“The underlying dynamic reflects a chronic shortage of housing supply, which the Bank can’t tackle directly,” Mark Carney, the governor, said in 2014 and has repeated in various formats since. “We are not able to build a single house.”

Yet it turns out we’ve been wrong. Skyrocketing prices, which have risen 60 per cent above inflation since 2000, have more to do with the Bank than the builders. That’s the Bank’s own finding, published on its Bank Underground blog, where it posts research that officials believe is worth airing. The analysis, using housing data for England and Wales, could not have been clearer. “We find that the rise in real house prices since 2000 can be explained almost entirely by lower interest rates,” the authors write. “Increasing scarcity of housing has played a negligible role.”

To make their argument, they disaggregate housing into its two components: the asset, namely the property; and the service, by which they mean having a roof over your head. If the problem was supply, with more people wanting a place than there are homes to accommodate them, the cost of the service ought to have risen. But rents, a proxy for housing services, have increased roughly in line with inflation, the Bank found. That “does imply that housing hasn’t got significantly scarcer over the past two decades”.

But what about the “chronic shortage”? Ian Mulheirn, chief economist of Renewing the Centre at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, says there isn’t one. Official figures show that since 1996 English housing stock has grown by 168,000 per year, while household numbers have increased by 147,000. We have a surplus of 1.1 million homes now, he estimates. Amended figures suggest that England needs only 160,000 homes a year, not the 250,000 in Mr Javid’s 2017 white paper.

What that means, as both the Bank and Mr Mulheirn state, is that the explosion in house prices has been driven by falling interest rates. To many, that may seem obvious. Low rates mean that borrowers can afford more debt— and what they can afford banks will lend. More money means higher prices and, hey presto, a boom. But not a bubble, even though house prices are now eight times average incomes, compared with 4.5 times in the 1990s. Mortgages are as affordable today as they have always been because money is so cheap. In the 1990s the rate on a five-year fixed mortgage was 8 per cent above inflation. Today the margin is 2 per cent.

The Bank cannot be blamed for this price escalator effect. The cause has been near-zero rates and quantitative easing globally, which have pushed borrowing costs down everywhere, as well as fierce competition in the British mortgage market. Nor can it claim innocence. Its own analysis shows that central bank policies are driving up house prices, as it knew in 2014 when, on tightening the mortgage rules, it said that low rates pose “risks to housing markets”.