Actually the proportion of schools affected is minute, a couple of hundred out of a total of 20,000, but it has not been a good look, especially as the form of lightweight concrete, used particularly in ceilings, is certainly not confined to education buildings. As ever, short-cut solutions providing cheap materials, with a limited life expectancy, end up costing the public purse more than doing things properly in the first place.

Ditto the extraordinary levels of housing subsidies paid to the poor, or rather the landlords of the poor, currently running at well over £25 billion a year. It should be noted that this expenditure does not produce a single social housing unit. Government ministers tell the media that they are building record numbers of social homes, but this is simply not true. If repeated it becomes a lie, which unfortunately is what is happening.

The reality is that government support for the creation of social housing by local authorities and housing associations has plummeted over the last decade. The number of such units being sold, or demolished to make way for market-oriented development, has soared, leaving big net decreases in availability for people least able to afford a mortgage. Increasingly this means they are forced into the private rental market, or (even worse) bed-and-breakfast accommodation. Tories appeared to dislike the poor, while Labour is simply embarrassed by them, having created no credible plan as to how they would increase housing supply across the board.

Amazingly, the Conservative government has not only failed to provide for the poor, but has fallen out with volume housebuilders (and commercial developers too) as a result of increasingly arbitrary planning decisions and policies, dreamed up by the Secretary of State for Levelling Up and Local Communities, Michael Gove.

If he can’t block a development by citing worries over carbon, he has a go by deciding it is not beautiful enough. If a local authority wants a development, he says they have misunderstood their own local plan. Senior planning inspectors, after inquiries costing in some cased millions of pounds, are having their decisions overturned by Mr Gove, to the point where he is being taken to court to have his rulings quashed.

Earlier this year, he intervened to block a housing development in Kent. The housebuilder went to court. Mr Gove then said he would need to reconsider his decision, made on the basis of out-of-date information. We await the outcome.

Notoriously, when our biggest retailer, Marks & Spencer, wanted to redevelop three buildings it owns on Oxford Street, one of them a store, Mr Gove intervened to block planning permission being granted, even though the application was supported by Westminster Council (the local planning authority) and the Mayor of London. A wishy-washy decision letter has now triggered another court challenge. It is extremely rare for this sort of decision to be taken to court, but the industry and its advisers now regard Gove as a loose cannon – the risk of losing in court diminishing enough to make that expensive journey worthwhile.

Gove has suggested, without irony, that in order to bypass a slow planning system(!), he might consider setting up mini-development corporations, with planning and compulsory purchase powers, across the country in order to generate much-needed housing. You couldn’t make it up.

In central London, the Secretary of State for Delay has failed to reach a decision on two major planning applications for commercial and mixed-use development both south of the Thames. They have been the subject of extensive public inquiries, and both developers and their legal teams were told that decisions would be announced in July. This has now been pushed back to October. Does this mean that inspectors have found in favour, but Mr Gove needs more time to come up with reasons to overturn their thinking? Or did he just want to get away on holiday? We can only speculate.

Brighter prospects

Amidst the gloom, there are signs that the public sector is at last beginning to take seriously its property assets, and the benefits that a long-term investment approach could deliver, rather in the way that the great Land Estates have provided models for stewardship in London for centuries.

Transport for London and Network Rail are both considering how they could operate in the same sort of way as Grosvenor Estate. So you don’t sell property assets, you manage them. You seek partnerships with adjacent landowners, particularly if they too are in the public sector. You nurture cordial relationships with the multiple planning authorities you are likely to deal with. You conduct forensic audits of your ownerships and lease arrangements. You develop housing both in the public interest, and as a way of generating long-term income.

And, by the way, you establish quality of criteria in respect of architecture, urban design and landscaping which the private sector will acknowledge with grudging admiration.

More details later this year, but things are on the move. Without national government poking its nose in.