Finally, an admission from the chancellor that Britain’s housing market is well and truly broken. Even a political party overflowing with estate agents, landlords and property developers knows the housing market is failing, not least because their own sons and daughters despair at affording a home.

But grand promises of 400,000 new homes, a help-to-buy scheme in London, and a doubling in the housing budget may still not be enough to reverse the decade-long fall in home ownership, that central tenet of Conservative philosophy.

No longer do rising house prices produce a feelgood factor among the voting population. Instead, there’s the feelbad factor of generation rent, paying half or more of their income to their landlord. It may explain why in this autumn statement the chancellor has made a second assault against one of the more powerful bastions in his own party, buy-to-let landlords.

In July’s budget he whipped millions off landlords with new taxes coming into force in 2017. He will find a further £1bn a year by making investors pay an extra 3% stamp duty on buy-to-lets and second homes. In real terms, this means that on a typical buy-to-let purchase of £184,000, the tax will rise from £1,180 to £6,700. The Association of Residential Letting Agents promptly called it “catastrophic” while the National Association of Estate Agents said it would “put a stop to those entering the sector”.

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Telegraph readers will be in shock. The paper’s “Axe the buy-to-let tax grab” campaign features “persecuted” and “demonised” landlords, despite the fact they have made fatter profits than any other group of investors this century. The boss of one big estate agency group, Ludlow Thompson said the chancellor is now treating the buy-to-let market “like the tobacco industry”.

About time, first-time buyers will say. They have queued at new home launches, or grim “open days”, where they have been consistently outbid by the financial firepower of tax-advantaged buy-to-let landlords.

Hitting landlords and second-home buyers should provoke a welcome reduction in demand. But what about supply? The promise is 400,000 affordable housing starts by 2020-21, including 200,000 starter homes sold at a 20% discount to market value, with £2.3bn allocated to building the first 60,000. Another 135,000 homes will be built under shared ownership schemes open to anyone earning under £90,000 (in London) or £80,000 elsewhere. Combined with an easing up of planning rules, it adds up to a developers’ charter, with Taylor Wimpey, Barratt Developments and Persimmon among the fastest-rising shares on the London stock exchange on the day of the chancellor’s speech.

Delivery is the problem. It’s a very good time to be a brickmaker or bricklayer, with the industry hitting capacity constraints. But quite why this has become such a problem is a mystery; with a much smaller population, Britain built many more houses every year in the 1950s and 1960s. One reason is that small-scale developers were killed off during the financial crisis, leaving the market clear for the giant developers. But what’s good for Barratts is not always what’s good for Britain.

Rental campaigners are nonplussed by the focus on the big housebuilders. Betsy Dillner of the Generation Rent campaigning group said: “After raising £6.9bn to invest in new affordable homes, George Osborne had an open goal, but by deciding to hand the money to private developers instead of bringing down rents for private renters, he has spooned the ball over the crossbar.” Starter homes can be sold off at full market value after five years, which she calls “another reckless giveaway”.

In Ireland, a country suffering a similar rental crisis to Britain, the government is introducing “rent certainty”, a sort of rent control-lite. There is no sign of that happening this side of the Irish Sea. Britain’s property laws urgently need reshaping, to give tenants better protection from absurd rent rises and retaliatory evictions, but also to give landlords better powers to deal with rogue tenants. But apart from cutting housing benefit, it’s a subject George Osborne was silent on. By all means, put in place measures to revive owner occupation. But right now, generation rent can’t even afford to pay the rent.