2nd opinion: Your big chance has arrived

As the new year begins, the sheer enormity of the Barker review begins to sink in along with the plum pudding and port. Social housing's initial reaction was oddly tepid. I fear a once-in-a-lifetime chance to sway policy is slipping away.

Let's recapitulate Kate Barker's two main points. Inflation has been beaten, which is why Professor David Miles has been working up fixed-rate mortgages. Except for house price inflation, that is. Inflation in this particular asset is not some kind of national foible, said Barker, but a persistent, weakening distortion of economic priorities. The cause is a profound market failure. What economics textbooks say about supply rising to meet demand just hasn't happened. What the textbooks also say, even those written by the neo-liberals, is that market failure is a prime justification for state intervention.

My worry is that when the housing lobbies get round to it, they will take that point and crank up the plea for more cash, as if Kate Barker were Oliver Twist's big sister. Yet she is on about much more than an expanded approved development programme. Implicit in her analysis is a case for taxes on land, the revival of property rates, a vast programme of compulsory purchase and so on. We'll see later in the spring whether Treasury caution gets the better of her.

Meanwhile the housing lobbies should be on the street, literally, making a case for the profound reform of housing policy. Middle-class privilege, backed up by the planning system and inequitable taxation, is the reason for homelessness. Charities, especially Shelter, which has prided itself on its tough-mindedness, like to say they are independent. Well, here's an occasion for them to demonstrate that independence – independence from a self-interested, owner-occupying public.

Much the same goes for the official representatives of social housing and the councils and registered social landlords they represent. They will give lots of attention, I fear, to Barker's provocative points about "too many" RSLs and their aggregate borrowing power. The bigger picture is that she is prescribing a huge expansion in development and, given their experience and potential, RSLs should be part of a phalanx of aggressive builders. They should be empowered to take on a private housebuilding industry that Barker all but characterises as dozy. But a pre-condition of this is that the Labour government is forced to adopt some or all of Barker's analysis, and this will take some politicking.

In the light of the governance issues that plague the sector now, do RSLs have the moral kudos and so the political weight to force government and society to see the scale of housing need? That has always been the risk facing the social housing movement. As it grew big and sassy, it lost its moral compass, becoming an interest group like the rest, with only a vestigial connection to the powerful social critique from which it sprang. In exchanging the penury of the old housing association form and culture for the richly accoutred forms of new RSLs, something was lost that must now be recaptured.

Barker's analysis is couched in functional terms. The CBI could, in theory, pick it up and say her prescription would be good for UK plc. But to persuade ministers, anxious about votes, to convince owner-occupiers to relinquish some of their ill-gotten gains, to force landowners to give up their privilege, will take strong arguments freighted with political values. Are RSLs, as they now are, capable of such passion? I fear not, which is why the great Barker opportunity will be lost.