IT will take another 41 years to clear the 12,930-strong waiting list for social housing in County Durham, at the current – miserable – rate of building.

But people crammed into damp-ridden flats, or bed and breakfasts, shouldn’t feel too hard done by – because it will take 50 years in Hartlepool, 53 in Richmondshire and 54 in Middlesbrough.

And even those figures pale next to the horror shows in other parts of England. Try Leeds (101 years), Carlisle (137), Wolverhampton (140) and Sheffield (339).

Now, this Coalition Government is guilty of so many policy disasters – the NHS overhaul, the ‘bedroom tax’, the ‘Green Deal’, tuition fees, crumbling schools, disability benefit tests, that stubborn £100bn Budget deficit – that it’s hard to pick a winner.

However, after much thought, I’m going to plump for housing and not primarily because of the dismal statistics I have just quoted.

Wherever you look across housing policy – whether it’s overall numbers, the types of homes being built, forcing councils to sell off homes, the mad price boom in the South – it’s a record of failure.

And yet this is an area where Labour messed up so badly. Somehow, this Government came in, took at the record of failure….and screwed things up even worse.

The bald figures are that 136,610 extra homes were added to England’s stock in 2013-14, still well down the – already pathetic – 144,870 added in 2009-10, Labour’s last year in power.

However, within that tale, lies a more worrying story about falling numbers of “affordable homes” - to buy through shared ownership, or available at lower rents.

In the last financial year, there were just 36,520 built, way, way down on around 52,000 completed in each of the early years of this decade.

They include a pitiful 350 affordable homes for purchase in this region, as I reported this week, a 52 per cent plunge on the total before the Coalition came to power.

But, believe it or not, it’s even more alarming than that – because we need to look at the type of so-called “affordable home” being built.

These days, the vast majority are to rent at up to 80 per cent of what the local market demands – rather than the 50 per cent charged for “social rented” homes.

This means “affordable homes” are, in reality, “unaffordable”, and their tenants will need ever-more housing benefit – pushing up the social security bill and so-called ‘welfare dependency’.

Sure enough, already the housing benefit is up by £1bn on 2010 – when the Coalition pledged to cut it by £5bn – with frozen wages also to blame.

If we look at new “social rented” homes only, building has plummeted from more than 35,000 in 2009-10 to just 10,000 in 2013-14, the worst total since 1945.

But – and apologies for sounding like a stuck record – it’s worse than that! Because, through ‘Right-to-Buy’, this stock of homes that people can actually afford is disappearing fast.

In the North-East and North Yorkshire, 1,359 council tenants have bought their homes since juicier discounts were offered in 2012, but just 21 replacements are under construction.

Indeed, across the country, according to the charity Shelter, 5,000 more social rented homes were lost last year – through ‘Right-to-Buy’ – than new ones were built.

If that’s not a record of failure, I don’t know what is.