There is a growing public sense crisis in housing, and a belief that the housing market is failing. But there's no swell of public or political support for new council and housing association homes. This is a hard truth for housing campaigners. 

The challenge is clear: ‘how can we build more homes that families and young people can afford?', though social housing is rarely seen as the answer.

Most people now think social housing is like social services, part of the state's safety net for the needy, not homes meant for them or their families. Three decades on from Margaret Thatcher housing is regarded as a private responsibility, not as an essential public good.

Above all, there is a pessimistic fatalism that much can be done about failings in the housing market, or that public housing can play anything but a peripheral part in building the homes our country needs.

In 1945, when Aneurin Bevan assumed responsibility for housing alongside health, he put local authorities in charge of a huge homes programme because the nation could rely on them rather than the private housebuilders to get building.