It seems like the face, or façade, of housing, and the need for government intervention to supply enough decent homes for all those who cannot afford the open market, is changing rapidly.

This may be why housing is just starting to be eligible for EU funding as successive governments are realising, all over Europe at least, that the post-war dominance provision wise, at least on the State sector, followed by the post 1980s over-reliance on the private sector, is leaving too many people high and dry. Both policies were a bit extreme. Too much State provision created a nanny state and monstrous housing estates.

On the other hand, the situation we are in today with too much private sector provision, has resulted in tiny new homes, monstrous prices, our country looking like a quarry (and not even a well kept one!), and too much influence and power for those in the building industry who have really made huge bucks too fast and, even more worrying, have political influence not commensurate with true democracy.

It has also translated into a palpably enormous sense of disgruntlement, also very evident here, that our contractors actually have too much power over the government because a huge number of those who are wealthy today, and who are willing and able to fund political parties, are contractors.

So people know that whoever they vote for, in terms of the main electable parties at least, a change in government would mainly mean a change in whom our contractors fund to keep going. This is reality, not taking political sides. This is also an aside I know, but in our current scenario I would like this kind of funding to be outlawed and for funding to come from taxes, because the influence of those who give nothing away for free cannot be discounted, and inevitably has a huge though not obviously direct, impact on any government’s policies which it really, ethically and morally, shouldn’t.

Housing is therefore, after being a Cinderella service funding-wise at least for years and years both in the UK and here, set too shoot up in importance. We have a very similar pattern of housing tenure in Malta and the UK and hopefully the realisation will also come about here, sooner rather than later. Every year that we don’t fund housing substantially, we create an enormous needs backlog which future taxpayers will have to bear.

The simpler reality is this. Governments have stopped funding housing in the big way they used to. The rot started under that baroness of privatisation known as Lady Margaret Thatcher. She hated the State intervening too much and she cut funding drastically at a time when the private sector was still in a position to supply affordable housing, either for rent or for sale.

And here too, following the massive Labour housing estates of the 1970s and 1980s both political parties, (even though Labour were only in for a very short time in the last 20 years) have ceased to really fund housing, partly because the private sector was able to supply and was supplying housing to most who wanted to help themselves purchase, so the government’s carpet of help was swept back.

However, both in Malta and the UK the private sector now cannot be the sole provider of mainstream housing. Governments’ role has to grow, and grow very substantially. It is no longer a case of tinkering and providing grants. There is a need for massive investment in housing.

And I hope both or all political manifestos will look at the hard mathematics of all this and start to fund housing again, in the same serious and significant way areas like education and health are funded in this country. Plenty of couples and singles even from middle class families cannot get on the property ladder today without substantial help from parents. Many English parents have a different mentality to Maltese ones and have no intention of using their home to fund their children’s climb on the property ladder. They are more concerned with how their home can fund a hopefully cosy retirement. So today the main concern of older teenagers in the UK is actually about how to start on the property ladder. I wouldn’t be surprised if these research findings would be paralled in Malta too.

So where is the need? There are two main areas. The first is for lower cost home ownership and more of it. People on starter wages need to find homes in the Lm20-Lm30,000 range and can’t unless they are eligible for a government scheme. The government builds around 150 a year of these low cost homes but probably needs around 500, at least initially, to meet the long-standing demand.

And then there is the larger group of those who live on benefits or minimum wage, who are older, who cannot get a loan and who cannot afford to rent anything. Who is going to supply housing here? If we buy private sector homes we need to spend at least Lm40,000 per unit to buy on the market.

So just to have 100 homes a year would cost many millions and there are thousands who wait forever. Otherwise government can start paying commercial rents. Again you need around Lm1500 per annum per family, an even more expensive solution in the long term possibly?

The truth is that Maltese wages are low and housing costs high. You can’t access housing on those wages so there is no incentive to work. People with more social problems get flats but those on low wages without too many social problems cannot get a piece of the cake because there is no cake.

As a starting point we need at least 10 million a year to start having a programme of units for rent, (whether we build them ourselves or buy empty homes), especially if the private sector refuses to rent out its properties to the government. One can well understand the reluctance of the private sector, but governments also have a responsibility to fund housing. It’s no good boasting about our low wage costs compared to parts of Europe if our workers cannot afford to access housing.

Something’s gotta give and hopefully housing will become a mainstream part of governments’ funding again. I was lucky enough to meet the EU president a couple of weeks ago and did my bit of lobbying for housing and for Malta. Housing is as serious a need as health and education. It used to be funded as an enormous need too. It must be so again, because no amount of IT literacy, no amount of millions spent on a new hospital, no amount of refurbished schools or ever more social centres can be complete without the same concomitant investment in housing.

The EU is thankfully just starting to wake up to these new housing needs, and our governments and others need to lobby the EU for EU-wide policies on housing and the need for governments to take a more direct interventionist role, at least until the private sector slows down its get quick rich approach, and starts to also supply enough decent homes again.

Market adjustments are needed and it is now up to governments to adjust that market with far more supply.

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