Housing minister was once a cabinet position and really must be again. For an issue which has so frequently paid a political dividend it has been remarkably relegated down the order of priorities. The domestic response to the two world wars was to rebuild the housing stock. David Lloyd George pledged homes fit for war heroes and the 1924 Labour government offered a housing act as its only substantive achievement. Aneurin Bevan spent more time on housing after 1945 than he did on the NHS and the number of houses built was one of the ways the Attlee government asked to be judged. The last time the Conservative Party really connected to the urban working class was when Margaret Thatcher arranged for 100,000 of them a year to buy the homes once owned and neglected by the council.

For the most part, though, the covenant on housing policy has operated silently. There has been an implicit bargain in postwar British politics that buying your own home is an index of progress and that, with hard work, it should be possible. After Bevan, housing policy has been directed towards the vision that Neville Chamberlain once described as “the property-owning democracy”.

There is a hint of the politics of housing in that phrase. Tories have assumed that owning property makes conservatives of people while Labour, the constant voice of municipal housing, has assumed the large estates create a client group of its own voters. Council house sales were first mooted by Joe Haines, who worked for Harold Wilson, but rejected by his party for privatising the nation’s assets. Throughout the twists and turns of policy, property rights have had a unique connotation in Britain, signalling the assumption that a home of one’s own is the prize for all citizens.

It is therefore a political fact of the first order that home ownership has fallen to 63.5 per cent, its lowest level since 1987. Household growth has been strong as the population has increased and as more people live alone but the supply of houses is stagnant. With the value of land increasing, house builders are better described as landlords. Building is at its lowest level since 1923 and last year Britain built 100,000 homes fewer than the 250,000 per annum that are needed just to meet existing demand.

The facts gathered by the Resolution Foundation in its report Home Affront: housing across the generations continue the work that David Willetts, now the think tank’s executive chairman, began in his fine book The Pinch. They describe a life for the youngest generation of adults that may differ fundamentally, financially, from that of their grandparents and may be, for the first time, worse. Housing costs for the average family have tripled since 1961, from 6 per cent of income to 18 per cent. The typical age for buying property is moving from the 30s to the 40s. The generation of people below the age of 30 spend almost a quarter of their income on housing, which is three times as much as their grandparents spent at the same age. They are also having to make do with smaller places to live, further from work. It is both more expensive and considerably worse and there is never a political dividend in that combination.

Home ownership has been falling across all regions and income groups since 2003 but the youngest cohort will be hit the hardest. The option of social housing is now a rarity so a whole generation has started to rent privately. Half a century ago one in ten 30-year-olds rented a home. Now it is four in ten. A family headed by a 30-year-old today is half as likely to be a homeowner as their parents were at the age of 30.

There are manifold reasons for the decline in home ownership. People are spending longer in education, marrying and having children later, immigration has increased, the divorce rate has required more houses for the same population and people are living longer and are understandably reluctant to vacate the homes they call their own. In the wake of the crash of 2008 wages have been stagnant and access to mortgage finance has been curtailed. The low supply of new homes has produced the obvious effect of higher prices. A generation ago it took the average family 3 years to save enough for a deposit on a house. Now it would take almost 20 years.

It means that a different life beckons from the implied bargain of British politics. Coming to home ownership later, if at all, means that people will carry mortgages later in life, perhaps even beyond working age. That, in turn, will affect the capacity of that generation to save for retirement. The whole journey of life shifts back and that is for those who manage to embark at all. There is a set of people who are seriously thinking they might be stuck renting indefinitely. There are now 11 million people in rented accommodation in the private market.

The minister in charge, Sajid Javid, has an opportunity if he is bold enough to seize it. In a speech on Tuesday he made some encouraging noises about a review of social housing policy after the disaster of Grenfell Tower. He really needs, though, to do something about the quantity of social housing too. The proportion of families in this sector has halved, under government neglect, since 1981 and there is no quick solution which does not involve the government doing some building. The problems here are fundamental. Low and stagnant wages, money flowing into British property from offshore, restrictive planning and no infrastructure guidance from the centre.