We are facing a housing emergency in Britain.

Access to safe, secure, and affordable homes is a fundamental right.

Yet council waiting lists are growing, and in the past five years councils in England have built only 2,200 social rent homes. Compare this to the 1960s, at the height of mass delivery, when we built 120,000 on average a year.

Council housing once sat at the centre of our welfare state, and there was consensus on the commitment to its delivery. But the economic experiments of the 1980s recast housing as merely a commodity. House building targets were cut, and the private sector was left to fill the gap, often unsuccessfully.

We are now living with the consequences of this.

Shelter estimates England needs 90,000 social rent homes a year for a decade to end the crisis and replace stock lost through policies such as Right to Buy. With the right powers, councils could deliver some 34,000 of these – but only if we equip them to be the driving force behind construction once again.

The Government has made some progress.

The announcement of the Social and Affordable Homes Programme delivers a boost in funding worth £39 billion, and changes to Right to Buy takes us some of the way towards better protections of the existing stock.

But there is far more to be done.

I echo calls by Shelter for Government to remove historic debt from councils’ housing revenue accounts; unlocking low-cost financing for council housebuilding; enabling councils to buy land at fair value; bringing empty homes back into use; and setting a clear mission across all levels of government to prioritise council-led delivery.

If we choose to act, we can once again put the right to decent housing at the heart of our mission as a Government.