I heard a bloke on the radio talking about housing. He was the chief executive of one of the big national housebuilders. The company is in the Footsie 100, and he’s been running it for 17 years. There’s a problem with first-time buyers unable to get on to the property ladder. It’s all about affordability. The interviewer was typically deferential. Planning regulations are holding us back; the Government needs to pump more public money into the system. I may have missed it; I was driving, but there were no questions about the 100,000s of houses with planning permission not being built. Or that by pumping £billions of taxpayers’ money into the housing market, the Government would be fanning the flames of house price inflation. Why, oh why, have successive governments continued to believe that this skewed market will deliver solutions to our housing needs?

One reason may well be the £millions house builders pay to Government to make the ‘right decisions’. Executives aren’t paid on whether they’re solving the housing crisis; it’s the share price that matters to them. If house prices are held at unsustainably high levels with taxpayer subsidy, the developers are laughing all the way to the bank. The irony is that if house building were a genuine free market, it would collapse in its current state. As the chief executive said, first-time buyers can’t buy. The bottom layer of the pyramid is disappearing. In short, houses cost more to build than people can afford to pay. The market is broken. But when big house builders can’t sell, along comes government in the form of Homes England to bail them out. And so, the failing system is sustained, and our housing crisis deepens.

And what does the Secretary of State do? He jumps around in a ridiculous Trumpesque performance, charting the mantra ‘build baby build’ as if that’s going to make any difference. Why not let the big developers fail, nationalise them, and then get back to building council housing. That’s what we did after the Second World War. Houses were built to solve a need, not service private greed. Don’t hold your breath; corporate Britain will circle the wagons, scaremongering, telling us the economy will collapse, and pensions will fall. Just look at the water companies. We need to bring corporate Britain to heel.

The failing housing market has deep and wide economic and social consequences. We must not allow the developers to dictate policy. The removal of local councillors from planning decision-making is a disgrace, and yet that is what government is intending to do this autumn. The devolution agenda we were promised is turning out to be anything but. Huge decisions will be taken by faceless officials, with Government claiming it’s to help solve our housing issues. All the while, economic growth is stymied by a lack of genuinely affordable housing. While key workers are unable to buy or rent and the proportion of disposable income is consumed by increasing mortgages and levels of rent, government appears clueless. It is transfixed by the big developers who are driven by greed.

More money is not always the answer, especially if that involves pumping public, taxpayers’ money into private hands. We’re proving this at the county council. When the policies and systems are right, things work better and more efficiently. This has created a surplus despite the strong headwinds. We can now invest in our roads, in our children and of course the libraries. All achieved, not by yet more outsourcing or extra spending, but by a clear vision of what we want to do and how we want to achieve it.