Off target

Granted, what she actually said was that it is now an ambition rather than a target but in the language of politics it amounts to the same thing. 

And at least she didn’t get asked about progress on Labour’s other great housing pledge. During the last election campaign in 2005, Gordon Brown promised to create a million extra home owners by 2010. By 2007 the total had actually gone down by 100,000 and many of those who did take the plunge are now facing negative equity and repossession. 

The 2020 target is actually not as high as it seems because it covers net new additions to the stock rather than new homes. But it always looked startlingly ambitious because it relied so heavily on the private sector. The last time housing starts in England exceeded 200,000 was at the end of the 1970s, when local authorities and new towns were responsible for more than 100,000. 

Even so, the target is an important one in the longer term because it signals a government commitment to do something about the mismatch between supply and demand that creates the illusion of wealth for the housing haves and an affordability crisis for the have-nots. 

The trouble with making a target an ambition is that you suspect before too long it will become an aspiration that everyone, including an incoming Conservative government, feels it is safe to ignore. Or, even worse, it becomes an indicative target - one you know you can ignore.

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