Just tea and sympathy

However, every loss is someone else's gain and the documents provide some valuable insights into government thinking.

Ms Flint, whose main claim to fame was a suggestion that council tenants should have getting a job as a condition of tenancy, considers that, "at best," house prices are set to fall by 5 to 10 per cent this year and warns that "housebuilding is stalling.

"New starts are already down 10 per cent compared to a year ago and housebuilders are predicting further falls," she warns. Well, that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, since the government has put all its eggs into the private-sector basket as far as housing supply is concerned.

It is a totally predictable response by private-sector builders to the credit crunch and the restrictions on mortgage lending which the banks and building societies are imposing - fewer mortages mean less building, satisfying profit, not need.

And, by strangling public-sector housing supply, the government merely encouraged the massive rises in lending at high risk, which John Prescott, in his recently released book, attributes to "greedy banks," without admitting that it was actions by him and his ilk which enabled that greed to thrive.

But, rather than the apologias which Ms Flint is suggesting, "letting people know that we are on their side," and so forth, the minister and her colleagues would be well advised to start a bit of serious thinking.

This government drove the less well off into the arms of the mortgage vultures and into short-term, two or three-year "tracker" mortgages and suchlike products purely and simply because poorer people in search of housing had no alternative.

Now, those mortgages are coming up for renewal and people do not have the money to replace them with the far less advantageous alternatives being offered by banks desperate to recoup the losses from their speculations on the US subprime market.

And what is it that the government is offering? Tea and sympathy and, believe it or not, advice on how to cope with your arrears.

New buyers cannot afford to buy, existing mortgagees cannot afford their higher repayments and, since so many of the lower-paid work in the public sector, it is this same government which is restricting their wages to sub-inflationary levels.

There is only one answer and it is the answer which Gordon Brown is so desperately trying to avoid.

Rather than propping up banks with billions in public-sector funds in attempts to get them to be nice boys and start lending money to mortgagees again, that cash should be ploughed into a huge programme of council-house building for rent.

This would alleviatethe pressure on new households to become first-time buyers, which would, in turn, take the pressure off the private housing market and kill the house-price spiral.

Not with the excessive charges, money-supply shortages and repossessions that are the inhuman answer of a vicious private-sector market-driven economy, but by the availability of economic, high-quality social housing which would not leave working people in unaffordable debt and at the mercy of an uncaring Thatcherite market economy in the control of Rachmanite landlords and housing sharks.