Housing should be a national priority but we don't need loads more council houses.

Council housing is 100 years old. Well actually it's quite a lot older than that and social housing provision goes back to the middle ages but let's stick with the anniversary of the Housing and Town Planning Act, 1919 which provided subsidy to local councils wanting to build houses - the original "Homes for Heroes". Local councils quite rightly celebrate their contribution to better homes for working people - from Bradford's Chain Street, built for Irish labourers to the massive Beacontree estate in outer East London.

People point to later actions such as the decision by the 1950s Conservative government to build new houses at a time when, despite its promises and commitment to socialism, Attlee's Labour government had failed to respond to an acute post-war housing shortage. Our 1950 manifesto proclaimed:

Housing is the first of the social services. It is also one of the keys to increased productivity. Work, family life, health and education are all undermined by crowded houses. Therefore, a Conservative and Unionist Government will give housing a priority second only to national defence.

It was a great achievement to oversee the building of more than 300,000 homes each year from 1952-55 and it met the post-war need and the related desire to use the opportunity to build new towns - better places to live in the manner of Ebeneezer Howard's 'garden city' ideal. So it's understandable that, looking back into this history, people cry out for a new generation of council homes to meet today's housing need - even down to a fêted TV architect going back to his roots with a campaign for these new council homes. After all the market hasn't provided these homes so government must step in again and spend billions on new homes - £146 billion according to the Chartered Institute of Housing and housing charity, Shelter.

The two examples above were driven by the consequences - and the economic disruption - of war. The 1950s housing crisis was largely caused by the Luftwaffe but was captured early on by social engineers who saw it as a chance to end what they saw as the tyranny of private rental and provide working class people with those 'homes for heroes'. The passion of these social engineers continued into the 1960s and 1970s as 'slums' were cleared to be replaced with grand cities in the sky - rows of walk-up blocks interspersed with huge tower blocks. Millions of people changed tenure from private rented property to council housing. And millions of kids - like George Clarke, our TV architect - were brought up on these estates.

But while George and others were growing up something else happened - more people began, despite the limitations of mortgage finance, to buy their own homes. Why move from one rented tenure to another when you could buy your own home. Alongside those newly built council estates, people saw rows of private homes being built, each filling with clerks, supervisors and administrators, with the growing lower middle class of an expanding service economy. Home ownership became the aspiration of most people, an aspiration that those living in council housing felt cut off from. In twenty years from 1958 to 1978, UK home ownership levels doubled leaving Britain as a country with two tenures - council housing and owner occupation.

The widespread view in the 1970s was that the next generation would not need council housing as rising incomes would enable them to buy their own home. The problem was that over a third of the UK's housing stock was council housing and, if future families weren't going to need those council houses, what would become of them? In London the GLC and some boroughs like Bromley and Hillingdon began to look at selling council homes to their tenants (this has been Labour Party policy in 1959) both as an effective political pitch and to begin resolving the mismatch in supply between councils housing and private housing. Right-to-buy was born and quickly became the Conservative Party's flagship housing policy - over 2 million people switched from being council tenants to living in a home they owned, as Michael Heseltine remarked, "no single piece of legislation has enabled the transfer of so much capital wealth from the state to the people".

Councils - or most of them - hated right-to-buy and hated the mission to remove government from the provision of housing for a mass population. During the 1980s and 1990s Councils dragged their feet, finding ever more creative means to delay right-to-buy sales. Despite this, right-to-buy was a huge success - by 1987 over 1 million homes had been sold to their tenants, billions in state assets transferred to the people.

With other legislation encouraging councils to transfer all their housing into new associations, there was a further reduction in council housing stock as housing associations became the government's preferred means of providing social housing. While some authorities retained their housing, by the 1990s the age of council housing as a monolithic tenure - the only alternative to buying a home - had finished. Councils could concentrate on their strategic housing role - making sure land is available for new housing, providing services and support to the homeless, and working to ensure that the quality of the overall housing stock remained good.

So what has changed? Why do we now have people advocating another massive splurge of council housing building - 300,000 a year for ten years is George Clarke's campaign target? It's not that, as many tenants in my experience could attest, councils were brilliant landlords, quite the opposite. And council housing seems to be a step backwards from a world of home ownership especially given the scale of economic betterment since the 1950s. The answer lies in those numbers, in the fact that from the end of the 1990s to today we have built fewer homes than we needed as a nation with the result that, from 1997, house prices rocketed and people whose parents bought a home no longer feel able to do so. Once again we have a large and problematic private rented sector with the same exploitative practices ended by a combination of regulation and council house building in the 1960s and 1970s.

The problem here is that, for all that we could build nicer council housing than the flats thrown up in the 1970s, people want to buy their own house. The shortage, in most places, isn't a shortage of social housing but a shortage of affordable homes for families to buy. Building lots and lots of council houses reduces the pressures but doesn't resolve the problem especially if, as Clarke and his fellow campaigners want, right-to-buy is abolished. A more interesting argument might be to call for councils to build on an explicit rent-to-buy basis but this wouldn't suit the municipal authoritarians who dominate public housing policy in the UK.

This isn't to say that councils shouldn't build new homes but it is to argue that if there's £146 billion in public subsidy knocking about, using it to buy already overpriced land so as to build homes to let as subsidised rents isn't a great strategy. Indeed, if councils want to contribute to solving the housing supply problem they have the ability to do so now through their local plan process. Land prices are high because there isn't enough housing land to meet demand - a dramatic increase in housing land supply would reduce those land prices and have a beneficial effect on housing costs all without the government having to cough up a penny in subsidy. As we've seen in Sydney, once the poster child of inflated housing costs, once you allow development at scale, you get development at scale - and housing costs fall.

The nostalgia for council housing is understandable but the reality for many who lived in it wasn't the idyll that some make it out to be and it featured poor, slow maintenance, lengthy waiting lists with obscure points systems, management 'discretion' allowing councillors to deliver political favours through queue jumping, and rising levels of crime and disorder as the more successful moved into the private sector. To suggest that the only way to resolve our current housing problems is the mass building of council homes is to acknowledge that councils - and councillors - don't have the balls to face down the NIMBYs, put a rocket under the planners and apply some creativity to meeting housing need. It's so much easier to simply say; "here's billions of taxpayers cash, go build some houses" and then build homes that people don't want (they'd rather buy), in places isolated from work and where folk would rather not live.

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