With the affordability of home ownership now at its worst point for 150 years and housebuilding levels still not keeping pace with demand, it is becoming clear that housing is likely to become a key political battleground at the next general election.

Housing has become the most pressing challenge facing all the political parties with an estimated shortage of around 3 million homes having been built over the past three decades – falling well short of meeting an ever growing demand for homes. Increasing mortgage costs and a shortage of properties have meant that home ownership levels have fallen from their high of 70.9% in 2003, to their current levels of just 64%.

Home ownership remains the preferred tenure of choice for millions of people. Although demand for housing continues to increase, we are now facing a chronic shortage of homes, resulting in soaring house prices which have driven deposit requirements and mortgages ever higher.

This means first-time buyers are finding it harder than ever to get on the ladder and it is now the hardest time to afford a home since our founding year in 1875, a sad reflection of decades of government inaction to tackle the UK’s housing crisis.

Nearly fifty years have passed since Margaret Thatcher said that she wanted Britain to become a ‘property owning democracy’, but as we see the Levelling Up Bill reaching its final parliamentary stages during April, the government’s manifesto commitment to build 300,000 new homes each year by the mid-2020s could be confined to the annals of history. Rather than there being a specific government target for house building, the government wants to make councils responsible for developing local plans for new housebuilding levels.

Everyone agrees that there is no silver bullet when it comes to solving the UK’s housing crisis but nationally set housebuilding targets exist for a reason. Indeed, the Home Builders Federation previously warned that scrapping the 300,000 annual targets could lead to 100,000 fewer homes each year being built and deprive the economy of £17bn in housebuilding and supply chained output. It also warned that the annual new build supply could fall to below 120,000 in the coming years – the lowest level since the Second World War.

In its excellent recent report, think tank The Centre for Cities, has said it will take at least 50 years to catch up with demand even if the government target of 300,000 new homes a year is met. According to their report, there is currently a backlog of 4.3 million homes unbuilt.

As the next general election gets ever closer, will any of the political parties pick up the homeowner’s baton and address the drastic shortage in housing? The issues facing homeownership are deep-rooted and wide-ranging but building enough homes to meet demand is the right place to start.

Achieving these housebuilding targets will be difficult, and it will take all parts of the market to deliver this level of housebuilding – from private developers to housing associations and local government. However, with enough political will from any future government, a decades-old problem can surely be overcome and would start to deliver on the homeownership aspirations of millions of people.

Home ownership was once a rite of passage for young people growing up, but over the last decade house prices have become more and more out of reach for millions of people.

Building enough homes has been achieved before – the 1960s was the last decade of true mass housebuilding and we saw the largest number of new homes built, at over 3.5 million over the ten-year period.

Since then, the number of new homes built each decade has declined and the latest figures show that just over 1 million new homes were built in the 2010s – the lowest level since the war. Despite the continued increase in demand for homes the number of houses built has declined decade upon decade, reducing by 69% since the end of 1960s.

Housing targets help to catalyse supply as well as providing consistency and stability – all things the market desperately needs as we seek to rebalance supply and demand.

We need a national conversation about the reasons why we’re not building enough homes and we need all the political parties to address the real housing issues this country faces. It’s understandable that people are protective of their local communities and don’t want undue disruption or pressure on services and infrastructure, but the trade-off is between that, and millions of people being blocked from the benefits home ownership brings.

Those supporting the effective removal of the 300,000 housing targets argue they want to put control in the hands of local people. We agree this is an essential component of deciding the development of communities, but this is no reason why the government should step back from having nationally published housing targets.

Political parties are now realising that addressing the housing crisis could be a real vote winner with many commentators expecting that housing will become one of the key battlegrounds in the next general election.

Martese Carton is director of mortgage distribution at Leeds Building Society.