Three years ago, the £11.5bn Affordable Homes Programme 2021-2026 promised to deliver up to 180,000 genuinely affordable new homes across England – a drop in the ocean compared to the 145,000 new affordable homes deemed necessary each year to meet demand.

But it’s not only the affordable sector that is struggling to keep up.

Last year, Centre for Cities produced a report which calculated that the UK had a residential housing shortfall of 4.3m homes, with the decline in housebuilding traced back to 1947.