Sector warned that fire safety costs could eat up HRA cap windfall

In the same session, John Bibby, chief executive of the Association of Retained Council Housing, noted that the housing agenda had been fundamentally changed in three years with the government deciding to redirect focus away from policies such as Right to Buy. However, he believed the government could still do more.

He said: “From a local authority perspective, if you look at where we were in 2015/16 all the measures followed through [from the government], we would have seen a real revolution in the approach to council housing.”

“If we are going to deliver a new generation of council housing, we need a revolution in how we do that. We are still waiting for the government to respond on the consultation on Right to Buy receipts, we know what we want in terms of flexibility.

“Is there a case in following the Scottish and Welsh revolutionaries and suspending Right to Buy altogether? Maybe there is a case to look at that.”

Nick Walkley, chief executive of Homes England, said that quality had re-emerged as priority in the housing sector.

He said: “There is a re-emergence of debate on quality. There is a live debate on new build quality and what it means to live in great places. That is a significant change since three years ago.

“This isn’t just the latest minister’s riff on the housing market, there does seem to be a real attempt to deliver a change in housing policy within government.”

Commenting on funding and ambition, Mr Walkley stated that the UK housing industry was not ready to cope with any big influx of investment if central government was to press ahead with large-scale council housebuilding.

He said: “I begin to worry about where the capability and capacity is, so that in the moment we got all the resources, we were asking what would we do?

“To get to this scale [300,000 homes per year], we have to move into large-scale development, which means new settlements, new city fringes, potentially whole new towns.

“There isn’t a housing association in the land big enough to take on a large settlement by itself.

“Infrastructure as we have learned through the Housing Infrastructure Fund is an awful lot more difficult than [people expect]. Actually delivering into existing communities is something we haven’t changed in a generation and we need to garner partnerships between councils, housing associations and developers.

“It requires long-term risk sharing as well as all of the skills and capability that goes with that.”