Is this the final blow to the idea of social housing? The government has quietly put down an amendment to the housing and planning bill, it has just emerged in the Commons, that will end councils’ powers to grant lifelong tenancies.

In future, new tenants will face a review of their circumstances at least every five years. Any change in circumstance might mean a move. If they’re lucky, it would be to alternative council accommodation. More likely, though, would be a move into the private sector, with a private landlord, either in a place where they don’t want to live or at a rent they can’t afford.

Farewell to any sense of permanence or community, long-term engagement or planning for the future. Why commit, when you don’t know where you’ll be in five years’ time? This feels like the final victory of property over communal ownership.

You can see the way the idea has developed. It depends on regarding social housing purely as a safety net, a last resort for people who have failed to show enough character to amass the wealth to buy their own home, an escape for those unlucky few who, through personal catastrophe or sheer misfortune, find themselves homeless.

In that light, this latest move is simply a way of making sure councils manage their housing stock efficiently, keeping home size and location aligned with tenants’ needs and the needs of others on the waiting list. In hard times, and with resources scarce, that makes a sort of sense.

But what really bothers Conservatives is the idea that people live in social housing when they could afford not to. These can only be freeloaders, a burden on the taxpayer. Even if they see themselves as doughty upholders of the dream of social housing for all decent folk, they are just deluding themselves or the rest of us.

There may be a few who are: on Department of Communities and Local Government figures, there may be as many as 35,000 of such households across England whose income exceeds £60,000. Since every social rent gets a £3,600 subsidy, if they all existed and they all moved out, there’s a handsome saving to be made.

Home ownership has been the default preference of government policy for a generation. Unfortunately, home ownership is often in direct conflict with house building, since homeowners are often resistant to new homes being built in their neighbourhood; and, once someone owns their own home, they have an interest in the price going up. The shortage of supply means that a joint income of £60,000 is unlikely to get you a home anywhere in southern England.

So the refusal to allow councils to build replacements for the homes they were forced to sell back in the 1980s, and now the madness (for all except the lucky tenants) of selling housing association homes, comes full circle, with the ban on long-term tenancies. Council housing will increasingly be for the neediest, the most dysfunctional or the desperate. And so another part of the 20th century dream of social solidarity is chiselled away to nothing.

The relentless Americanisation of society so vividly illustrated in the reports from inside the Sports Direct warehouse strides on. And the dream of estates of solidly built, decent, homes where the doctor, the vicar and the factory worker all lived as neighbours in the same road in a respectable, classless utopia is banished.

Unless of course, you can afford to buy (starting price somewhere about £300,000) a house in the Dorset county town of Dorchester. Here Prince Charles has applied the ideas of the new urbanism, another housing dream, built a mixed neighbourhood of pastiche classical streets, and called it Poundbury.