This journal is running a campaign, which I strongly support, to hold the government to its manifesto commitment to deliver 300,000 new homes a year, every year.

It doesn’t seem too controversial, does it? Virtually everyone now agrees that we have a housing crisis rooted in the insufficient supply of new homes over decades. We have over a million people living in ‘temporary accommodation’, often for many years because there is no permanent home for them to move to.

Indeed, there are twice as many children living in temporary homes now then there were in the mid-1960s when Ken Loach made the seminal film ‘Cathy Come Home’. We have a generation of people who have lived all their adult lives in the private rented sector and will continue to do so in retirement. We have young adults in good jobs who can’t afford to buy a home. We have, for the first time in our modern history, more people who own outright than are buying with a mortgage. Levels of owner occupation have fallen from 70% to just over 60%. What other evidence do we need that we have failed to build enough new homes?