities for failing to release sufficient land and grant permissions quicker.