• IN the ancient world they had something called Greek fire, a chemical fire that would increase when you added water to put it out.

So, now we have Prime Minister Theresa May claiming that by adding £3billion to spend on house-building she will be doing something to stop the housing crisis.

Like Greek fire, it will make things worse, not better. If you think about housing like water and then imagine what would happen when everyone has their taps turned off – they all rush to the shops to buy bottled water. The problem is that businesses have got there first and there is no bottled water.

The private sector’s land banking and house hoarding mean that we have a housing market only accessible to the rich and the super-rich. Most houses in London are far beyond the reach of ordinary workers.

Why? Because prices in areas like London are too high and are been kept high.

Building about 25,000 homes will not change things but just make them worse by giving land-bankers and house-hoarders more property to make money on.

What is needed is to look at the whole housing market and not just tinker with building a small number of homes. If the government is serious about dealing with this crisis it needs to stop the sales of council housing and end right-to-buy, now.

Then it needs to stop the huge army of foreign speculators buying properties to leave empty. In places like City Basin homes are sold to foreign buyers before they are built.

I recall going on a door-knocking session over a weekend when only a handful of the more than hundreds of places we knocked on had someone living there.

In Islington, we have a waiting list of more than 23,000. We are now near to my predicted point where there will be more people in need of housing than we have homes for them to live in.

What we need more than ever is a government committed to really dealing with the housing crisis, not offering a fig leaf to paper over its own shortcomings and failed policies.

CLLR RAPHAEL ANDREWS
Labour, Clerkenwell