When many people make their homes in social housing, it becomes much more difficult to make sweeping judgements about what kind of people they might be just because of where they live.

It is now hard to imagine, but there was a time within living memory when around a third of our population lived in social housing. The post-war social contract included a promise that living conditions would improve and millions would be rescued from the Victorian slums that shamed so many industrial cities.

As thousands of good quality, spacious homes were built and inhabited, it was simply impossible to make unflattering or discriminatory assumptions about one in three citizens purely on the basis of their address. To put your name on the council housing waiting list was a positive and even aspirational goal for many.

So when we asked the NFA’s new tenants’ panel why they thought council housing tenants in particular were now the focus of so much stigmatisation, top of their list was one word – scarcity. As council housing has been sold off through Right to Buy and not replaced, and as housing has generally become increasingly less affordable, social housing has become seen as a short-term option for those with the greatest need.

And because of long-term structural inequalities in our society, those with the greatest need and least power have often accumulated the other discriminations that go hand in hand with poverty and poor education, and attach themselves to issues such as disability, class, ethnicity or employment. In a way, social housing is just a lightning conductor for these inequalities.

Genuinely affordable housing – that is, housing for which people pay no more than a third of their income – is the bedrock of a functioning society. The lack of affordable housing embeds inequalities and disproportionately affects certain groups, including people from certain BAME communities, single parents, care leavers and people with disabilities. It also has a profound effect on the huge numbers of children who are living in harmful, inappropriate and temporary accommodation.

A lack of familiarity with social housing also breeds stigma. Evidence from the 2018 Public Attitudes to Social Housing survey shows that the less familiarity people had with social housing, the less comfortable they would be living next door to it: 31% of owner-occupiers would be uncomfortable living next door to social housing compared to just 4% of social renters.

Potentially, there are solutions. Removing the glass ceilings that keep people out of top jobs if they don’t have the ‘right’ background will shift perceptions. More politicians and journalists who have direct personal experience of social housing would also help, as would making sure the voices of those who live in social housing are heard and as respected as those living in other tenures. Tenants repeatedly raise the point that calling it ‘social housing’ doesn’t help, and we need a new name for publicly provided homes.

But fundamentally, building more social housing (much more) will clearly make more people more comfortable with it by simple familiarity. It will reduce the inequalities and discriminations baked into both our housing and our wider society.

The UK’s housing market, now so deep in crisis that we are many millions of homes short of the number we actually need, desperately needs a new normal. The raw statistics show clearly what’s gone wrong. In the 30 years to 2021, three million fewer properties were built than in the previous 30. Meanwhile our population has increased by more than nine million.

So perhaps we should, in fact, be demanding a return to the post-war normal that made publicly provided housing a solid pillar of the national push for better living conditions, better employment and better health and educational outcomes for everyone.

And a good start would be to shut down perceptions of publicly provided housing as some kind of ambulance service, and once more promote it as a vital and valid component of any well-balanced, mixed-tenure and fully supplied housing market.