Creating more social housing is the only solution for most claimant families and individuals.
Hear, bloody hear! I only got my social home because I'm disabled and over 55; had I not been, I'd have had to wait up to 10 years instead of 15 months.
Everyone in my family lived in council housing, in an era where there were few obstacles to a family getting a tenancy, and where a young single person could expect to be offered one after two or three years on the waiting list.
My grandparents rented the same house for 66 years, and both they and my parents point-blank refused to try and buy their homes in the 80s because they believed it wasn't fair to future generations.
Some others on my grandparents' street did buy, and you can now identify the privately-owned houses – mostly tatty and unimproved, occupied either by elderly people with no money to spend on them, or rented out to students – and the ones the council managed to keep, which have new windows, roofs, and external insulation.
I think a huge emphasis on building new social housing is not only important to the life chances of people who can't afford or don't want to buy, but also to environmental improvements. Many of the large commercial landlords will do the absolute minimum required to improve energy efficiency and switch to sustainable heating systems. There are some pretty poor local authority and housing association schemes too, of course, but many of them are better on environmental standards.