Anyone unsure of the message Labour wanted to get across at this year’s party conference would have been put right within minute of arriving at the exhibition centre in Liverpool.

On every wall: HOPE AGAIN. On every screen: HOPE AGAIN. On every flag: HOPE AGAIN. A year ago, the omnipresence of such a cultish exhortation would have read as sign of desperation from the party spinners.

This year, its heavy-handedness obscured the fact that it reflected something real about the mood around the conference.

Around the housing and built environment fringes, there was a sense of a fresh start, a (possibly brief) moment for optimism – a marked contrast to the cognitive dissonance of last year, where Steve Reed’s ‘build baby build’ bombast fell flat among developers with real world frustrations with an exceptionally challenging market.

In one sense, not much has changed since then. Many of the same challenges around viability, affordability, and high costs of building and borrowing still persist. In another sense, we live in an entirely different world, with a freshly disrupted geopolitical environment and, of course, a new prime minister.