Strong intervention from the government was missing from the Budget

Even the promises to do more on speeding up planning and land supply were stronger on identification of the problem than on strong measures to fix it.

This week, I spent two hours being one of a panel of three (along with Brian Berry of the Federation of Master Builders and Nick Forbes, leader of Newcastle City Council) giving evidence to the Treasury Select Committee on the housing measures in the Budget.

This consisted of a series of thoughtful questions about the full range of issues in the Budget, to which nearly every answer was a variant on “yes, it’s a useful measure, but it doesn’t go far enough”.

“Anyone who thinks £2bn for social rent is enough is living in cloud cuckoo land.”

At one point, we were asked whether the £2bn for social rent is enough. I must confess my answer was to suggest anyone who thinks it’s enough is living in cloud cuckoo land. I also said that I don’t think anyone in government believes it is enough.

We need to regard it as a down payment – and a huge step forward after a period of seven years where there has been no financial support from government for social rent.

But it goes nowhere near the £7bn a year Savills consider necessary in a recent report.

The same is true of the changes to Universal Credit.

“The Universal Credit model still assumes that people have to get used to a working world where salaries are paid monthly.”

Removing the one-week wait at the start is helpful and the decision to allow a two-week transition period where housing benefit will continue to be paid recognises that this is a real problem.

These are big and welcome steps forward. But the model still assumes that people have to get used to a working world where salaries are paid monthly.

This is just not the case for millions of people in the gig economy, in insecure work where payments are weekly, fortnightly, or even sometimes daily.

We have asked the government to be bold (I think I used the word muscular) in its approach to land purchase and assembly, using compulsory purchase powers to ensure we have the land we need to build on. We have suggested that there should be no more price-based competitions for the sale of public land and that public land should first and foremost be used for the benefit of the public.

That would be real value for money and ensure that the value that comes from a residential planning consent would be in the new development rather than lost to the landowner.

When we were building 300,000 homes or more every year in the 1950s and 1960s, these were the measures used by government.

We have a broken housing market. It should be a clear national priority to fix it. As Theresa May said: it is the defining issue of our time.

“The requirement to be bold doesn’t rest just with the government.”

I really don’t want all this to sound as though I am damning with faint praise.

After six years where most government decisions made it more difficult to build new homes and great places, we now have a range of decisions that are clearly and significantly helpful.

We have more money and the political wind in our sails.

The requirement to be bold doesn’t rest just with the government. It rests with everyone who has a contribution to make to fixing our broken market.

Housing associations are already demonstrating a clear commitment to doing just this.

In the past two years they have built nearly 80,000 new homes, and last year they started work on 13% more new homes than in 2015/16.

Our sector’s boldness and commitment will help.

The truth remains that it is only muscular intervention by government that will deliver transformational change. At least for now, that seems not to be on the table.

David Orr, chief executive, National Housing Federation