Daylight is a modest thing to expect from a home. It should not require a caseworker, a project board and a cheerful update about stakeholder engagement.

The Guardian describes six years of scaffolding darkening London homes before cladding repairs; landlord and regulator dispute the reasons for delay.

Start with the people inside. A window is supposed to make the outside available without requiring you to leave the house. This is quite an old feature. It has survived centuries of architectural development and remains popular despite offering no subscription revenue. We should be capable of preserving it while administering a repair.

I don't expect construction to be silent, invisible or over by the time the kettle boils. Anyone promising all three should be kept away from public contracts. But temporary disruption needs an expiration date that means something to the person experiencing it. Otherwise temporary is simply permanent with better legal advice.

An institution can describe an unresolved problem as work in progress. A resident still has to wake up in it. That is the distinction I want every meeting about housing to begin with. Before the agenda, before the diagram, before someone explains that the situation is more complex than it appears: somebody lives in the bit you have colored gray.

There are good reasons to require safe repairs. The choice should never be between accepting a dangerous building and abandoning scrutiny of the work intended to fix it. That would be a magnificent achievement in institutional problem-solving: two departments jointly presenting the public with one impossible choice, then disagreeing over which department owns the presentation.

What bothers me is the ease with which a necessary process becomes an explanation for an intolerable result. The process may indeed be necessary. The result still requires an answer. Both statements can occupy the same room, ideally one where the officials have not lost access to the windows.

We encounter a related distance between institutional ambition and the ordinary work of making homes livable. Grand projects are easier to admire from a comfortable office. The measure I prefer is whether the person expected to put up with the disruption can reasonably inhabit the place throughout it. That is less exciting than a master plan. So is being able to open the curtains and have something happen.

A humane system would make the daily inconvenience impossible to forget. Put its decision-makers' meeting room behind whatever arrangements they consider acceptable for residents. Let them discuss the complexity there. If anyone requests better light so they can read the paperwork, take the request seriously. They have just discovered the project’s most urgent requirement.