Is housing at the heart of unequal Britain? With Anna Clarke

I think in providing some context of how we've got to where we are now, it'd be great to get a sense of throughout Britain's perhaps like longer history, when were the high points for house building? When were we building the most homes and providing the most livable space for people to live in?

So we were building a lot in the early part of the 20th century, certainly.

We were building kind of big estates.

We were building large scale.

That was private sector led delivery almost entirely.

And then the big social sector delivery was the kind of post-war.

There was some post-First World War, the kind of homes fit for heroes stuff.

So the early council housing came in there.

But then in the 50s and 60s, we saw large scale public sector led house building, which is big council housing going up in the 50s, 60s.

And then that's declined.

right down after that, to some extent replaced by housing associations, but they've never been at the scale that councils did in the 50s and 60s.

And then also to some extent replaced by the private sector building a little bit more.

But the private sector has gone up and down with economic cycles.

So we have got up to nearly 300,000 a year within the last 20 years on the normal model of private sector with a little bit of social housing.

So we've got quite close to the level that would meet the government's target.

but we haven't sustained it.

We've gone up and down because of the economic cycles.