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WHEN I was growing up, the home we lived in was not ours. It was rented from the then Scottish Special Housing Association. I lived there from the age of four until I was 20. My dad still lives there, although he now owns it.

David Cameron’s annoyance at council tenants being given a home for life is based, he says, on the need for flexibility in social housing. He’s right to identify the problem that there is a shortage of such homes.

But he chooses to ignore the need for parents to have a level of security as they raise their families. That was not a problem, I suspect, for the young David when he was growing up. Neither should it be a problem for the next generation of council tenants.

What struck me about Dave’s comments – other than the fact that it shows how incredibly out of touch he and his advisers are with the realities of council tenants’ lives – is the absence of any referece to the right to buy, introduced by the Thatcher government 30 years ago. I support tenants’ right to buy, but if Dave is really concerned about the shortage of social housing, why didn’t he suggest a review of that policy?

Or is he saying (and he is) that only those tenants who can’t afford to buy their own homes should be subject to short-term leases, with the uncertainty about your family’s future hanging constantly overhead?

Will those new, short-term tenants be entitled to buy their home before their five- or ten-year lease expires? If not, then the Prime Minister has, in effect, signalled the end of the right to buy. And that’s a very important story indeed.