Many people seem to be working up a lather on the government’s proposal to reduce benefits to those who live in under-uitlised social housing. The aim of this proposal is to encourage small households that are living in large houses to swap with large families living in smaller houses. Given that there are around 1,000,000 overcrowded families looking for larger houses and some 2,000,000 smaller families or singles living in larger houses, you would have thought there might be some scope to swap people around.

However, trying to tackle this issue is fraught with problems, not least of which is people’s attachment to their house and to the community in which they live (and may have lived for a very long time), not everybody wants to uproot themselves when their sons and daughters leave home.

However the key issue in talking about social housing is the lack of new affordable housing coming into use. Had we been building at two or three times the current rate of affordable builds for the last decade or two, we probably would not have needed to tackle the issue of under-utilised houses, as the total stock would have been much bigger and the problem much smaller.

We simply need to build more housing that people can afford to live in and the current planning regime (and propsals in the pipeline) do not make this any more achievable. We need an emergemcy programme to get Britain building.