I wanted to cry at surgery this week; in fact a tear or two did descend. A woman with a young, quadriplegic daughter sat in front of me begging for my help in getting her family re-housed. They have spent four and a half years in temporary – and unsuitable – accommodation. It started off as a stop-gap when the child was a baby, but proper accommodation has never been found in all the years since. As if caring for such a daughter was not enough in itself.

And this was the second case that had come my way since May. Both have been told that no houses have come up in the years since they applied.

It really makes me angry that for all the plans, targets, partnerships and acronyms, people such as this are so often let down. Even if Haringey Council’s Chief Executive had to go out himself to an estate agent to buy a property for this family, how many of us would begrudge this extra cost to help a family so much in need?

There are two other awful twists in the way the housing bureaucracy works. First, if you don’t take the first property offered to you, you drop right down the list again. So people are forced into accepting totally unsuitable properties out of fear of otherwise never getting anything.

Second, the rules keep on changing. People are allocated points based on their circumstances, how long they have been waiting etc, and when you accumulate enough points you get offered accommodation. But I’m endlessly told how Haringey Council is reviewing its points system. The targets keep on changing – so people keep on hanging on, thinking they are about to qualify for housing and keep on being let down. Dashed hopes year after year.

Now, if you were told at the outset that it would take (say) 15 years to get accommodation (or that you would never get it) – that would not be welcome news. But it would at least allow you to make a whole series of decisions about your life and what you will do with it for yourself and your family.

So here’s the conundrum. Social housing is desperately needed. Mayor Ken’s London Plan seeks to address London’s housing deficit. But the 19,000 new homes decreed as Haringey’s quota (although Haringey is trying to negotiate the figure substantially downwards) places an ‘anything goes’ developers’ charter on our area. And it’s become all a game about numbers of new homes. Quality and supporting services just have to go hang. Transport infrastructure, sufficient doctors and dentists, enough school places – all these get missed out in the dash to hit Ken’s target.

So too do sensible decisions about where to locate new housing. Developers know about Ken’s targets too – so they target the quickest and most profitable sites to build on, knowing how difficult it is for people then to say no. The result? Except in a few cases where brilliant local campaigns have said no it means far too much poor quality housing on badly chosen sites.

This is true across the whole borough, but particularly true of the most needy of areas where Haringey Council seems to believe that those in the more deprived areas will put up with anything in the name of more houses. We get badly designed proposals for high-rise prisons, using the poorest quality materials with no infrastructure to support the extra population. These buildings will last for decades, blighting the communities and letting down those who live in them.

So my message is that everyone deserves good quality housing, with sufficient public services within reach. Why should those who need council housing have to suffer anything less than this?

So I will go fight Haringey for houses for the two desperate families with quadriplegic children. They are very special cases.

But the greater fight is to push up the standards of housing more broadly. It is about quality of design, quality of concept and quality of materials. The built environment is vital in terms of spirit and aspiration and those most in need of being able to lift their eyes above the daily miseries are those who are worst treated.