One difference between Theresa May’s government and the last one is its more active attitude to housing. At the Conservative party conference, for example, a £3bn home building fund was announced, together with promises to use publicly owned land to help create houses. This makes sense. If May is serious about helping the “just about managing”, she has to help the millions denied a decent, secure and affordable home and reduce the everyday misery created by the current combination of high prices and inadequate supply. These pressures may be felt only in prospering areas, mostly but not only in London and the south, but not by prosperous people.

This week, the communities secretary, Sajid Javid, is expected to reveal a housing white paper, a document reportedly delayed because of opposition from within his own party. The main cause of the opposition is the issue that will also dominate the headlines – his likely desire to encourage more building in green belt and rural locations. The Daily Telegraph has fired a pre-emptive salvo, warning that “the green belt must not be sacrificed for housing”. Javid, however, seems ready for some sort of fight.

Other ideas have been trailed and leaked. Javid might allow people to add a storey or two to property on existing blocks that, depending on its impact on surroundings, is a sensible way of allowing incremental growth. There is an idea about putting the car parks at railway stations underground, so as to build housing on top, also sensible but not a magic bullet. He will probably encourage the manufacture of houses offsite and in factories, so they can make better quality homes more efficiently and quickly than at present.

These would all be welcome, as supply is a large part of the housing problem. The Telegraph’s fears are exaggerated: London’s green belt is three times the area of the city itself and building on a tiny proportion of it would make a huge difference to the supply of homes. There is much more land designated as green belt than there was 25 years ago. The nation’s green belts are in no danger of disappearing under concrete, but they should form a part of any sane response to housing need. Ex-industrial, brownfield land should be built on as much as possible, but it is not always in places where people want to live. To say “let them live in old gasworks” will not answer every need.

But the hard part for Conservative politicians is that housing demands un-Conservative responses. The housing market is not and never will be free and unrestricted. It is not like selling beans in a shop. Whatever is built, whether in green belts or next to railway stations, requires planning. Legitimate interests have to be balanced, land well used and things such as schools, roads and open space provided for.

There is a political prize for whoever can crack this issue

Christine Whitehead, professor of housing economics at the LSE, argues that a basic level of monitoring and communication by local authorities would reduce opposition to development. “People are not irrational,” she says. “They know that people need homes, but they do not understand fully and are therefore scared. They don’t know when it’s going to stop.”

Someone, somewhere, has to be paid to address these questions in advance of building or protests against “sprawl” will be justified.

Nor can provision of housing be left to the private sector alone. Private housebuilders have not built houses in sufficient numbers since before the Second World War, not because they are wicked or incompetent but because it is not in their interests to do so. So government has to get involved and to assist, whether through housing associations or local authorities, which sometimes prove more effective than private companies at getting homes built and at a higher quality. As David Orr of the National Housing Federation says: “It’s all hands to the pump. We just have to bank the contribution from the private sector and say thank you very much, but also see how else we can fill the gap.”

There’s a danger, says Whitehead, that the white paper will simply generate a grand debate at the expense of smaller practical initiatives. There’s also a likelihood that its thinking won’t be big enough, that it won’t change the assumptions that have got us where we are. But there is a political prize for whoever can crack this issue. Until now, the generation of winners, those who sit smugly on the property they bought some time ago, has outweighed the younger generation of losers, but as the latter grow older and more numerous they will carry more electoral clout.