When housing association leaders met in Birmingham this week, the sun shone, but a metaphorical pall of smoke hung over every session. No-one can ignore the the burnt-out shell of Grenfell Tower, 125 miles south.

It is not yet clear how the terrible events of 14 June are going to change this government’s housing policy. Since 2010, all government effort has been aimed at encouraging home ownership. Social housing – properly affordable homes for rent – has been actively discouraged.

There has been a deliberate erosion of housing rights, a mass sell-off of social housing, cuts through welfare reform and a cut in the rents housing associations can charge; and a growing callousness towards vulnerable people.

Margaret Thatcher used to play up her background as a grocer’s daughter, implying it prepared her for the job of balancing the country’s economy.

It’s been a while since a Conservative secretary of state for housing took a similar tack. But this week, communities secretary Sajid Javid told housing association leaders that he knew how living in the wrong kind of house could affect your life chances.

“Kids from my neck of the woods simply didn’t take A-levels or go to university,” said Javid, of his upbringing on Bristol’s Stapleton Road. “Society had low expectations of us, and we were expected to live down to them. It was the same years later, when I was applying for jobs with merchant banks in London. I got the sense that the interview panels had never before met someone who lived in the overcrowded flat above the family shop.”

Javid went on to say that the Grenfell tragedy demonstrated the extent to which these attitudes have spread and become deeply ingrained in the UK. “While I don’t want to pre-judge the findings of the public or police inquiries, it’s clear that in the months and the years before the fire, the residents of Grenfell Tower were not listened to,” he said.

It was sleight of hand that failed to take an ounce of responsibility by successive governments for creating the very conditions that Javid now has to tackle: a housing market that is, by the government’s own admission, broken, with an acute shortage of housing , especially social housing.

Instead, Javid made the classic move of a politician who knows something’s up, but doesn’t know what the answer is. He announced a green paper on social housing. This will take months, if not years, with no guarantee at the end of it that the government will make any changes to existing social housing policy.

With no definite policies to announce, Javid switched to praise, telling delegates that there had been some “unfair criticism” of social landlords but that he knew they were all passionate about getting safe, secure, affordable roofs over the heads of families. “I want to thank you all, and everyone that you employ, for all the good that you do,” he said.

It comes to something when the bare minimum from a secretary of state is regarded as a positive move forward. But frankly, many of the assembled housing leaders took comfort from the fact that Javid wasn’t being outright critical, or more punitive.

This is a shift. Two years ago, housing chiefs felt they had little option but to accept,“voluntarily”, the extension of right to buy to social housing tenants.

This year, however, the National Housing Federation chief executive David Orr was emboldened to ask for more from the government, specifically requesting Javid to switch the unspent £1bn in the fund for starter homes into money to help housing associations build more homes. A report by the federation, produced to coincide with the conference, says the amount of capital committed by the government to house-building has fallen from £11.4bn in 2009 to £5.3bn in 2015.

But more money is unlikely to be easily forthcoming and housing associations have also been warned by the sector’s regulator not to expect more financial support unless they sweat “every single asset”.

In 1968, Ronan Point was, like Grenfell Tower, a preventable disaster that occurred because of the fragility of a tower block. Almost 50 years later, tenants are still asking to be listened to. Perhaps a green paper will make that happen. But it is a very long-winded way of creating housing policy. For the time being, social housing feels like it is still in limbo, hemmed in by government policy and haunted by Grenfell.

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