Finally, it's time to talk about the twin elephants in the room. First, taxes: how we raise the money to pay for the public services we all rely on and which are crucial to slaying the poverty giant. Second, housing: housing costs are a central driver of poverty, locking people into poverty even as wages rise. Too many people in poverty are trapped in overcrowded, damp, unsafe homes. High costs and insecurity pull increasing numbers into homelessness. These two issues are linked. The structure of our tax system helps to shape both the housing and labour markets. How we raise money is as important as how much we raise and how we choose to spend it. Increasing the supply of housing is vital but not sufficient. We also need to change the structure of the housing market and the ways in which housing operates as an asset as well as a home.

In 2018, David Willetts (a Conservative MP and minister in the 1990s and again in the Coalition government from 2010 to 2014, now in the House of Lords, colloquially known as “Two Brains”) gave a speech in which he delivered some home truths to his fellow boomers (Willetts 2018):

It doesn't require two brains to know that he was right, or that actually achieving this shift is a political nightmare. But the argument that regularly breaks out about wealth taxes and inheritance needs to be understood in the broader context of how both our tax system and the shape of our national wealth have changed over the last few decades, and the pressures which make it imperative that we grasp the nettle of redesigning our approach to both.