Ever heard that what comes around, goes around – or is it the other way round?

Only the political classes can tell us that as they dance around and around the maypole they call housing. They are still going after yet another season of conferences, Budgets and Budget squabbles comes to an end.

Remember council house building and the static labour market, when no one dared move in case they never got back on a waiting list again?

Or the Rent Acts that killed the private rented sector? The rabbit hutches that passed as starter homes and which were unsaleable once the economy picked up?

Or Home Information Packs? Or 20% deposits before a mortgage was granted? Yes – granted, as in Royal Prerogative!

This is the litany that has filled the post-war years. Decade after decade of party political and government interference that, 70 years on, has left us with another housing crisis, and still no cure in sight.

Now, even as the continentals openly despair at the low calibre of British politicians they have to deal with over Brexit, the residential housing industry stands on the sidelines, wringing hands and waiting expectantly for practical action from politicians.

But who will speak for the poor, the dispossessed, the families in appalling bed and breakfast slums, and the tenants paying 50% of their income in rent to landlords who themselves are being treated as low life to be taxed away from providing housing?

What of the rural and coastal communities who are being allowed to drive away second-home owners with new Stamp Duties as if there was anything else to keep their economies afloat?

And all of this accepted by a Chancellor who, in a minor way, was once a developer himself!

The Government promises new housing to be built at levels not seen since Harold Macmillan was housing minister in the 1950s.

It forgets that these numbers were delivered in conjunction with reconstruction following wartime bomb damage and a huge, and hugely overdue, programme of slum clearance.

As always, Westminster ignores the facts: that starter homes are mostly built where no one wants to live and that the average size of a new-build home in Britain is smaller than the equivalent throughout Europe – even in the densely populated areas.

And, of course, no Stamp Duty on these homes, and without alleviating Stamp Duty at all levels this is likely to drive prices from the bottom up.

Lack of affordability can be cured by ceasing politically-driven banker bashing – still going on ten years after the crash – and encouraging innovative forms of finance from lifetime mortgages, even mortgages that can carry on after death, providing continuity for families.

These would fund a better type of starter home.

More tax-efficient incentives for corporates are needed to persuade them to own and manage private rental property and to support the housing associations.

Charities such as Rowntree and Peabody should be encouraged to expand. Their experience and track record is invaluable both in terms of what is needed and how to go about it.

At the same time, politicians should drop the endless and inevitable Right to Buy mantra, which is part of the problem, not a solution. Ask any housing association or local authority.

The empty streets throughout the north and in other parts of the country are the result of domestic emigration to the south.

That is the cause of the shortages in London and the south-east, not the influx of bogeymen from Eastern Europe.

Northern cities like Manchester and Salford, Newcastle and Liverpool, have shown the way, and it is for Westminster to follow – not to try and lead – and to back locally grown schemes both for finance and build.

The homeless, the houseless, the new poor renters, the disillusioned applicants for mortgages, can all testify that it’s time to take housing policy and finance away from the political classes. They have been dancing around the housing maypole for far too long.

Remember, as Philip Collins, the political commentator and former speechwriter to Tony Blair, commented recently: “The (present) political class is of the lowest intellectual calibre in living memory.”

* Malcolm Harrison is an experienced commentator on the housing market