Between 1997 and 2010, the number of home-owning households rose by over one million. It has fallen since 2010, from 67% to 64% last year, and housebuilding has still not recovered to the level it was before the global financial crisis.

I am concerned that the Government’s record on housing is nine years of failure on all fronts. There has been a 90% decrease in real-terms funding for new affordable homes, 30,000 fewer social rented homes built each year, a rise in private renting with households paying ever higher rents, and a 165% increase in rough sleeping.

To address these failures, I support the establishment of a new department for housing tasked with building at least one million new homes over the course of the next Parliament. I believe the ambition should be to reach and then sustain housebuilding at a level of 250,000 homes a year with at least 100,000 of these genuinely affordable homes to rent and buy. This would involve a new type of housing – “first buy homes” – with housing costs for new build homes set at a third of local average incomes so that homes are priced at a level than people can afford, and not what makes developers the most money.

More widely, I support meaningful action to end rough sleeping and tackle the root causes of rising homelessness to ensure that everyone has a place to call home. This includes ending cuts to local government and ensuring that councils can deliver vital local services like homelessness prevention and reduction.