When it comes to building more homes, the dividing lines between the main political parties are clear. But the jury is out on whether their policies will deliver the houses that the UK's most dynamic cities need to support economic growth.

Last week Centre for Cities launched new research on future housing supply. When we studied house building across the country over the past decade, we were surprised to discover no relationship between the level of house prices and the volume of new construction.

Although the period has been punctuated by booms and busts, there has been a steep rise in house prices over the past 50 years.

Recent research by Halifax estimated that prices are more than 270 per cent higher now than they were in 1959 in real terms. To put this in perspective, if the price of eggs had risen at the same rate, a dozen would cost £18. A bag of flour would cost £6.

Not enough housing is being built in the places with the greatest economic potential. The town of Guildford, nestled in Surrey's green belt, has a high employment rate powered in part by its transport connections to London and Reading.

An average house in the town costs £270,000 - more than eight times an average annual salary. Despite this fewer new houses have been built per head in Guildford than in less prosperous towns such as Doncaster or Mansfield.

This matters because it means that we are stifling those towns and cities that are most capable of generating high-value private sector growth. To tackle the house building challenge the next government needs to confront conventional wisdom. One example is the brownfield target.

This policy proves highly popular because it appears to tick all the right boxes. New houses are built, derelict land is revived and priceless countryside is saved. But trying to funnel the majority of new housing onto brownfield sites has starved the market of land.

This has resulted in less land being converted to housing use in 2007 than in 1995, despite prices rising by more than 250 per cent. The time has come to drop the national brownfield target.

The Labour government has accepted the need for more homes since the publication of Kate Barker's first housing supply review in 2004 and given itself an ambitious new target of delivering three million new homes by 2020.

It has relied on local and regional targets and piecemeal reform of the planning system to achieve this. This reliance on top-down targets has been necessary because there is so little reward offered, either politically or financially, for local authorities that promote development.

Only 17 per cent of council revenues are raised locally, compared to an average of 55 per cent across member states of the international Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development group. Political costs can be high when many of the beneficiaries are households in other districts. Those already on the housing ladder seek to maintain a stranglehold on local housing policy.

Rewards for councils that promote housing growth are a key element of an effective new housing policy. This is a view shared by the Conservatives in their planning green paper. They propose matching the additional council tax that local authorities earn from new housing for six years.