England’s house building pipeline is at the lowest level since records began 17 years ago, as fresh pressure is piled on government parties to mend a “deepening housing crisis”.

High interest rates and slow planning processes mean new home delivery has likely fallen to just 100,000 in the last 12 months. We need to be building four times that many a year to fulfil our moral duty of getting people on the housing ladder, says Brandon Lewis

We need to build more homes. It is a sentence I have written, sadly, many times before. Yet here we are again. With the government perpetually outlining its housing plan but falling short on concrete details, we must consider what any such plan should include. As ever, housing is more than bricks and mortar; it is the foundation of economic growth and social mobility.

A core driver of economic growth has always been enabling house builders to build and home buyers to buy. A quick look at the country’s GDP in the decades following the Second World War reveals a clear link between economic growth and increased residential development. For years, home building has........

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