If you think there a shortage of houses underlies the country's housing crisis (and of course, not all of you do), then as this graph starkly shows, that shortage is almost entirely the result of the collapse of public/social housing new builds - since the 1970s, there has been no appreciable rise (or fall) in annual private house construction.
But of course, private house builders want to engineer a shortage to maintain prices, so we shouldn't be surprised.
h/t FT