‘Pretty much all the mental health problems you see each day – the pent-up rage, intolerable sadness, suspicion, apathy, isolation – are all rooted in the social housing crisis’

FEW hours pass in the New Journal’s office without a call coming through the switchboard from a tenant in serious distress.

The number of people contacting us, in what is almost always a tearful last resort, has shot up over the last decade or so.

There are two main issues at play.

The straightforward state of neglected homes owned and run by the local authority or housing associations

And the strange mixture of anger and despair – a kind of furious loss of hope – that builds and builds the longer a tenant is fobbed off or downright disregarded by their landlords.

This is not just about people making do with a bit of rising damp, a leaking bathroom or boiler on the blink. It is about a cracked mentality in Camden.

We are living in a three-tier society. There are those that are happy going home. Those who dread it. And those that do not have a home at all.

The numbers of homeless in our borough are a terrible indictment of the kind of society our political parties have settled for.

Our neighbours on the street deserve our full attention and compassion. But out of sight is in some ways a far greater problem.

Thousands of people, already struggling with exhaustion of modern life, are living hand to mouth in abject squalor.

Pretty much all the mental health problems you see each day – the pent-up rage, intolerable sadness, suspicion, apathy, isolation – are all rooted in the social housing crisis.

The single best thing an incoming government could do right now to genuinely help the people would be to stop scrimping on social housing.

We need a massive injection of funding for local authorities so they can not just end the repairs backlog but also bring back a sense of decency to the way tenants are treated.

Housing associations, which have grown so big they are no longer able to respond to people on a personal level, should be broken up.

The impact would surely bring the kind of enormous economic “growth” governments appear so often obsessed with.

The Labour Party, apparently about to take power for the first time in a generation, speaks of home building and regeneration schemes.

But it is not just new homes we need, it is ambitious and radical policies.

For example: abolish the right to buy, introduce rent regulation, restore councils’ power to borrow to maintain their housing stock, bring an end to reliance on private developers for new social housing.

Keir Starmer! We’ve had enough of all the tinkering around the edges.