This week the LSE hosted a public debate titled Housing: where will we all live? The panellists were Richard Blakeway, Deputy Mayor for Housing, Land and Property, Professor Paul Cheshire of the LSE, Rachel Fisher, Head of Policy at the National Housing Federation, Wayne Hemingway of Hemingway Design and John Stewart, Director of Economic Affairs at the Home Builders Federation.

All five arrived at a consensus early on, that there is a housing shortage and it needs to be addressed. But how to address it?

Let us start with Mr Blakeway. Housing supply is the problem, he said, and this could be trouble for employers. Why? Because employees will find it increasingly difficult to live in London, and thus begins a brain drain. Employers, then, should provide support for rental deposits like they do for travelcards. This is something his boss, London Mayor Boris Johnson, has also championed.

How to address the supply-side problem? Mr Blakeway said pension funds are conspicuously absent from the housing market; they should be attracted into the market (how, and by whom?) to supplement housebuilders. Brownfield land in London could be the capital’s panacea – there is space for 300,000 on brownfield land. The state could facilitate development by clearing up this land.

The planning system, opined John Stewart, is the culprit. Since the 1940s the planning system has become more and more prescriptive. It is the private sector that will deliver the homes we need, not the state, and while onerous planning controls exist, the private sector will be deterred from building.

Rachel Fisher had more faith in the state. For every £1 invested in affordable housing, £2.40 is generated. The corollary is that when the state withdraws our problems are compounded – witness the Coalition’s Comprehensive Spending Review when capital spending in housing was cut by 60 per cent. This, Fisher contends, is at least partly to blame for our current malaise. Pithily, she added that the Green Belt is not quite as green as we like to think it is; brownfield development is not the only answer.

Back to the planning system for Wayne Hemingway. Everything is a challenge because our planning system is fundamentally confrontational, meaning we can’t build out and we can’t build up. Planning shouldn’t be negative. The same arguments have been repeated through the years – but while hot air continues to be expended, the only thing that changes is that house prices go up further.

Professor Cheshire argued that the crisis can be traced back to a disparity between supply and demand, which has caused a chronic undersupply of land. More land should be released than is needed so that developers can compete against one another. Until this happens more people will be squeezed into the private rented sector, creating a stark divide between those who rent and home owners who reap the benefits of vertiginous house price increases.

What can we take from this debate? It highlighted that even among the converted – those who acknowledge there is a housing crisis – there are a multitude of ideas on what we can do about it. This is reassuring in one sense – there are a number of policy leavers Government can pull. But on the other hand, it illuminates quite how many factors create our present quandary.

One of the loudest bursts of applause came with Richard Hemingway’s valedictory remark that to effect change, we, the pro-housing lobby, need to stand for election and get on planning committees. Quite right.