THE party conference season is well and truly over, the debris swept away and the junketing safely trucked back to Westminster.
So, in the emptiness that followed, what of any substance is the public left with?

Conference seasons are never short of promises. The question is always what the parties would actually deliver? Let’s start with a thumbnail comparison.

The Lib Dems began with forewarnings that a Conservative-only government would be more unashamedly divisive than one constrained by a coalition. The Conservatives promised exactly that. And in response, Labour promised it would earnestly pursue a better form of austerity.

The Greens may as well not have bothered to promise anything, for all the coverage they got. And Ukip promised that, whatever the problem, it would blame it on the Poles, or at least the EU.

None of this risked taking British politics into a space that was remotely transformational.

The Lib Dems had one tentative stab at it — in proposals to break up the Treasury.

But Lib Dem “greening” credentials have been trashed by a record of having bombed their own “green champions” more comprehensively than they will ever bomb Isis.

As the architects of a £90 billion taxpayer handout to the Hinckley Point nuclear reactor, the Lib Dems will cop the blame for the most expensive white elephant in British energy history.

Their new addiction to nukes and old addiction to fossil fuels trips up anything transformational about Lib Dem energy politics. The coalition may be a loveless marriage, but only rhetoric now divides the two parties in their energy policies.

Is Labour any better? Well, not much. But at least Labour set out more up-front commitments to energy saving and eradicating fuel poverty. The problem here is delivery.

Within an austerity-obsessed straitjacket, all parties will struggle to offer meaningful answers to unavoidable problems. Nowhere is this clearer than in the competing claims over housing.

I’m sure that when he did his conference turn, with house brick clutched in hand, Boris Johnson’s main worry was of being intellectually outshone by the brick.

I doubt he ever realised he was presenting the conference with one of Britain’s biggest conundrums. At the moment, you can barely buy a brick in Britain — at least not one that’s made here.

As ever, construction has borne the brunt of the last economic crisis. Many of the country’s brick-makers went bust.

Those that remain have largely been bought up by the bigger developers. Smaller-scale housebuilders are now importing bricks from the Netherlands.

To add to the problem, the coalition’s austerity programme managed to lose most of Britain’s skilled bricklayers.

We don’t yet know how many trained in other skills and how many were recycled as “baristas” or shelf-stackers, but the hunt for the British brickie is now an elusive one.

In fact, much as this might piss off Ukip, you’d be lucky to find additional Polish brickies to come and rescue Britain at the moment.

Any pretence that the coalition had a skills training programme to replace lost construction skills was blown out of the water during the Conservative conference week.

In a barely covered story, the Leicester-based Mark Group announced 670 redundancies in its home-insulation workforce.

Cuts in the government ECO programme had made this another non-viable part of the British housing sector.

So, before the next government — of whatever complexion — lays a single brick in its housing renewal strategy, there are massive questions to be asked about where you will find the brick and who will you get to lay it?

David Cameron was clearly untroubled by such practicalities. His conference speech unashamedly set out to trump Labour’s promise that it would be building 200,000 new homes a year by 2020.

Cameron’s promise was an immediate 100,000 new homes a year — and at a cut price for first-time buyers.

Go into the small print and you soon find this was just a lurch into Ryanair housing — cheap seats, low standards and bring your own infrastructure.

We are part way down this path already. The coalition has unashamedly dumped its Code for Sustainable Homes.
Ministers no longer mention zero-carbon housing.

The Homes and Communities Agency (HCA), which began its life with a remit to allocate funds on a 50:50 basis (balancing quality and cost), today chases only least-cost submissions.

For generations, Britain’s building lobby — many of whom should be in prison rather than in business — have pushed the “cheap and cheerful” case for British housing standards.

While European counterparts pushed housing standards ever upwards, Britain aspired only to mediocrity.

“Too difficult or too costly” was always the construction industry’s cautionary warning.

This “convenient untruth” has left Britain with some of the poorest housing in Europe and the biggest hill to climb.

But, providing Britain is willing to reinvest in a skilled workforce, this is not a trap an incoming government would need to stay caught in.

This, however, is where the politics comes in.

First, a divide has to be opened up between good builders and crap ones.

Germany has found a really neat way of doing this. The German KfW (Green) Investment Bank loans money at 1 per cent interest for housing construction and refurbishment but principally for near zero-carbon homes.

Last year it completed 360,000 whole-house refurbishments, delivering 370,000 jobs, and to the sort of standards Britain no longer even dreams of.

Labour has committed itself to zero-interest loans to take one million households out of fuel poverty.

It would be a small step to make this entitlement conditional on delivering at least B standards of energy efficiency — and adding cash rebates for going further and for including renewable energy technologies in the build.

Labour must make high standards of energy performance the norm, not the road to redundancies.

Let the crap builders build what they like, but offer no financial cushion to yesterday’s “make-do” building mentality.

Then you come to the question of affordability. It is a space in which everyone avoids the obvious.

Until recently British construction costs had remained relatively stable, even during the last housing price spiral.

What has changed most is the current price of land. Developers and speculators have turned this into a national extortion racket.

No government will come up with answers to Britain’s housing crisis if they begin from bankrolling those who speculate on land values.

In a recession speculators simply sit on land and building assets, refusing to accept that these fall in value.

In a recovery, they demand high rewards for a resource in short supply.

Britain’s “land-bankers” understood Mark Twain’s advice — “Buy land. They’re not making it any more” — and have gambled that land (with no planning permission) will multiply in value if they can hold out until the nation is forced to look for new places to build.

Often the price land-bankers extort forces others to short-change both the building and infrastructure part of any construction programme.

Britain needs a radical rethink of the way we treat land, long before we talk about building.

We could begin by giving new powers to local authorities in the management of local land assets. Instead of rewarding those who gamble on future planning permissions to quadruple land prices, why not give local authorities the right to buy the land at its original price?

Then permit councils only to add in infrastructure expenditure to the land costs that they then lease on for development.

For a start, this would allow localities to develop more comprehensive renewable energy networks than developers are usually interested in providing. Energy saving, energy storing and energy sharing would become the starting points in a transition towards tomorrow’s smart towns and smart cities.

Grant the same acquisition powers to local authorities to reclaim and renovate existing “mothballed” buildings in their locality, and you could tie this in to a similar German-style approach that brings existing buildings up to “near zero” carbon standards.

The fact that this creates huge numbers of job and skill training opportunities just throws cherries onto the cake of any government that is serious about rebuilding a real and sustainable British economy.

Those who have speculated on land acquisitions will, of course, squeal about an abuse of market power. In reality, though, it is only their right to abusive market power that is being revoked.

In the past, governments have forced through the sale of public assets at knock-down prices for private speculative gain.

In today’s crisis, it should be no less legitimate for a government to rescue the real economy from the speculative one.

Fundamentally, those who wish to buy, build or rent have no real interest in propping up a speculative land market — especially one that prices them out of the game.

And if “public interest” protection requires that public acquisitions should be in the form of common ownership schemes, so much the better.

It would demonstrate a profound shift in government thinking — putting long-term good before short-term gambling.

If the rest of Europe can tax-favour local breweries to promote local beers, Britain could promote local brickyards to produce local bricks.

If big corporations can bind-in local suppliers using just-in-time delivery contracts, then local authorities could do the same with the components needed to build and repair Britain’s housing.

Sooner than you think, political parties will come touting election promises on your doorstep.

When they do, press them about the bricks and the brickies needed to make anyone’s building promises credible.

Remind them that, fundamentally, this land is ours, and that most families in it would prefer to treat Britain as a country, not a casino.
This is the promise we once understood, but now have to reclaim.

Alan Simpson is former Labour MP for Nottingham South.