Sir Howard Davies produced a veritable ‘marmalade dropper’ when he appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning.

According to the chairman of NatWest, it is not that difficult for people in the UK to get themselves on the property ladder.

The answer for those struggling to grab hold of that first rung is – get this – to simply “save more”. To which the only natural response is to ask what planet Sir Howard is living on. Save more? Plenty of people are struggling to get to the end of the month in the black, let alone able to find extra cash lying about to build up a deposit faster.

According to data published by Zoopla last year, the average price of a first-time buyer property in the south east was £300,000. Even if you were able to bag a mortgage with a 10% deposit – lower than the average put down by first-time buyers – you’d have to have squirrelled away £30,000 to get your foot on the ladder.

If you could manage to stick away £500 a month – a tough ask for the majority of households during a cost-of-living crisis – it would still take you five years to cobble together that deposit. All the while house prices are likely to have continued to climb, almost certainly outstripping wage growth over the same period. No wonder many trying to get onto the housing ladder feel like they are running only to stay still, while the market gallops ahead.

Still, “save more”. Apparently that’s the answer. And I suspect there will be a sizable minority who (almost certainly from a position of their own financial security) agree with Sir Howard. What are these youngsters complaining about? Things were tough in our day, too. Maybe these millennials should ditch the avocado toast and Netflix subscriptions and any semblance of fun in their lives and, hey presto, a deposit will materialise in a jiffy.

But that’s nonsense. The sums we’re talking about here are not spare change. Minor lifestyle tweaks are not enough to get people onto the ladder in a broken housing system, where the average home in the UK now costs around nine-times average earnings. The last time house prices were this expensive relative to average earnings was 1876.

Prospective first-time buyers will feel rightly sick of being told the reason the stability of home ownership is eluding them is down to them and their failure to save enough money. Sir Howard comes across as wildly out of touch with the struggles facing people in this country, particularly those trapped paying exorbitant rents and soaring bills while trying to save for a deposit.

The failure is not of the individual, but of the system itself. Save more money? How about building more homes?