Halting Britain's housing crisis will need the same spending levels as health and education, a government advisor has warned.

Director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation Lord Best warned chancellor Gordon Brown that there will have to be a massive hike in government spending on housing to tackle the current crisis.

The peer, who is a member of local government minister Nick Raynsford's Sounding Board, warned Britain is not building nearly enough houses - requiring 39,000 new homes just to keep up with demand.

"Although the chancellor may not like it, we fear it's going to require a return to levels of public expenditure on housing that, if not the same as health and education, have got to be more significant than they are at present," he said.

"We need to fund a lot more affordable housing and that's going to cost serious money."

Lord Best, who sits in the upper house as a cross-bencher, told the ePolitix.com Forum that the government would also have to tackle the issues that come with building more homes.

"We need to hit the infrastructure problems: the need for better transport if we're going to develop the Thames Gateway or other areas in the South," he said.

"We also need to address the water supplies, the environment of those areas where there is dereliction but where new homes are going to be built. So it adds up to, I'm afraid, a lot more public expenditure."

He highlighted several options that the chancellor could consider as ways of raising revenue to pay for a homes programme including a windfall tax on developers.

"We think there are probably opportunities for land tax on the windfall gains that some people make from development to pay some part of that extra bill," he said.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation had warned two years ago that Britain could be short of a million homes by 2020 but Lord Best said there had been no improvement since then.

"I think that we know from the interim report issued by Kate Barker just before Christmas that the position is probably worse than we described it two years ago," he said.

"We need 39,000 extra homes every year just to stand still and keep up with the rising number of new households."