I met Carole Guscott, a retired former carer, on a clear winter’s morning in the Somerset town of Minehead. She was walking her whippet, Gracie, on the way back to her new flat, past the local Premier Inn and on to a cul de sac called Rainbow Way. “I knew as soon as I saw it,” she told me. “I just thought: ‘I can make this place my home.’”

Up until recently, she was living in a private rented place near the centre of town and paying £780 a month in rent. For four years she had known that Rainbow Way was being built. She also knew that its houses and flats were an example of something that is vanishingly rare in post-Thatcher Britain: new council housing, which meant security for the people chosen to be the tenants but also intense competition for places.

But she then got a call, and an invitation to come and have a look. “I was stunned,” she said. She instantly decided to move in, paying just over £500 in monthly rent, and delighting in the views of the surrounding hills and townscape. “The flat is just so open and bright,” she told me. “I feel blessed that I’m here.” She also said: “Without a council house, there just isn’t the security.”

There are 54 new council homes on Rainbow Way: 33 flats and 21 houses – the first such dwellings to be built in this part of Somerset in 30 years. Around half the people now living here were recently “homeless, facing harassment, being moved on from supported accommodation or urgently needing two or more bedrooms due to family circumstances”. Of the new tenants, 89% were already resident in Minehead and 11% had “strong local connections”: an important point, because the town is a byword for deprivation and low social mobility, with an economy centred on seasonal employment – symbolised by its........

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