It’s been revealing to see our housing system through the eyes of Ukrainian refugees recently.

They cannot fathom why we don’t have an ample supply of large, warm, cheap, secure homes when we are such a wealthy country.

It is all too easy to become habituated to how our housing system works, or doesn’t, and to lose the perspective to be able to step back and recognise how utterly dysfunctional it is. This is the result of decades of abject political and market failure.

 A home is a human right (article 25 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights). The UN interprets this as the right to live somewhere in security, peace and dignity.

Putting the provision of a human right primarily in the hands of markets, as we do in the UK, is guaranteed to fail. Delivering human rights is not what markets do. Generally, left unregulated, they will do the opposite.

There are so many examples today of this failure of markets to deliver what society needs.