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How many people, even in the Labour Party, have noticed the dog that didn't bark? On what has been one of the major parts of the party's social policy for decades, the government has gone very quiet.
The hush that has fallen is shown by two statistics: in 1953, local councils built nearly a quarter of a million council homes. Last year, they built a mere 250. The building of council homes has gone from being a major part of British life and politics, the stuff of headlines and passionate national debates, to a virtual irrelevance - a trifling thousandth of what it once was.
Labour launched a major council house-building programme after the second world war. Each time the party returned to power in the 1960s and 1970s it stoutly revived council house building after the Conservatives
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| Three out of every ten households in Britain lived in a council house or flat. That proportion has now slumped to just one in ten |
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had let it dwindle. Yet since Labour came to power in 1997, it has been different. That year, a miserly 1,543 council dwellings were built and in subsequent years the figure has been allowed to diminish even further.
Under Labour in 1977, three out of every ten households in Britain lived in a council house or flat. That proportion has now slumped to just one in ten. It is true that housing rented from 'social landlords' has risen as a partial substitute and now accounts for eight per cent of all dwellings. But the death of council housing as an idea is plain.
Why has it happened? Cost is one reason. Other parts of the welfare state have kept getting more expensive and squeezed the budgets available for housing. The cost of welfare benefits grew enormously in the 1980s and 1990s, and the funds available 
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