If you go past a building site on your regular commute, you will have experienced the strange feeling of noticing that, after a seeming eternity of nothing much happening, a whole structure suddenly springs up, almost out of nowhere. It is as though all that time spent working on foundations makes building the actual houses look like a walk in the park.

I had this same feeling reading IPPR’s new report: Benefits to Bricks. Labour have been laying the foundations of a decent but unflashy housing policy for several years and we are now starting to see the results take shape (apologies for the pun).

What is that shape?

At the beginning of the year, I argued that Labour needs to answer two big questions to develop our housing policy: to take a position on council housing and to decide who we think is to blame for the current housing crisis. IPPR’s report gives us an indication of the likely answers to those questions.

Graeme Cooke and Bill Davies, the authors of the IPPR report, seem to blame two factors for the housing crisis. Firstly, too much reliance on housing benefit and not enough expenditure on actually building houses. Secondly, they argue that Whitehall has had too much influence on shaping housing policy.

This argument in turn shapes their position on building new council houses. In essence, they are highly supportive of new council housing being built but they are not calling for this to be directed by central government. Instead, they lay out a process that would result in local authorities and cities deciding how much council housing will be built within their jurisdictions.

This neatly sidesteps the risk of Labour being painted as the party of council housing, with all the stigma that holds in some quarters, while at the same time putting in place mechanisms to substantially increase the amount of council housing that is actually being built.

These ideas are perhaps not the transformative or bold policies that some Labour supporters would like to see. There is, for example, no call for a return to the days of the 1960s when we were building huge numbers of houses each year. In fact, despite being launched at the same time as the grander and broader Condition of Britain report, there is very little discussion of how housing policy could contribute to ‘social renewal’, ‘fostering reciprocity’ and the rest.

Instead, what IPPR has laid out is a cautious, gradual approach to nudging the housing system in a different direction. These ideas are not, by themselves, enormous vote winners. However, they do contribute to the image of Labour having credible, worked-out policies that do not involve promising what Hopi Sen calls ‘free ponies’, a phrase that should perhaps be updated to ‘free owls’.

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Thomas Neumark  is a former Labour councillor and blogs at Dream Housing. He tweets @TomNeumark

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Photo: Alex Pepperhill