We’re three weeks into the election and you could be forgiven for thinking Brexit is the only thing troubling the nation right now.

Here and there, other policy announcements have cut through, but it has been patchy.

Labour’s plan to nationalise broadband last week received a lot of airtime, for example, while doubtless Boris Johnson’s ‘accidental’ tax-cut reveal earlier today will grab some headlines too.

But there are other fundamental issues that so far we have heard little about - or, if we have done, we have only heard about them in pretty simplistic terms.

So here are four of the biggest, most intransigent and most important issues that could really do with a little more in-depth debate.

Crime

Yes, the parties are talking about crime, up to a point. But the terms of the current election discussion don’t even scrape the surface of the issues facing communities up and down the country, including in Greater Manchester.

Here, our senior police officers have long been saying that if you’re the victim of a low-level or even relatively serious crime, there’s a good chance they won’t be able to help you.

For the last few years data has shown that between 40pc and 50pc of crimes are simply ‘screened out’ by GMP. In other words, they don’t get followed up at all.

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That GMP is so up-front about its inability to investigate a large bulk of crime here is striking. It has long felt bizarre that such a situation can be deemed politically acceptable.

At last month’s Greater Manchester Combined Authority meeting, for example, the Chief Constable said victims of serious sexual or violent crime get a ‘good service’; as do, he said, vulnerable people with mental health problems, such as those who go missing.

“The people in the middle are the people who have really suffered,” he admitted. “And they are not getting the service they deserve.”

The ‘people in the middle’ are a lot of people. He means victims of anti-social behaviour, or assault, theft, criminal damage, robbery or burglary, for example. All things that the electorate has always assumed would be investigated if they call 999, but now, not so much.

Some communities have started clubbing together to get their own private policing services. In the summer we reported how knife crime had doubled in Greater Manchester over three years. Only one in 15 crimes here now end up with a charge.

Ask voters what they’ve heard said about crime during the election campaign so far and, if they’ve heard anything, it will probably be Boris Johnson’s promise to hire 20,000 new officers, which is in fact simply replacing those lost under his government since 2010.

It is also important to note that while Boris Johnson is fond of saying ‘we are recruiting’, as if it’s happening in real time, in fact only 2,000 officers are due to be hired next year, with the full total not planned until 2023. It's not clear how they will be distributed, or entirely certain that some of them won't be paid for through more council tax increases.

“I think people’s expectations are going through the roof because everybody’s just talking about 20,000 additional officers,” Chief Constable Hopkins told council leaders last month.

“Well, it takes nine months from when they walk through the door of the training school to when they walk out on independent patrol.

“Between 45pc and 60pc of my frontline are student officers, and that inexperience is going to be really hard for us to manage over the coming years.

“I’ve not had one new officer of those 20,000 walk through the door of GMP yet and people all of a sudden think we are going to be able to transform the way we operate overnight. We are not.

“This is going to take years to get back to a position that we were at a number of years ago.”

Housing

A massive structural problem facing this country that has been curiously absent from the debate so far.

It’s logical to assume Labour will talk about housing in its manifesto tomorrow, with ideas previously having been floated about allowing private renters the ‘right to buy’ the home they’re in, although little has been trailed so far.

An announcement on social housing is pretty much certain.

The Tories, on the other hand, were hit by an unhelpful headline earlier in the campaign that revealed not a single one of the 200,000 ‘starter homes’ promised by David Cameron ahead of the 2015 election have actually ever been built.

It is unclear what the Conservative position will be on housing in this election, although Boris Johnson has talked in broad terms about the need to borrow more for infrastructure investment.

When I asked him about housing last Friday - asking directly whether his manifesto would include pledges on social housing, Right to Buy or welfare, all key issues affecting people at the lower end of the market - he dodged the question, although he did say we need new homes of all kinds.

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Yet in general, housing has barely had a mention so far in this campaign - which is strange, given the acuity with which the issue is experienced across all age groups, geographies and demographics.

At the bottom end of the market in a place like Manchester, a genuine crisis in affordable housing supply has seen soaring numbers of homeless people, including families, now relying on the town hall to house them - a town hall that has not been given enough cash by Whitehall to cope with that crisis.

The waiting list for social housing here is vast.

With 6,000 people in 'urgent' need in the city, fewer and fewer social homes are becoming available because they're being sold off under Right to Buy faster than they're being built; there are around 1,000 fewer now coming free over the course of the year than previously.

At the same time, as we have reported extensively in the past, capped housing benefit payments, which don't just affect people who are out of work but also many who have low-income jobs, simply cannot keep track with rising rents here.

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That really is a crisis, one that leads local officials to simply shrug in despair. Yet it has hardly been mentioned.

From a self-interest point of view, meanwhile, you would also think every political party - but especially the Conservatives, who have an ageing vote - would be interested in tapping into that younger generation of voters now locked out of buying a home altogether, all now forced to add to the pressures onto the private rented sector until they are far older.

This was something actively being discussed on the fringes of Tory party conference both in 2018 and 2019, yet the plans announced by the party at this year’s conference effectively amounted to no more than fiddling around the edges, comprising a new design guide for the planning system and looser restrictions around adding two storeys onto an existing home.

As with all the issues listed here, however, just because politicians don’t want to talk about them doesn’t mean journalists can’t - so we will be continuing to raise these points, and others, throughout the rest of the campaign.

Buses

Bus services have not been of much interest to national politicians, or to national media for that matter, for decades.

One reason for that is simple: most policymakers and news outlets in the country exist in London, the only place where bus services weren’t de-regulated by Margaret Thatcher in 1986.

Consequently, while not being perfect, services there are a world away from what most of the rest of us experience.

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But it also means the dire state of bus networks in most other places have been largely overlooked - albeit not by local politicians in places like Greater Manchester, who have long wanted to see their systems overhauled.

Let’s be honest, though, when can you last remember bus services being a key theme in a general election?

They should be.

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Even if political parties don’t really care about buses, it’s in their interests to talk about them - there are 4bn journeys made a year on this country’s network.

Bus patronage has long been falling as London's has risen, thanks to endless route cuts, fare rises and patchy services outside the capital. But even so, around half of the country's total are still made in areas beyond London, so it is surely an obvious topic for politicians to focus on.

See this story from the Stoke Sentinel over the weekend as an example of an election battleground where buses are a big issue, while we have extensively covered the problems here.

A Centre for Cities report a couple of weeks ago called buses ‘critical urban infrastructure’ (and as someone originally from a rural area I would add that the same applies in the countryside too).

“They not only provide access to jobs for workers without a car, but they offer the mass-transit capacity that make jobs-dense, high-wage city centre economies possible. In so doing they take cars off of the road,” it points out, not forgetting the fact they connect people to basic services, reduce isolation and take cars off the road.

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There are signs that, incrementally, this issue is finding its way onto the national agenda, although it certainly could do with more airtime.

Boris Johnson has mentioned buses - buses in general, not big buses with slogans on - on a number of occasions since becoming Prime Minister and Jeremy Corbyn has a track record of speaking on the issue, while being rumoured to have some kind of bus nationalisation policy due in Labour’s manifesto tomorrow.

The Tories also announced during their conference that £200m would be made available for areas wanting to reform their networks, such as Greater Manchester, which suggests the PM does indeed understand the need to get going on this.

Yet so far, we’ve heard very little on this issue during the election. The question for politicians is, really: if you’re not talking about buses yet, why the hell not?

Social care

Another one of those massive structural issues that politicians simply seem unable to fix, social care has long been a nightmare policy problem they’ve chosen to kick down the road.

But last week’s NHS figures showed the danger of that strategy.

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The A&E data for October were revealed to be the worst on record, with more than a quarter of patients waiting over four hours to see someone.

And that is partly due to the crisis in the social care sector, where an ageing population and relentless cuts to councils - which pay for social care - have interacted to create a massive bottleneck in hospital emergency departments.

There is currently a vast £3.6bn shortfall within the social care system nationwide, but in recent years - and this includes under Boris Johnson’s government - the only solution brought forward nationally has been to pass the burden onto council tax payers, by allowing town halls to whack an extra 2pc onto your bill.

Taking aside the fact that council tax is in itself a deeply flawed way of raising cash - as well as the fact that as a strategy it’s dishonest, because it asks voters to lay the blame at local government’s door - it also doesn't work.

In an area such as Greater Manchester, where there is less income to be had from council tax, it’s a particularly ineffective way of supposedly plugging the financial gap.

In the meantime families go through the heartache - and in some case huge costs - of trying to sort out the social care their relatives need, never mind the knock-on effects in hospitals with ever-growing A&E queues.

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The problem, of course, is that £3.6bn is a lot of money to find.

When Theresa May put forward plans for people to pay for social care in their own home using the value of their assets during the 2017 election, the idea was swiftly dubbed the ‘dementia tax’ and ditched, later credited with helping to lose her majority.

Boris Johnson, for his part, made noises on the steps of Downing Street in July about social care.

“My job is to protect you or your parents or grandparents from the fear of having to sell your home to pay for the costs of care and so I am announcing now – on the steps of Downing Street – that we will fix the crisis in social care once and for all with a clear plan we have prepared to give every older person the dignity and security they deserve,” he said.

What’s happened since? He’s whacked 2pc onto council tax in the autumn spending round, just as his predecessors did. And that’s it.

Just because this is electorally difficult is not a reason to avoid it, though. Politicians are elected to tackle all policy problems, not just the issues they want to talk about.

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So if any candidate doorsteps you to explain what they’re going to do about the NHS, the other question to ask them is: what about social care?

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