Battleground Yorkshire: Housing is a top priority in all areas of Yorkshire

"I'm really unsurprised to hear that housing is coming up everywhere,"

says Conor O'Shea, inset, from Generation Rent, a group representing the increasingly large number of private renters in the UK.

"Housing is completely universal. It's obviously something that everybody cares about, everybody needs a roof over their head," he says.

"And even if you have a very secure home, if you've got, for example, a home that you've lived in for a long time, and you've paid the mortgage off, you're quite likely to be concerned about somebody else's housing situation, be it your children, or other people in your area."

This need from the public has been somewhat matched by the major parties, with reforms to renting, reforms to leasehold and the promise of millions of new homes pushed for by both Labour and the Conservatives. "This is a positive thing," says Mr O'Shea, adding that housing policy has not been "on the agenda for a huge amount of time".

"It's very good to notice that we basically don't have enough homes in this country at all."

The cost of living crisis has meant that housing, whether that be a mortgage, purchase or rent, has become more unaffordable.

The average house prices in Yorkshire since 1995 have increased by anywhere between 250 and 500 per cent, and with the value of wages hit hard by inflation, the money in voters' pockets is not stretching as far while house prices continue to rise.

The solution to this is slightly more nuanced than simply building more homes everywhere and allowing developers to build what they want, where they want.

"It has to be done in a managed and affordable way," says Mr O'Shea, adding: "Affordable being the key word here."

"If you build a bunch of houses that nobody can afford to live in, or if you build a load of blocks for rent that are luxury flats, when actually the need in the community is for something more affordable that people can genuinely afford to live in, then that's not going to resolve the problem at all. So this notion that we might build our way out of the crisis, just by giving a blank cheque to developers is not really correct."

Often at the bottom of the food chain are renters.

Further protections for renters is something that the increasingly large proportion of the population, who are renting later and later into their lives, need to stop exploitation, says Mr O'Shea.

"Often we do see the really poor treatment of tenants by landlords who are just not professional, not in their game for anything other than their own bottom line, and just see something as an asset or an investment that just can't fail.

"That has bred a culture that has led to this situation that we find ourselves in right now. We've got landlords and letting agents who are inciting you to pay as many month's rent upfront as you possibly can, as opposed to paying them the normal amounts.

"People have told us letting agents and landlords won't even let us see the property unless we commit to paying six months' rent upfront, which is just a crazy amount of money that people don't have."

This next election will provide the main parties to be a champion not only for those still renting, but also for those with core Conservative ambition to own their own home and start a family.

The party that can deliver this may take the goodwill of the electorate with them for a very long time.