If there is one thing guaranteed to animate people more than a debate about religion, it is a debate about housing and immigration.

Margaret Hodge’s comments in the Observer on May 20th did just that.

“We need to… debate whether our rules for deciding who can access social housing are fair and promote tolerance rather than inviting division,” she wrote.

Her argument was relatively straightforward. The current system sees need as the primary determinant of housing rights. People (UK born or immigrant but not – note – any immigrant) who have significant needs, such as those who are homeless, living in unsanitary or overcrowded conditions, with specific medical or welfare needs, or at risk of domestic violence, will be prioritised over those with less pressing needs. In her, now much-quoted, example:

A recently arrived family with four or five children living in a damp and overcrowded, privately rented flat with the children suffering from asthma will usually get priority over a family with less housing need who have lived in the area for three generations and are stuck at home with the grandparents.

This, Hodge implied, was divisive. ‘We should look at policies where the legitimate sense of entitlement felt by the indigenous family overrides the legitimate need demonstrated by the new migrants.’

And after looking at them, ‘we should… look at drawing up different rules based on, for instance, length of residence, citizenship or national insurance contributions which carry more weight in a transparent points system used to decide who is entitled to access social housing.’

The response to her article was… lively. Some charged her with being a mini Enoch Powell, doing the BNP’s work for them, etc.  Some, less hysterically, censured her for not making it sufficiently clear that not all immigrants receive social housing or that immigrants do not get preferential treatment simply because they are immigrants.

Others criticised her for diverting attention from the ‘real’ issue, the lack of social housing.  Thus Labour MP John McDonnell said, ‘the issue… is not the allocation of housing, but the chancellor's failure to allow affordable house building over the last 10 years – resulting in the present housing crisis."

There is little doubt that there is a severe shortage of social housing in Britain. Around one and a half million families are on the waiting list for housing.  According to the 2004 Barker report, the country needs to build 23,000 social housing units per year. However, the idea that house building is the solution is not convincing.

Firstly, those who advocate house building as the solution rarely address the attendant if awkward question: how much is enough? At what stage can we legitimately say that the country cannot sustain more housing units? Those who do raise this question are often accused of pseudo-racism; undoubtedly, in some instances, rightly. But with a housing stock that tripled over the 20th century (an increase that had more to do with family fragmentation than with immigration), only the naïve or ideologically-blinded can pretend this isn’t a real issue. Where do you draw the line?  30 million? 40 million? 50 million?

Secondly, and no less awkwardly, asking the important question about the need for social housing does not answer the equally important one about the mechanism for allocating social housing.  In MP Frank Field’s words:

Trebling the supply of new social housing locally would not deal with the current sense of unfairness, particularly if there are inadequate funds to improve the quality of existing homes.

Here the issue comes into sharp focus even if the resulting image is not morally clear cut. If you design a system of social housing in which need is the primary or sole determinant of allocation, a healthy and self-reliant couple who have dutifully lived, worked and paid taxes in an area all their life will find themselves continually bypassed in their request for social housing.

Alternatively, if you design a system in which length of residence (or citizenship or national insurance contributions) is the primary or sole determinant of allocation, then you will, as Margaret Hodge acknowledged, see families with vulnerable children living in a damp, cold or overcrowded conditions.

Here we have the choice at its starkest, a choice between the unjust and the immoral.  Those who fail to recognise the moral complexity of the situation – from the BNP who backed Margaret Hodge’s comments to those who all-but accused her of being a closet racist – do not help solve it.

There is, alas, no solution, certainly none that allows us to emerge smelling of ethical roses.  Those who advocate a system that prioritises need over length of residence should recognise the problems any such system faces in an age of globalisation and mass migration. The fact, unpalatable to many, is that extensive systems of taxation, redistribution and welfare become increasingly difficult to support as populations become more fluid and diverse.

Conversely, those advocating a system based solely on length of residence need to acknowledge the way such a system would quickly become divisive and self-fulfilling, permanently alienating those who are in any way new, cheating the country everything that they have to offer, and condemning many to a painful and possibly harmful exclusion.

Inevitably, therefore, wherever we stand on the issue will say at least as much about us – our worldview, our values, our presuppositions – as about social housing. Much as we might crave one, there is no neutral, objective, detached position from which we can pass judgement with unimpeachable authority; no obviously correct answer.

Unless we are prepared to ignore altogether this important issue, we are compelled to make a choice based on incomplete and imperfect evidence, on suspect preconceptions and questionable predictions, on our inherited and shifting prejudices.

But that is the mark of any important decision in life.

Nick Spencer is Director of Studies at Theos