This is a thoughtful commentary on the issues recently raised by George Clarke regarding the need to deliver 100,000 affordable homes per year.  As home ownership seems to be an increasingly impossible aspiration for many it really is time that the housing crisis was taken seriously by Government.  Too often the burden has been shifted onto the private sector to deliver affordable housing on the back of private development projects.   In many instances that simply ends up discouraging any private sector development at all.  As this article argues, what is really needed is a concerted public sector effort to make public money available (dare I say, to avoid wasting it on fantasy projects), to identify sites and to fill the skills shortages that will be required to deliver a new wave of public sector housing.