Following a bruising confidence vote, in which 41pc of the prime minister’s own MPs said they had lost confidence in his leadership, Boris Johnson is working to repair relations with them by announcing a range of new policies. Top of the list is a promise to address the UK’s housing crisis. But will it work?

What is the UK’s housing crisis?

In the last few decades, the cost of a home has risen faster than wages, leaving workers increasingly priced out of the market.

Experts agree that the country has failed to build enough homes year-on-year, in particular in the places where people most want to live.

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Rather than one single housing crisis, the UK has several localised crises affecting its most economically successful towns and cities.

But the problem goes beyond just the number of available homes and is fundamentally about price - much of the existing stock is out of reach for most people’s budgets.

What are the government’s latest plans to fix the problem?

In a speech in Lancashire on Thursday afternoon, the PM announced he wants to extend the right to buy to people who rent from housing associations.

Council tenants in England have been able to buy their homes at a discount since October 1980, when the right-to-buy policy was introduced under former Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

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The aim of the policy, Mrs Thatcher said, was to create a “property-owning democracy” - and it is thought to have created some two million property-owning households.

The policy has long been enshrined by the Conservatives as one of their landmark achievements in government in the 1980s, but it has also been blamed for exhausting supplies of social housing that have not been replaced.

People who rent from housing associations have, until now, not been able to buy their homes, unless their property was once owned by a local authority and they lived in it during this period.

Downing Street has said the new policy "could benefit up to 2.5 million tenants who would gain the right to buy".

Downing Street added: "The prime minister has also pledged to turn ‘benefits to bricks’ – changing welfare rules so that the 1.5 million people who are in work but also on housing benefit will be given the choice to use their benefit towards a mortgage, rather than automatically going directly to private landlords and housing associations."

Will the plan work?

The policy can only work if more affordable homes are built at the same time.

The National Housing Federation, which represents housing associations, has said any extension to right-to-buy should include a guarantee that any homes sold will be replaced, a commitment included in the government's plans.

Without such a commitment, there were fears the policy will simply deplete England’s already scant affordable housing stock, while the sector estimates 4.2 million people are in need.

But concerns remain. In a statement, the federation said replacing housing association stock is difficult to achieve because the money generated through sales is not enough to build new social homes.

There are some 4.4m affordable homes in England, but even according to the government’s own estimates, a fully operating right-to-buy mechanism for housing association tenants is only likely to result in the sale of around 224,000 homes in a decade.

Polly Neate, chief executive of the charity Shelter said the plans were “baffling” and “unworkable” and would sell off the “little truly affordable” housing left.

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Ms Neate said: “Hatching reckless plans to extend right to buy will put our rapidly shrinking supply of social homes at even greater risk.

“For decades the promise to replace every social home sold off through right to buy has flopped. If these plans progress we will remain stuck in the same destructive cycle of selling off and knocking down thousands more social homes than get built each year."

What other solutions are there?

One of the main alternatives would be to focus on reforms to the planning system, which would enable more homes to be granted planning permission, closing the gap between supply and demand.

The 2019 Conservative manifesto committed to building 300,000 new homes each year by the middle of the 2020s, but less than 250,000 were built last year, the highest rate in a decade.

Proposed changes to the planning system under former housing secretary Robert Jenrick, which would have seen a ‘zoning system’ introduced to categorise all land as either for ‘growth’, ‘renewal’ or ‘protection’ was scrapped after disagreement among Conservative MPs over which parts of the country should be prioritised for growth.

Instead, the new housing secretary, Michael Gove, has devised a new system emphasising the need for homes to be both "beautiful" and more "democratic" in how they're granted permission.

In much of Norfolk, it is simply not possible to build more houses at the moment, because of a blanket ban on the granting of planning permission for new homes in the catchments of the River Wensum and the Broads.

The new rules were introduced due to concerns from government advisor Natural England about the need to ensure the county’s waterways become ‘nutrient neutral’

That means any pollutants that flow into them, for example from new housing, should either be limited or counteracted through the creation of new habitats.

Until a system can be put in place to prove that the impact of new homes on such pollution can be minimised, the ban remains in place.