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I hope you realise there's a housing crisis. After all, we hear about it every day.

If you repeat something often enough it becomes accepted as fact, and the phrase "housing crisis" has been uttered by politicians of all parties for so long that anyone pointing out there isn't one gets shouted down.

But there isn't a housing crisis. Or at least, not the one you've been told about.

The crisis discussed most often is one of construction. That not enough new homes are built, so of course there are people without homes.

This is just the sort of bendy logic politicians love because it is short and easy to say on the evening news, and it rather ignores the fact that if more houses were built, a man sleeping in a wet cardboard box under a bridge would in all likelihood not feel his problems resolved.

But he is not the sort of homeless that politicians worry about. They prefer to show concern for people who HAVE homes, but just not the ones they desire, and who are more likely to vote.

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It need not be pointed out that people in rented housing, or those living with family, are not homeless. Nor are they "hidden", however sorry for themselves they may feel, because they get mentioned all the time.

These are people who would like a home of their own but don't have one, can't afford one, don't meet the mortgage criteria or spend too much on poncey coffees. Possibly all four.

FYI, snowflakes, it is possible to solve these problems if you apply yourselves to it. Houses are earned, not delivered.

So if the housing crisis isn't about the genuinely homeless, and involves demand rather than need, who is really in trouble because of it?

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That's right, the Chancellor of the Exchequer At Least Until He Cocks The Budget Up On Wednesday, Philip 'Plonker' Hammond.

For weeks now his people have been leaking that the budget will include a pledge to build 300,000 new homes for the people who need them, which gives you a lovely headline but a bit of a headache too.

You see, in the 2016 budget he promised £1.4billlion to build 40,000 new homes, and £2.3bn infrastructure to supply a further 100,000. But in the same year he managed to provide just 1,102 homes for social rent, and then extended the help to buy scheme because who needs social housing anyway.

Since the Tories came to power in 2010 the number of such homes built has plummeted by 97%.

And in 2015 the Tories promised to build 200,000 new homes and they didn't materialise either.

(Image: PA)

The trouble is homes for rent aren't profitable, and the Tories don't want to build them or persuade someone else to do it, so they introduced a thing called "affordable houses".

They're so affordable that 98% of people can't afford one.

The not-affordable houses are such a con that not only does this mean the state offers a 20% discount to first-time buyers, they have to contribute to it through taxation and the only ones who benefit are the property developers who sell a home for more profit than if it was social housing.

So that's Tories telling voters they'll give them cheap homes that aren't cheap and a discount they have to pay for and there's still a crisis for everyone but property developers who go KERCHING.

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But there's another group of people we need to worry about, and that's the 77,240 families in temporary accommodation.

These are women who've fled violent partners, those evicted because their Universal Credit was 10 weeks late, and those on the breadline or who hit bad luck.

They include 6,590 families in B&Bs, 3,000 of them with dependent children. They get moved out of their home borough, they get put in unsanitary accommodation, and local councils have spent £3.5bn on temporary housing for them since 2010.

That's a 43% jump in costs on the Tory watch.

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So the Tories are barely bothering to build social housing, their totally-unaffordable housing costs us more than it ought to, and I expect about now someone will say this is all the property developers' fault. They bank land, they set the prices, they don't build on brownfield sites!

I'll tell you what else they do, and that's have fun with a housing loophole kindly loosened for them in 2012 by then-Communities Secretary Eric Pickles.

Developers enter into what's called Section 106 agreements with local authorities, agreeing a certain proportion of affordable homes in any new development. Pickles allowed them to run "viability assessments", by which they could claim the proportion was too high to make it profitable enough to get the cement mixer out.

Research by Shelter has shown that in 9 cities these assessments were used in half of new developments, and that the proportion of that's-not-affordable housing went from an average of 28% to just 7%.

(Image: Andy Stenning/Daily Mirror)

Private Eye reports the government now looks like it's cracking down on these assessments, but seeing as that crackdown involves a long consultation and a lot of thinking, the phrase "looks like" is the most accurate description for it.

But then Tory maths never quite adds up. They say we have to loosen rules for developers, but new houses don't appear. They say we have to make things more affordable, and they get more expensive. They want us to build on green fields, and then they'll complain when they're gone.

Well, here's a bit of maths we can all work out. There are 1.2million people on the housing waiting list in England, and 1.5m second homes.

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Buying a second home benefits nobody. They are re-sold only after years, so the economic effect of stamp duty is negligble. They are occupied on average for just 2 weeks a year, so your annual holiday is 100,000 times more expensive than it needs to be. And the communities they are in wither and die as jobs, tradespeople, and resources flow or are priced out of the area.

Now imagine for a moment those second homes were taxed almost out of existence. Say, 10% of their value every year.

The oligarchs with a London penthouse would just cough up, as would former Prime Ministers with a London home, an Oxfordshire home, a Cornish home and some lucrative memoirs in the pipeline. That money would go to the Treasury and be spent on things all of us would find useful.

Others would rent their second homes out as holiday lets, turning them into businesses, bringing in visitors to support local jobs, and - gosh - generating more tax.

And the remainder would dump them on the market, causing prices to drop to a level more easily described as "affordable" particularly at the bottom end of the market where first-time buyers want smaller properties.

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As a bonus, more people means more jobs. They not only support local business but can afford to set up their own, and firms would relocate from elsewhere to wherever the workforce is.

From Cornwall to the Cotswolds, Skeggy to Suffolk, the knock-on effect would be greater social cohesion, reduced rural crime, and communities that don't have to splinter because young people can't find work or a home.

As a result grandparents can help more with the childcare, and people can look after their frailer relatives thus cutting the costs of social care and NHS bed-blocking.

If we tax those second homes the tax take goes up, the tax spend goes down, jobs are created and communities made whole.

But we don't, and the fact that second homeowners and property developers are more likely to be Tory donors and voters is just a coincidence.

Whatever the budget says, remember this: the only housing crisis we have is that Tory millionaires are in charge of housing. The only economy they care about is their own, and the only maths they're any good at is the sort where they get another house out of it.