The council house was a payment before it was a rescue

Everyone argued yesterday about whether a council house should ever go to one person ahead of another for any reason except need. It's treated as settled that need is the only decent test. It was never settled, and the law on the statute book right now says otherwise.

Start with where council housing came from. It wasn't built as a rescue. It was built as a payment. Britain came out of the First World War having seen, in the medical examinations of its own recruits, how badly it had housed the men it then sent to fight. What followed was a campaign with a promise attached: homes fit for heroes. In 1919 the government first required councils to provide housing, and paid them to do it. The word heroes was doing real work there. The house was a return for something given.

That idea faded. Across the century the council house turned from a payment into a rescue, from something owed to people who had put in to something owed to people in trouble. Both are defensible. The second one was simply never argued out in public. It arrived through statute and guidance, one adjustment at a time, until nobody could remember that the other way had ever existed.

Except it never went away. To get the strongest claim on social housing in England a person has to clear five tests, and the fifth has nothing to do with hardship. It asks whether the applicant has a local connection: whether they live in the area, or have lived in it, or work in it, or have close family there. That's a test of belonging. It asks whether you are one of us, here.

So the argument of the day wasn't really about whether the queue may weigh anything besides need. That was answered decades ago, in law, and the answer is that it may. The argument was only ever about which kind of belonging counts.

They will say that any test but need means turning away the desperate to please the settled, and a rule written badly will do exactly that.

But the plan Reform set out yesterday picks the wrong measure, and picks it in the one way we won't follow. Sorting citizens by where they were born makes two grades of citizen out of people holding the same passport, and a country that starts grading its own citizens has given away the thing that made the passport worth holding. One law, applied equally, isn't a luxury to be spent when the queue gets long.

The better rule is already written, and it's the local connection test - lengthened, given teeth, and made to count what people actually mean when they say someone should be nearer the front. Years lived here. Years worked here. Family here. A rule of that shape rewards what a person has put in rather than where they happened to be born, and it treats the man who came here young and paid in ever since exactly as it treats the man born on the street. That's what fairness looks like when you say it out loud.

Britain has rationed housing by belonging since before anyone reading this was born. The only new thing is a party willing to say the word.

An opinion of the house.