Whatever the Starmer administration’s woes, Labour’s first conference as the party of government in 15 long years will still have an element of gleeful excitement. But nagging doubts will not be hard to find, and they will go further than the awful mess over gifts and donations. A panicked prime minister is now vowing to protect public services from austerity while sticking to his lines about the forthcoming budget being “tough”, and replete with “difficult decisions”, which means that the big question simmering away in Liverpool’s hotels and bars remains unavoidable. The conference’s key slogan is “Change begins”. But if the government’s aims and targets are constrained by thrift, what will that actually look like?

One policy area brings all that into sharp focus: housing, which will surely be one of the things most animatedly debated on the conference fringe. Labour, we know, says it will oversee the building of 1.5m new homes by the time of the next election, or 300,000 a year. For the most part, ministers have portrayed this in terms of houses people will buy, built by developers that will supposedly jump into action once planning rules are loosened. But there is another Labour promise that often looks even more uncertain: the pledge to “deliver the biggest boost to social and affordable housing in a generation”.

The crisis that such talk vaguely answers is only getting worse. Last week, the housing charity Shelter published new research showing that one in 78 children in England – 152,000, in total – are homeless, and living in temporary accommodation. At the last count, households on English councils’ housing waiting lists had reached 1.29m, the highest number in 10 years.

Housing associations, long the biggest developers of social housing,........

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