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The woman pushing the drinks trolley along the aisle of my train gave me a survey to complete. One question stood out. Would I be prepared to pay more for my cup of tea or coffee if it was fairly traded? It’s a fair thing to ask. The journey up to the moral high ground is not a free ride. How much am I willing to pay to get there?

A couple of weeks ago, my own institution, the Church of England, answered, “Not very much”, when it comes to Housing.

The Octavia Hill estates had been put on the open market, and the highest bid was not from a Social Landlord. The evidence suggests restricting the sale to Housing Associations would have depressed the value by less than 5%. For a majority of the Assets Committee that differential was too much, so something approaching £200 million worth of Housing may now be lost to the affordable rented sector as existing tenants move on and are not replaced with similar households.

Miss Hill, whose face stares accusingly up at me from the paperweight on my desk, is commonly considered the founder of social housing. Back in Queen Victoria’s time she did a deal with the Church authorities.

If they would put their capital into her schemes she would promise a good return on their investment, and produce high quality rented housing in well planned neighbourhoods with good community facilities. The model always had its price; she never promised the Church that she could achieve the maximum possible financial return, year on year, for their capital. But for that generation, and for a hundred years or so following, it was a price deemed worth paying.

I suspect that Miss Hill’s criticisms of affordable rented housing today would not be restricted to the betrayals of her former employers and investors. The Housing Association sector has latched onto the term “social businesses” to describe what we are and then forgotten about the adjective in its single-minded pursuit of the noun. Along the way we have certainly sharpened up our business processes significantly, and I wouldn’t want to decry that. But I wonder whether we still have the capacity to make moral decisions, when those decisions come at a business price.

Are we prepared to invest our surpluses in the well-being of our residents and the neighbourhoods where they live, rather than hoarding every penny to subsidise the next development bidding round? Do we have evidence that the quality of our board recruitment and its decision making will be so much enhanced by paying its members that the voluntary ethos can be sacrificed? Do ever escalating CEO salaries really enhance the sector’s performance to a level that compensates for their incompatibility with a society where housing is affordable for all?

Despite the bad example the Church of England has set us, let me offer from its traditions the idea of using the season of Lent as a time to reaffirm our moral values. And I’ll happily offer a dozen cream eggs to the most repentant Housing Association between now and Easter.