Gordon Brown's big idea - so far, that is, there are sure to be more - is to make a play for the votes of the countless young people shut out of the housing market by the property price explosion over which he has presided as Chancellor.

Whether a promise to build cut-price "eco-homes" for them will really make them vote Brown Labour is debatable. What it does show is that he has latched on to these frustrated would-be home-buyers as an electoral factor.

That is shrewd. Intuitively one might expect rising house prices generate votes for the Government of the day. Yet in 1992, John Major won an election he was supposed to lose in the depths of a housing slump.

Home-buyers were struggling with their mortgages because interest rates had more than doubled. Tens of thousands were losing the roofs over their head each month. Plenty of those that kept going were caught with "negative equity" - homes worth less than the mortgage.

But not everyone was hurt by slimmed-down house prices. They were a buying opportunity, too. First-timers who had been hard-pressed a couple of years before to afford a studio flat, were in the market for comfortable family houses. "Starter homes", slums of the future built at the top of the late '80s boom, became unsaleable for a while.

There was no way to count heads, but it is quite possible there were more winners than losers.

Anyway, John Major won. Today it is the other way round. Gordon is right to worry. Votes apart, a situation where people on ordinary pay cannot afford ordinary homes in nine-tenths of Britain is self-evidently unsatisfactory.

Douglas Anderson, an actuary at Hymans Robertson, points out that they are also hard-pressed to buy themselves an adequate pension. Why not try to link the two?

Buy-to-let chancers reckon they don't need a pension provided they have some bricks and mortar to sell when they are old. That depends on what happens to house prices along the way - and on rules for capital gains tax when the time comes. Gordon won't let them use tax-free personal pensions for the purpose, though. One can see why.

But that rule also applies to ordinary home-buyers. Stand it on its head, suggests Mr Anderson. Let people use their pension savings to buy a home. They would still need a mortgage - but a smaller one. To stop buy-to-let landlords getting clever there could be a rule that you must sleep in the place to get tax relief on the pension money.

Pensions and mortgages might be combined into hopefully intelligible financial packages. People, who can barely afford either a pension or their own home as things are, could be given a realistic prospect of buying both.

There are niggles to overcome. Fees, for a start. Or mis-selling - pushing pensions to modestly paid individuals likely to fall foul of Gordon-style means tests. In a perfect world a regulator could see to that.

More seriously, this would pour more fuel still on to the housing market. It would blaze brighter than ever.