That's because Mid Wales has a housing shortage of serious proportions. Some people are registered officially homeless.

But loads more are living in their friends' and family's front rooms, trying to get on with life and putting up with the crush and overcrowding that this involves.

This group are the hidden homeless, who don't show up in statistics but do show up at their accommodation with strained resignation.

The thing is, it's all connected. The stalling of the housing market means more people are looking for rented accommodation.

These folks then look for places to rent, which means that rent prices go up too as demand increases. Result: even more problems in Newtown, Welshpool and across the county for people desperate to set up home but imprisoned in their circumstances and living in other people's house.

What's the answer? Well, three things. We can't do much about the state of the housing market in the short term. But we can introduce a system where you buy as much of a house as you can afford and a social landlord, like the Council or a Housing Association, owns the rest.

That keeps the mortgage down, and means you don't have to fork out a fortune to step on the first rung of the housing ladder.

Also, we should start using the 840,000 empty properties in the UK. Some of these are in Montgomeryshire and smart thinking could easily bring them on stream for renting.

And we should make repossessions the very last action in the event of arrears. Banks are in a panic at the moment, and everyone needs to calm down and settle a bit. That way, rational decisions will replace anxious ones – and stress and hassle won't be the staple diet of hard pressed households doing their best to keep up payments, while fearing the worst as their debts get worse.

I'm making these very points to Government Ministers in Whitehall. There's nothing party politically complicated about them. The Government is perfectly well placed to start working the sort of solutions I'm talking about.

But in the meantime, I remain deeply concerned about this housing crisis – a crisis which isn't looming, but which has already arrived with great force, affecting people's quality of life in a very real way. Until we implement the kind of ideas I've outlined, our citizens will continue to endure Second World accommodation in what's meant to be a First World country.