The former director of Shelter, Chris Holmes, has called for 300,000 new homes to be built a year with 90,000 for people who cannot afford to buy. In his book, A New Vision for Housing, Holmes claims the Barker report, that called for an extra 120,000 new homes a year, did not go far enough. Holmes outlines how he would reduce the widening divide in housing wealth with a three-pronged approach: ending the use of temporary accommodation for homeless families, the creation of mixed income areas across all housing areas, and a tax system that covers accumulation assets as well as income and spending. Holmes says that we should seek to diversify communities and must not sacrifice quality for quantity. “The problem is not that people who are poor live in social housing,” he argues in the book. “It is that they are too often all housed together on the same estates.” Guardian