To solve the housing crisis, we have to end our old-fashioned attachment to owning property

Sajid Javid's idea is to hand all responsibility to ‘the private sector’ – it’ll never work

Help to Buy has been a failure of a scheme: it increases demand without supply (Getty)

Wanting to attract the young voters it has lost, the Conservative Party is looking to see what it can do about the badly operating housing market. Home ownership has been declining during the past 10 years. People who would like to own their own homes have all too often had to rent instead, or else they have simply gone on living with their parents.

So Sajid Javid, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, has sketched out an answer – admitting that delivery will depend upon whether the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, will pick up his ideas in next month’s budget. Javid argues that the Government should borrow to invest heavily in new homes and associated infrastructure.

On the face of it, this looks like bold new thinking. I immediately thought of the Wolfson Economics prize that in 2014 set the question: “How would you deliver a new garden city which is visionary, economically viable and popular?” It was won by an entry that argued for the near-doubling of an existing large town in line with garden city principles. But I am afraid that nothing so bold is in the Secretary of State’s mind.

What sort of new homes is he considering? Javid says the aim is for “a big increase in all types of home”, including social housing, build-to-rent properties and shared equity homes. Would the Government do this directly? Unfortunately not: no garden cities are contemplated. The Minister said that while councils “have a big part to play” in the plan, as do housing associations, the “biggest role” should be taken by the private sector.

This raises a further question: If the biggest role were to be played by house-building firms (what I presume is meant by the “private sector”), how exactly would the extra funds be passed on to them? By making loans, or by taking share stakes? We do not know – though neither course seems either likely, or, if followed, capable of producing big increases in house-building. For the house-builders are permanently short of skilled staff.

But at least the Minister is addressing the key problem, which is a shortage of supply – unlike his boss, the Prime Minister, who crazily seems to think that the difficulty is a shortage of demand. That is presumably why she announced on the eve of the Conservative Party conference in Manchester that the Government would find an extra £10bn for the Help to Buy scheme, to let another 135,000 people get on the property ladder.

Unfortunately, nobody seems to have told Downing Street that such measures make no difference to supply but boost demand, with the effect that house prices rise to even scarier heights. In any case, the Bank of England has done its bit by maintaining very low interest rates for 10 years.

But given that shortage of supply is critical, this raises the question of whether the Green Belt, which was introduced to prevent urban sprawl, is the chief obstacle to progress in building more houses. Substantially compressing supply, as it does, it is bound to be a prime suspect. But in practice, local authorities have been nibbling away at the Green Belt for many years. Planning approvals on the Green Belt grew by some 430 per cent under the coalition government, from 2010 to the end of April 2015.

There are also those who question the very concept. Much of the Green Belt is not all that green, including as it does scrap yards and gravel pits. In addition, the National Ecosystem Assessment of 2011 said flatly that land given over to intensive agriculture “has no environmental benefits at all”.

The thinktank ResPublica seems to have a much better idea than the Government of what to do. Its plans leave the Green Belt alone. Instead, working with leading housing associations, it is proposing a National Housing Fund that would invest substantially (£10bn annually for 10 years) in new homes for rent: it projects at least 40,000 new homes a year could be built. These would be available under family friendly long-term tenancies, at reasonable and predictable rents.

That sounds like a coherent and convincing way forward. It makes sense of Sajid Javid’s musings.

The housing crisis is not insoluble. But the problem won’t be cracked in Whitehall.