The housing crisis has not been caused by a natural disaster. It is the direct result of decisions taken by government ministers who had every warning that their approach would damage health, cause insecurity and poverty, and endanger life.

Since 2010 the housing crisis has worsened – 13 years of abject failure of government housing policy by 15 transient housing ministers. Can you even name the current housing minister? She is Rachel Maclean who isn’t a household name, not even (as the old joke goes) in her own household.

The government has no real interest in resolving the housing crisis. If they had cared they would have acted, as Harold Macmillan did in the 1950s, building more than 300,000 homes a year. The current Conservative government and all Conservative Members of Parliament, including Rishi Sunak, were elected in 2019 on a manifesto that they would build 300,000 homes a year. Yet they have now abandoned this pledge. The “inevitable outcome” of this, according to the MP, Clive Betts, who chairs parliament’s Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee, will be a reduction in housebuilding.

Can we ever trust in the future anything the Conservatives say about housing? Given their record, the answer is a resounding no.

In 2013 the coalition legislated to stop tenants getting legal aid for disrepair of their homes unless they are able to prove a severe risk to life or health. And as a consequence the tenants of Grenfell Tower were denied legal aid before that fateful fire.

The Right to Buy remains in place in England but is long gone in Scotland and Wales where the financial stupidity of this policy has been recognised. Forty per cent of homes sold through the Right to Buy are now in the private rented sector charging rents four or five times greater than the amount charged when these homes were council houses. The government now wants to extend the Right to Buy to housing associations! Worse still, even Labour is suggesting it wishes to do likewise.

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The effectiveness of independent advice agencies to deal with tenancy disputes has been blunted by years of funding cuts, starting with cuts under Labour until George Osborne inflicted a near-fatal killer blow.

With cost-of-living, health and climate crises, you would think it would make sense to invest to ensure that homes are energy efficient, costing less to heat and reducing the climate impact. The health of residents would improve and demands on the NHS would reduce. Three issues tackled for the price of one.

I appreciate that health is a huge department but if poor housing is costing the NHS £1.4 billion a year then surely it would make sense to have health and housing under one government department. They did that in 1948, why not see sense again?

Housing insecurity, like insecurity in employment, allows for the existence of a compliant, insecure and desperate population, be they renters or people with mortgages. This weekend I spoke to a couple of tenants who are anxious about asking for needed repairs in case their landlord terminates their tenancy at its next review.

Housing policy was once designed to provide homes where people live. It now facilitates investment opportunities where small and large fortunes can be made, including by government ministers and backbench MPs who oppose the introduction of rent caps, or the requirement that homes in the private rented sector are in a decent state of repair.

So-called affordable rents are 80 per cent of market rents. In places like Brighton and Hove this can be well beyond the means of many people. The conduct of volume house builders, both private and some housing associations, has been complicit in this conspiracy.

Conspiracy? Yes – they all know what they are doing and they all know the consequences. Government housing policy borders on being a criminal conspiracy to inflate housing costs to maximise profits for themselves, their backers and the rich.

Government initiatives like Help to Buy increase demand and do nothing to increase supply. Those in housing need, especially in high-cost housing areas like Brighton and Hove, will not benefit from these schemes.

Where will people live in the future? We won’t begin to tackle the housing crisis in Brighton and in the country at large until we have a massive programme of house building but not of any tenure because land is scarce in places like Brighton. We won’t begin to tackle the housing crisis until we a massive programme of building council houses, that are well designed, well maintained, carbon neutral, and with rents that people can actually afford to pay.

If the government wished to do something about housing, they have had every opportunity to do so over the last 13 years, but they haven’t done anything meaningful because, simply, they just don’t care.