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It used to be said that all boys should be educated in mixed schools and all girls in single sex ones. If we put what most senior housing professionals advocate for tenants together with how they behave themselves, the housing equivalent is that all social tenants should live in mixed neighbourhoods and all owner occupiers in single tenure ones.

Getting a genuinely mixed scheme isn’t easy. Sale prices are lower if social housing is part of the equation. Councils often accept money instead of properties on site. Developments segregate the tenures so that residents never pass each others’ homes. I welcome Hills’ practical suggestions that social landlords should provide more low cost home ownership in the most monochrome estates, and sell properties in areas where most are rented to buy ones in owner-occupier neighbourhoods. But they will require plenty of public money to make them work.

With determination mixed neighbourhoods are achievable. But it’s the easy part of the problem. Mixing tenure in itself has little more social value than insisting on residents of mixed height and body weight. Is it to enable good things to happen or to stop bad ones? Bluntly, why do we want it?

In my physics A-level studies I learned that ordinary Uranium doesn’t explode because the highly fissile 235 – isotope is dispersed thinly within the more prevalent and stable Uranium 238. Isolate a few pounds of 235 and it bring it together and you get an atom bomb. Preventative mixed tenure is about spreading across the wider community, issues that, if they were all in one place, create the social equivalent of a nuclear reaction. If this is good enough we need to say so, and forgo the implication that varied tenure can actually have direct good consequences.

Positive notions of mixed tenure conjure up the mental picture of a single mum taking an elderly widow her shopping whilst the widow lets the washing machine engineer into the house of her upwardly mobile neighbour who is out taking the single mum’s teenage son to a football match with his own child. But it’s a picture fifty years out of date. Our grandparents spent a lot of time in their local communities; shopping, joining in leisure pursuits, working, visiting extended families. They travelled far less than we do. And they had less entertainment available in their own homes. It was that high level of local engagement that created “bridging social capital�. Without it there is evidence to suggest that physically putting different groups in a neighbourhood whilst they live lives isolated from each other is more likely to create tension than harmony. What will create genuine mixing in today’s communities?

Three cheers for Hills. Mixed tenure? “Yes, please!� But let’s be clear why.