Housing is the defining domestic political issue of the day. It’s the nearest that most voters get, personally, to the wider economy. The latest research shows that many families are cramming into new homes that a generation ago would have been thought too small to live in. Despite televisions getting bigger, living rooms are a third smaller than the 1970s. While no celebrity chef is without a runway-sized island to prepare meals, kitchens are 13% smaller than in the 1960s. According to the LABC Warranty study, homes are now being built not just with smaller rooms, but fewer of them. If true, families have less space for children to study in and less room to dissipate the strains of relationships. What is agreed is that England has the smallest homes by floor space area of any EU country. It’s also not in doubt that extreme overcrowding can have profound effects on family health and social cohesion.

So it is bizarre that the UK is one of the few western European nations to have no mandatory minimum space standards for housing. Little wonder that other nations have bigger homes while the UK gets shoe boxes. Ministers did introduce voluntary space standards for new homes in 2015, but as these could be ignored they only gave the appearance of solidity to pure wind. When this ruse was called out in 2016, the government said it would review how these were operating. Nothing has appeared. Part of this is to do with a rightwing legacy: Margaret Thatcher got rid of rules that set a reasonable internal size for public housing. Reintroducing legal standards in the interests of society is the right thing to do. It would also be a repudiation of a Thatcherite legacy, and is at odds with the direction of travel in housing.

Under the Conservatives, housing interventions designed to promote social solidarity almost disappeared. The distribution of housing space is dominated by a largely untrammelled market in land. This has led to re-emergence of a housing inequality in space. By some calculations, the most spaciously housed tenth of the population have five times as many rooms per person than the most overcrowded tenth. The counter argument is that market mechanisms will sort this out: older people who have houses will die and release stock on to the market. Yet this reasoning does not stand up to scrutiny.

Houses are needed and the reasons are largely to do with social justice, inequality and the distribution of political power. There must be an acknowledgment of the psychological comforts that domesticity affords. Past rules would need to be updated – homes must no longer find space for dining tables and upright pianos but be designed for the activities and furniture that are typical today. The Grenfell Tower tragedy provided a new background for politicians to think about housing. For too long politicians have cultivated voters reliant on house prices remaining high, and rising. The policies that have allowed this have had a damaging impact on a growing proportion of the population. So far Theresa May’s government has exaggerated how far it is prepared to intervene on the side of this section of society. Setting mandatory standards for house sizes is one test of whether this rhetoric will yield to reality.