There is a dangerous shortage of affordable housing in this country for council tenants, for private rent and for sale which means people from all walks of life have to go to dramatic extremes to survive.

I don't think anyone seriously denies that welfare reform of some sort is necessary, whether to reduce waste and fraud, to re-establish proper incentive for the unemployed to look for work, or to help restore order to public finances. Around these basic points there's consensus. The question is, however, reforms at what cost, and to whom?

Viktor Orban has considered his party's political majority not as a responsibility, but as an opportunity to consolidate his party's grip on the state, media and judiciary. International and European institutions, civil society and human rights organisations, opposition parties, and even the United States, have closely scrutinised and criticised the gradual 'Orbanization' of Hungary.

Telling us that the deficit is the priority when families are homeless and starving shows a government astonishingly out of touch. It needs to back its early promises, and understand that redistributing money to those that need it from those who don't deserve it (some might even say from perpetrator to victim, in a roundabout way) will demonstrate that this we really are all in this together and that it isn't redundant, dogmatic ideology that is providing the impetus.

The potentiality, and perhaps inevitably, of 2013 proving one of the most socially convulsive and ugly in Britain's social history is very real.

Instead of focusing its efforts on the 'vulnerable' margins none too effectively, the mayor and the government need to build - or else create the conditions whereby others build - more houses to meet the historically massive shortfall.

The number of homeless families staying in bed-and-breakfast accommodation has doubled in a year, according to official figures. Between 2010 and 2...

The prospects for young people starting out in the world today are already bleak with nearly one million young people currently unemployed - and now life is about to get even harder for them. The reckless proposal to remove housing benefits from under-25s risks leaving some of this country's most vulnerable young people out in the cold. What makes this proposal particularly distasteful is that in reality only a mere eight per cent of total housing benefits are claimed by under-25s, making this a policy which risks causing long-term harm to the lives of young people for the sake of a few headlines.

There is no more visible and tragic sign of the failure of housing policy than people sleeping rough on our streets. It is a scandal that in the twenty-first century, in one of the richest cities in the world, there are people still forced to sleep rough on London's streets.

A blanket ban on support for young adults would leave thousands at risk of homelessness - while any truly compassionate list of exemptions would be so broad as to make the policy redundant. Ministers should ditch this unworkable proposal now.

We desperately need housing to be a national priority to deliver a huge increase in new homes. Our continued failure to tackle this problem head on hits millions of families hard, denies people the opportunity to buy their own home, traps increasing numbers of working people in benefit dependency at huge cost to the public purse and acts as a real brake on economic growth.

Governments need to get out of the habit of giving our money away. Grants should be reserved for charities. In all other aspects of governmental spending both nationally and locally they should be asking the question: 'what's in it for us?'