Category: 10-year plan for housing

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10-year plan for housing Blog Post

It’s time to move away from leasehold in older people’s housing

The Government swept to power with an overwhelming majority last summer and a mandate to deliver change. What better time is there to improve UK housing by reforming leasehold?

An important part of the housing sector in the context of the UK’s ageing population is specialist housing for older people. For example, Integrated Retirement Communities feature comprehensive service offerings such as restaurants, gyms and personal care (as distinct from age-restricted retirement housing with fewer amenities and services). Research from Homes England, published in 2024 and backed by HM Treasury, found that modern housing-with care schemes, such as Integrated Retirement Communities, deliver NHS savings of £1,840 per resident per year given their positive impact on resident health, as well as removing the factors that drive delayed discharges from hospital.

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But what is the right tenure of the future for Older People’s Housing? The independent Taskforce on Older People’s Housing’s, whose final report was published last autumn, recommended the UK look at new tenure models used overseas in order to drive growth in provision, affordability and innovation in the sector. Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook MP noted there is “rightly significant national interest in the Taskforce’s findings”.

Tenure reform in Older People’s Housing is needed not only because of the limitations of the current leasehold system, but because the UK is an outlier in its focus on property ownership in Older People’s Housing.

Indeed, the UK is highly unusual in using long leases (which are subsequently resold from one customer to the next) in modern, service-based housing-with-care schemes for older people.

Countries with more developed Integrated Retirement Community sectors have swapped a focus on property ‘ownership’ for a focus on those things that matter most to customers – affordability, cost certainty and consumer protection – all of which are delivered using contracts.

The experience of other countries, such as New Zealand, shows that a move to a bespoke tenure for the sector has massively helped the sector’s growth, as well as enhancing consumer confidence.

ARCO, the main body representing the Integrated Retirement Community (IRC) sector in the UK, has been looking into the viability of a contract model for the IRC sector in the UK since 2020, consulting with stakeholders from around the world, along with lawyers and investors. Our core conclusions to date are that the contract approach could work in the UK and could be used in both new and existing schemes as part of widespread reform to the leasehold system.

We are calling our proposal the ‘Retirement Occupancy Contract’ (ROC). Implementing such a model could be an important achievement of this Labour government.

Why? A key benefit of the model would be improved affordability and access to the sector for older people on average incomes, opening up this option to more households and ensuring that more older people have the option of living in an Integrated Retirement Community.

Implementing a contract approach can be included as part of the government’s leasehold reform agenda. Only minor amendments to primary legislation would be needed.

The leasehold system is commonly described as “archaic”, “feudal” and “outdated”. Although the Integrated Retirement Community sector in the UK has grown using Leasehold as the default tenure for private payers, the time is right to learn from best practice in other countries and provide the sector with a bespoke tenure model.

With a growing ageing population looking for housing that meets their changing needs, there has never been a better time to do away with the outdated leasehold system and create the tenure of the future.

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10-year plan for housing Blog Post

A ten-year plan for community-led housing

Image of London CLT member at project being built in Sydenham, south London.

Dr Tom Archer argued here in May last year that we need a more diverse and competitive housebuilding industry, including more community-led housing, if the government is to hit its housing targets. The 10-year plan must make diversification a key objective.

Labour ministers have repeatedly called for a great diversity in the housebuilding industry since coming to office in July. They join a long line of ministers saying this, going back well over a decade, with the previous government even declaring the housing market broken in a white paper in 2017. But the market has only become more concentrated and broken over that period. Labour’s long-term housing strategy needs to move beyond rhetoric to reforms that get to the root of the problem.

One aspect of market diversity missing from the UK is self-commissioned homes – those built or commissioned by individuals, families or community groups. The Bacon Review noted in 2021 that these approaches account for around 4 in 10 new homes internationally, but fewer than 1 in 10 in the UK. Community projects are even more acutely underrepresented within this market sector – a mainstream approach to social housing provision in many European countries, it accounts for just 170,000 homes in the UK, or 0.7% of the housing stock.

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Why so small?

As the Bacon Review put it, ‘our housing delivery system has become increasingly hard-wired in favour of one particular model of limited appeal’.

Part of the answer is cultural. Our housing system is built around paternalism and speculation. Increasingly large top-down organisations build homes for people in need, who are assumed to be incapable of playing any meaningful part in decision-making, and for consumers who will buy the same lowest-common-denominator pattern book product. You rarely hear mention of co-operative approaches. Policymakers and industry professionals tend to assume – against the evidence – that ‘self build’ means Grand Designs and ‘community’ means scrappy, slow and expensive. But look internationally and they are completely normal, integrated into the way that market, affordable, and social housing is built and managed.

At a time when public trust in institutions is so low, is it wise for those institutions and the government to write the public off as incapable blockers? Polling by Grosvenor found that just 2% of the public trust developers and 7% trust local planning authorities to make the right decisions for their neighbourhoods. Doubling down on the same broken system is a surefire way to stoke populism.

With a record number of Co-operative Party MPs in Parliament, and in key ministerial posts, there is a real opportunity to challenge this culture and to change the system, to adopt cooperative models that build trust and pride and cohesive communities, as well as housing units.

I have been working with counterparts in the UK Cohousing Network and the Confederation of Co-operative Housing, and a wider network of communities and professionals, to feed into the ministry’s work on its long-term housing plan.

We have a long shopping list of ideas connected to the current Government’s policy programme. Some have excited activists, such as implementing a Community Right to Buy that encompasses housing and regeneration.

But at the heart of our proposals is something more akin to an industrial strategy.

If you look at housing coops in Switzerland or cohousing in Denmark you mostly do not see plucky groups of people banding together to become amateur developers, using complex community rights to build on marginal sites. You see a mature market of cooperative developers and enablers working in partnership with the public and private sector. Sometimes they start with a site and build the community around the new homes. Sometimes communities commission their homes from suppliers that come with all the required skills, access to finance and industry relationships to codesign and build them.

We had some of this when the government last supported housing coops in the 1970s and tenant management organisations in the 1990s. There is a small marketplace of these enablers and developers today. But they have struggled with constant policy churn and tokenistic support, while billions were ploughed into volume housebuilders and the largest housing associations via grant funding and Help to Buy schemes.

Our discussions with the government are inspired by the approach set out in its emerging industrial strategy.

The government needs to engage in a sustained collaboration with the community sector, providing a clear direction for growth with less policy churn and stable policy decisions. This means fixing the planning system so that it is less expensive, slow and risky for SMEs, without watering down standards. It means redesigning grant and investment funds in Homes England and the Greater London Authority so they improve access to suitable and affordable finance, including flexible grants for social and affordable housing. It means using opportunities like new towns and public land to create opportunities for community-led housing.

The government also needs to catalyse activity that otherwise would not happen, and build institutional capacity and structures. This means investing in our growth lab to support the development of more co-operative developers and enablers, and using tools like financial guarantees to bring private capital into a fledgling market. It means incentivising or requiring the large housing associations to partner with and support community-led projects as a condition of funding, extending successful partnership models that are currently very concentrated in the rural South West.

The 10-year housing strategy also needs to recognise that the problems, and the barriers to the solutions, are very different in Cornwall, Bristol, Liverpool and Cambridgeshire. Community-led housing has often struggled when developing locally-appropriate solutions that fall foul of Homes England funding rules, or Treasury metrics on value for money. Policy needs to follow local needs, not the other way around.

A ten-year industrial strategy could transform the agency and power of communities in England. It could give real hope to millions that they can meaningfully shape and control house building and management. Make them builders not blockers, partners not consultees, actively engaged in our national renewal.

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10-year plan for housing Blog Post

Reforming the housing association model in the 10-year plan for housing

The delivery of new homes is at the centre of government’s plans for growth, and its radical moves so far to unblock planning are very welcome, but they won’t deliver unless we get the foundations right. The changes needed to get even close to 1.5m homes are much deeper, and more difficult, but it is also possible that only this government with its will to build could deliver them.

Housing associations deliver most of Britain’s affordable housing and the “mixed funding” model we use is a product of the 1988 Housing Act that enabled private borrowing to improve Britain’s housing at scale for the first time. At the time, before the fall of the Berlin Wall and when Bros topped the charts, the investment this enabled led to very real improvements to the homes of millions of people.

Through this model, housing associations invest in homes using debt supported by the net rents from existing homes, after covering normal costs of management and maintenance. This enabled significant private finance to be raised for investment into social homes. As of 31 March 2024, the housing association sector had £99.7bn of drawn debt, which has been invested in existing and new homes.

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But now that it has reached its fifth decade, the model is showing strain. There are limits to sector borrowing, with the model stretched by rent reductions and the rent cap that was right at the time but came without any mechanism to recoup lost income. This income deficit continues to be compounded by maintenance costs soaring far above the headline rates of inflation, older homes that are reaching the end of their practical lifespan, and ever-increasing expectations of service delivery policed by stringent regulation.

In basic terms, the cost of managing and maintaining many social homes is above the level of income that the home generates, primarily through rents. This is unsustainable, and it does not even benefit existing social housing residents as providers make increasingly tough choices where to invest dwindling resource.

The strain on the housing association sector is evidenced by the average interest cover ratio[1] for the sector now being below 100% for the first time since the 2007/08 global financial crisis. This is a key measure of an organisation’s ability to cover finance costs from operating income and contrasts to a sector average in 2019 of over 150%. Some of this deterioration is down to a sustained rise in borrowing costs due to the current interest rate environment but that is not expected to change in the medium-term.

In the more recent past some organisations sought to create more ongoing capacity through cross-subsidy from developing and selling homes for sale. While sometimes effective, this brought additional risk and complexity, which is still being worked through in some organisations. Recent surges in construction costs, far above increases in values in most cases, and increased regulatory requirements in the construction of new homes also undermine this model. It simply doesn’t work in many areas of the country, where costs of constructing a home are now above its value.

This doesn’t just damage social housing. One symptom of the model failing that has bled into the wider development market is that Section 106 homes, the affordable element of most market development schemes, have remained unsold to housing associations at record levels as associations focus limited resource on meeting regulatory requirements for existing homes. This jams up the delivery of all new homes.

Housing associations suffer because they offer a practical solution to a political problem, neither satisfying those who believe that affordable housing should be provided primarily by the state, or those who see housing simply as a market.

This isn’t good enough, and a new model needs to be created that sets ideology to one side and enables a sustainable affordable housing sector. The Government can’t fully fund a huge building programme at the same time as retrofitting the oldest and draftiest homes in Europe, nor will the market alone deliver the affordable homes we need.

The development of this new model should be collaborative, and that government should bring together a group, possibly similar to the New Towns Taskforce, for a once in a generation revision of the funding of social homes. This group should carefully consider a range of options and the costs, requirements, and rents underpinning social landlords as organisations.

In the meantime, a ten-year CPI+1% rent settlement with convergence would give the breathing space for this work to happen. If this group’s work starts now then there would be a fundamentally different sector in ten years’ time, doing much more for current and future residents.

[1]Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation inclusive of capitalised major repairs (EBITDA MRI) interest cover which measures net revenues before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation less spend on capitalised major repairs as a percentage of the organisations’ contractual interest payments in the year.

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10-year plan for housing Blog Post

Living with the Private Rented Sector

Whatever the housing sector looks like over the next 10 years, it is a certainty that the private rented sector will remain a major part of its makeup. Currently the second largest form of tenure after ownership, it is likely to remain so for much, if not all, of the next decade.

It has also become the default form of tenure for those for whom it is, in many ways, manifestly unsuitable – there are increasing numbers of retirement age private tenants, increasing numbers of families, and, in the absence of sufficient social housing, large numbers of low income and otherwise homeless people. This is not a problem that is going to go away quickly.

For all these reasons, a long term plan for the private rented sector is vital, even if most answers are ‘well you don’t want to start from here’.

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The Renters’ Rights Bill (in the House of Lords at the time of writing) is a very significant step forward.  I think we have forgotten how unthinkable some of the measures in the Bill would have been 10 years ago. It is the biggest change to the PRS in 37 years. My view is that it will have both immediate and longer term effects in shaping the PRS.

It hugely reduces the central problem with the PRS – the inbuilt, deliberate instability of tenure for tenants – and with that, gives tenants more confidence to pursue their rights in terms of housing conditions, unlawful charges, over-market rent increases etc. that had been deterred by the (often justified) fear that complaints would result in a section 21 notice and eviction.

It goes some way towards encouraging an actual market in PRS tenancies by enabling tenants to serve notice and leave an unsatisfactory, or overly expensive, property with two months notice, not locked into a year or longer fixed term that could not be terminated earlier.

The ‘landlord database’ – a de facto national landlord register for England – could be a powerful tool for addressing the criminal end of the sector, addressing undeclaration of income tax, but also, and perhaps more importantly, encouraging or requiring the professionalisation of the sector. (Most PRS landlords have only one or two properties. The extent of ignorance over the law and their obligations is breathtaking.)  What information is recorded on the database, and what information will be available to current or prospective tenants will be key.

The prospect of a new Decent Homes Standard applying across both social housing and the PRS could be a very effective move. We know that housing standards are generally lower in the PRS than the social housing sector, though there are far too many poor quality and hazardous homes in both. But what the standard will be and how enforced will be key.

There are some ‘could be’s here for two reasons. First, the devil will be in the detail of forthcoming regulations, and second because the effectiveness of the regulations will largely be reliant on enforcement by Local Housing Authorities.

If it all goes right, the direction of travel for the PRS should be better standards of accommodation, a focus on longer term tenancies and steady rental income. Not short term rent-inflating tenancies and a model based on ‘passive income’ paying the mortgage on properties where the landlord’s real gain is quickly realisable increased equity in the property.

If it all goes right, the sector will become increasingly professional, and the criminal actors be identified and suffer penalties that make the risk not worth the reward.

But that will need enforcement. The track record of LHAs on housing-related enforcement over the last decade is, to put it mildly, patchy. About half of LHAs do none at all. This has to change – enforcement staff must be recruited and trained, active policies on enforcement set out. This may require, at the least, seed funding for LHAs and for training programmes.

As the Renters’ Rights Bill proceeds, there have been inevitable and loud calls for rent controls in the PRS. To which the current answer is ‘well, you don’t want to start from here’. There is no tried model of rent control that doesn’t either raise rents overall, or result in the sector shrinking at speed.  At this point, we simply can’t afford for either to happen. The homelessness crisis is already severe, and LHAs are finding it increasingly impossible to find affordable PRS accommodation by which they can discharge their duty to the homeless. A shrinking PRS hits both ends of that equation. Maybe in 10 years and with a lot more social housing, things might be different, but right now it is a potential disaster.

That said, local housing allowance rates cannot remain frozen. The rate currently does not restrict rents, it reduces supply.

The Renters’ Rights Bill sets the stage for the future direction of the PRS, and it really needs to be considered in terms of its potential longer term impact on the culture and practices of the PRS, not just the immediate changes to tenure. But there is a lot of detail to get right in the subsequent regulations, and then a lot of LHA enforcement to do, to really bring that home over the next decade.

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10-year plan for housing Blog Post

Looking back over 7 years ahead of the 10-year plan for housing

Image by the justified sinner licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

In the debate on the King’s Speech last summer, the Prime Minister said that “the fight for trust is the battle that defines our era”. Frightening but true. During my seven years as Chief Executive of Shelter, the catastrophic loss of trust in institutions and experts, the disenchantment and disenfranchisement of so many people, the polarisation of the public discourse, the pandemic of misinformation – all these are now the stuff of nightmares. Yet the basic building blocks of the social contract, of people’s sense of having a stake in the country, are enduring. I have always believed that a safe home is paramount among these, and in those seven years that belief has only strengthened.

Despite a world that is so much more frightening than it was then, we are actually closer to bringing that safe home within the reach of many more people. I am proud of having played any role in that. But also I’m truly afraid that the progress of the last seven years could still slip away. That’s a political choice, and one that still has to be set in stone.

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When I joined Shelter in 2017, although we had not yet experienced the loss of innocence that would accompany the pandemic, Trump’s first victory, the world domination of conspiracy and polarisation, my view of the job ahead was fundamentally shaped by that most horrific and unjust of catastrophes, the Grenfell Tower fire. It was a symbol of systemic neglect of the duty to provide a decent home for people on low incomes. It laid bare the lethal consequences of the demonisation of social housing tenants that had pervaded policy, practice and indeed entertainment for decades.

Just a few years earlier, Inside Housing had declared “The Death of Social Housing” on its front cover, and frankly it looked to me as though, instead of resisting that narrative, the entire sector (including Shelter) had accepted defeat.

It seemed urgent to speak truth to power, however unwelcome: to speak with not for the people with the most to lose or gain from housing policy, to translate the appalling stories that colleagues in our frontline services were hearing every day into clear goals and action.

So where are we now? There has been much to celebrate during my time at Shelter: the work of an incredible group of colleagues, with the support of many thousands of campaigners they have mobilised up and down the country.

Housing is back on the agenda and social housing is not a dirty word. It was a core issue of both national and local elections. Mayors were fighting it out to outbid one another on the number of social homes and Labour, the Greens and Liberal Democrats all recognised the importance of social housing in their manifestos. The current government has committed to the biggest increase in social and affordable homes in a generation and has changed local planning rules to include a focus on social rent. 

For us at Shelter it started with our Social Housing Commission in 2018, chaired by Reverend Mike Long of the Notting Hill Methodist Church near Grenfell, which brought together a panel of key figures across the political spectrum with grassroots campaigners like Grenfell Tower survivor Edward Daffarn. This was our line in the sand, a defining moment that signalled the need to work together to push for the systemic solution that is the only way to prevent and ultimately end homelessness. The Commission’s report was one of the main foundations of our ten-year strategy launched in 2019, which firmly and proudly put campaigning for social homes at the heart of Shelter’s work for a decade.

It took several years of campaigning with Grenfell United, and later with the family of Awaab Ishak, but in 2023 we finally saw the passing of the landmark Social Housing Regulation Act and the creation of Awaab’s law to ensure social tenants have protection against unhealthy and even life-threatening conditions.

We also took the decision in that strategy to fight for an end to no-fault evictions and give private renters greater security and stronger rights, a fight which is finally culminating in the once-in-a-generation Renters Rights’ Bill.  

We’ve seen other key victories along the way. The Conservative government restored local housing allowance to cover the cheapest third of rents after campaigning from Shelter – and passed legislation allowing councils to buy land without having to pay extortionate ‘hope value’. During the pandemic we pivoted in response to the emergency, and successfully pushed for a ban on all evictions.

And in 2021 and 2022 our strategic litigation saw the courts establish that refusing to rent to people on benefits is indirect discrimination and therefore unlawful under the Equality Act.

None of this would have happened, I believe, without the changes we made in Shelter to organise in our local communities and build a national movement for change. Our transformational support for individuals and families continues, but now those individuals, families and communities are at the heart of our campaigns as well as our services. We’re not a think tank, we are an activist organisation. We were not founded just to pick up the pieces, or to complain about how bad things are. We were founded to change things.

Which brings me to the future. Yes, the narrative on social housing has shifted beyond recognition since 2017. But that is not enough. Yes, the new government has demonstrated it is willing to reform planning, funding, legislation and policy in order to enable more social homes to be delivered. But the change we really need is yet to come.

Let me be clear: anything less than significant investment in social housing at the Spending Review will derail attempts to end homelessness and fail to fix our broken housing system. The government must deliver the lasting solutions that will transform this country and rebuild the rotting foundations of our society. The promise that hard work can bring a good life is broken in this country – a broken promise that is driving the upheaval we see all around us. 

The government needs to make that promise a reality again: a promise that begins with home.   

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Encouraging innovation in the 10-year plan for housing

The construction industry is a substantial and diverse sector. Beyond creating physical assets, the industry fundamentally shapes how we experience and interact with our environment. Construction encompasses not only the building of homes, but it also includes hospitals, schools, offices, shops, and critical infrastructure such as roads, rail, and utilities – all of which help to underpin the broader economy.

However, the adoption of innovation has been historically uneven across the sector. While construction in the energy sector is advancing new technologies, and a second high-speed rail line is anticipated from the transport sector, in contrast, the housing sector remains slow to implement new approaches. Instead, it persists with a model for housebuilding that consistently fails to keep pace with demand. The result is constrained supply, driving up house prices and rents. Meanwhile the supply of social and affordable homes has consistently fallen short for decades, despite the efforts of successive governments, creating an acute shortage that is deeply felt.

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Over the last decade we’ve witnessed the stuttering rebirth of modern methods of construction in the UK. This has been particularly challenging for those companies who adopted a modular approach which has been delivered successfully in other countries such as Japan, Germany, and Sweden.

In hindsight experts now recognise that modular house construction, known as category 1 according to the government’s MMC framework, was unlikely to deliver the volumes needed at scale due to a lack of accessibility across UK infrastructure. Category 1 homes are factory built, preconstructed rooms which are transported to site and assembled as homes or large structures. Market failures which include companies such as Ilke Homes, Legal & General Modular and Urban Splash Modular have cast a shadow over the industry and attempts to modernise how we deliver new homes. However, failure is a necessary and integral part of the innovation process, a reality we must recognise across all industries and learn from to develop the right outcomes.

This has led the market to adapt and move to utilising category 2 and 5 of the MMC framework which incorporates a panelised system, now recognised as fully deliverable across UK infrastructure. The case strengthens when you consider the additional benefits of reaching net-zero and ability to anticipate the Future Homes Standard, which is due to come into effect in 2025.

The housing industry’s challenge is no longer a lack of innovation, but rather the resistance to change that impedes its adoption. This is despite a widely held belief that without the adoption of new approaches, we will fail to meet government’s stretching housing targets.

Driven by existing market conditions, leading housebuilders and developers have long adhered to a tried and tested approach which has successfully aligned with their business model. In addition, fragmentation across the construction industry which incorporates multiple tiers of contractors, each with their own supply chain, prevents effective capturing and sharing of knowledge. This limits the dissemination of innovative solutions. Whilst these are inevitable consequences of the housing market, as the government implements new housing standards and regulations, the industry must eventually embrace new approaches that will help them keep pace, protect profits and deliver against future homes standards.

As the government grapples with balancing supply-side and demand-side measures, Homes England and the Greater London Authority continue to be the most significant sources of development support through capital grants. However, in many cases limited grant funding and rising construction costs have significantly undermined the viability of social and affordable housing development opportunities. This is particularly challenging for innovative new approaches that incorporate modern methods of construction due to perceived risk and lack of widespread industry adoption. This has resulted in a significant absence of viable opportunities, which will demand intervention to bring about change.

To encourage the adoption of innovative construction methods, we must re-evaluate the current approach to development appraisals. These are the financial evaluations used to assess the viability and profitability of a proposed residential development project, and are at present do not take into account the need for net-zero homes or of incoming quality standards.

This is particularly crucial in a sector that prioritises up-front costs, often deterring the adoption of new techniques and approaches despite their ability to meet net zero, dramatically improve performance of the asset and deliver lifecycle cost savings. Including a presumption in favour of net-zero homes that align with local planning and meet future homes standards, will speed up the delivery of high-quality homes, reduce risk and improve cost certainty.

This brings me to a salient point when considering a ten-year strategy for innovation. We need a system-wide approach that integrates innovative approaches into the development process. This should include new lifecycle appraisal modals, supportive finance and proactive development strategies that bring additive capacity to delivering new homes at pace.

With the support of our parent company AtkinsRéalis, we have fully embraced the principle of additive delivery that avoids disrupting existing housing supply. By leveraging a precision-engineered industrialised approach to development that utilises offsite manufacturing, we are able deliver net-zero, future-ready homes with a reduced impact onsite quicker and cleaner than traditional methods. 

I am pleased to see that the current government acknowledges the need for change, placing housebuilding at the centre of its growth strategy. To achieve its 1.5 million homes target, the Government must support the adoption of innovative solutions that can address the imbalance between supply and demand of new social and affordable homes. This is evidenced by more than 1.2 million households on the housing waiting lists and 123,100 households living in temporary accommodation. Business as usual will not address the problem. At EDAROTH, we believe in ‘housing as a verb’ and something we do to provide safe, secure, and truly affordable homes where people want to live, work, and prosper. We stand ready to deliver against that belief. However, we cannot do that alone. It will require collaboration, market intervention, accountability, and a willingness to embrace change to make it a reality.

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Lessons from the devolved nations for the 10-year plan for housing

Prime Minister Keir Starmer host Council of Nations and Regions by No.10 Downing Street is licensed under CC BY 2.0

The UK’s housing challenges are vast and multifaceted, ranging from affordability crises to inadequate supply. The devolved nations offer valuable insights into addressing them through innovative approaches and long-term strategies.

1. Leveraging devolution for a tailored approach

Since devolution, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have shaped housing policies to meet their specific needs. A good example of this is the Right to Buy (RTB), which Scotland abolished in 2016 to protect social housing supply. Similarly, Wales phased out discounts before fully abolishing the scheme in 2019, prioritising affordable housing supply.

The UK government has begun welcome reforms to limit social housing loss, but RTB remains centrally controlled. Since 2012, local authorities (LAs) have managed their Housing Revenue Accounts (HRAs) independently, yet RTB rules remain dictated by central government. Given councils’ financial independence—reflected in their ONS classification as “public corporations” and the £8 billion debt incurred to gain autonomy—local authorities should arguably have the power to set their own RTB policies. In contrast, Scottish LAs have had financial independence for many years and there is no centrally determined rent policy, so they still have more financial freedom than in England.

Empowering councils to manage RTB aligns with the government’s “devolution revolution” and would allow them to tailor policies to local housing needs, ensuring the scheme supports sustainable social housing supply.

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2. Scaling up affordable housing supply

Scotland’s Affordable Housing Supply Programme aims to deliver over 110,000 homes by 2032, with at least two thirds allocated to social rent. Wales aims to deliver 20,000 affordable homes by 2026, prioritising social housing. Whilst neither is doing well against current targets, for various reasons, they both met those which were previously set.  To date, Northern Ireland has committed to delivering at least 2,000 new social homes annually to address its pressing housing need, against an average annual build of 1,400 over the past ten years. Furthermore, the Northern Ireland Executive recently endorsed a cross-departmental housing supply strategy aiming to deliver 100,000 homes by 2039, a third of which will be social homes. These nations demonstrate that ambitious targets, backed by substantial funding, can yield significant results.

In England, affordable housing delivery has consistently fallen behind. According to CIH’s 2025 UK Housing Review, England allocates just 53% of housing investment to affordable housing compared to Scotland’s 99%, Wales’ 78%, and Northern Ireland’s 100%. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s latest poverty report highlights that a lack of affordable housing is a key driver of poverty, with increasing numbers of families facing financial hardship due to rising rents and insufficient housing supply.

To bridge this gap, the UK government should increase grant funding for social housing to levels comparable with Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Grant is already much higher in Scotland, covering around 60% of new build costs for housing associations (40% for LAs). In comparison, the average funding per affordable home in England sits at £56,800, while the cost of building an average three-bedroom home typically reaches to over £202,000. Moving beyond reliance on developer contributions would provide a more stable and predictable funding stream, ensuring that affordable housing targets are met regardless of market fluctuations.

3. Addressing decarbonisation and building safety

Scotland’s Energy Efficiency Standard for Social Housing (EESSH) sets ambitious emissions reduction targets with clear milestones (though there is some way to go to realise them). The Welsh government has made retrofitting of social housing a priority in the new iteration of the Welsh Housing Quality Standard, though levels of government investment fall short of that suggested by the Future Generations Commissioner’s “Homes Fit for the Future” report. The UK government should move ahead with establishing mandatory energy efficiency standards for social housing, enshrining in legislation the target of reaching EPC Band C (or equivalent) by 2030 that most providers are already working towards. It should also invest further in retrofitting to reduce emissions and alleviate fuel poverty.

Building safety is another critical area where lessons can be drawn. Scotland’s comprehensive regulations and funding frameworks have ensured high standards. Meanwhile, in England, financial pressures hinder housing providers’ efforts to remediate safety issues. While the Social Housing Regulation Act marked progress, a unified, well-funded approach to safety and decarbonisation is essential to protect residents and improve living conditions.

4. Innovative approaches to homelessness prevention

Wales has led the way in tackling homelessness through progressive legislation. The Housing (Wales) Act 2014 introduced a duty on local authorities to prevent homelessness, focusing on early intervention. Despite initial progress, Wales, like other jurisdictions, faces the same pressures around finding suitable accommodation and responding to the additional demand created by the Covid-19 pandemic and cost of living crisis. However, there has been some success with the roll out nationally of the Housing First model since 2018 which has delivered significant results.

Scotland has gone further with its commitment to end homelessness, underpinned by a shift to a Housing First approach, strengthened legal duties and the abolition of priority need. The Scottish Government’s Ending Homelessness Together plan prioritises rapid rehousing and long-term support, ensuring that people experiencing homelessness have access to stable, permanent housing as quickly as possible. Although it was undermined by cuts in 24/25 to the affordable housing supply budget, the budget has been restored for 25/26. Northern Ireland has strengthened its homelessness prevention framework, incorporating long-term housing-led strategies.

The Public Accounts Committee’s recent report on homelessness in England underscores the need for urgent and focussed action, highlighting rising levels of temporary accommodation and the growing number of children affected (though all administrations are struggling with TA and B&B use.) The report highlights systemic issues, including a lack of affordable housing, inconsistent funding, and insufficient local authority capacity, which have left councils struggling to manage the crisis. Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s analysis also links homelessness with deepening poverty, reinforcing the need for stronger preventative measures.

England’s homelessness strategy should adopt similar preventative measures by:

  • Expanding discretionary housing payments to provide immediate financial relief to households at risk of homelessness.
  • Enhancing local authority capacity with resources and training to deliver effective homelessness prevention services.
  • Ensuring consistent, long-term funding for prevention initiatives to reduce reliance on temporary accommodation and tackle root causes of homelessness.
  • Implementing a Housing First approach nationwide.

These steps, combined with a national commitment to increasing affordable housing supply, would shift the focus from crisis management to early intervention. This approach not only reduces long-term costs but also delivers better outcomes for vulnerable households, ensuring fewer families face homelessness.

5. Lessons in governance and funding

Stable funding and coherent governance are critical to successful housing outcomes. Scotland’s commitment to high grant levels per home has enabled consistent delivery of affordable housing. In contrast, fragmented funding streams and short-term policymaking hinder progress in England.

The government should provide multi-year funding settlements for housing programmes and empower local authorities with greater fiscal autonomy, such as through land value capture mechanisms.

Conclusion

The devolved nations have shown that bold, well-funded policies can deliver tangible housing outcomes. By embracing the learning, England can create a sustainable, inclusive housing strategy that addresses the pressing challenges of the next decade.

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10-year plan for housing Blog Post

Delivering the council homes we need in the 10-year plan for housing

Lamb Close, Warwick is licensed under CC BY 2.0

How can councils building homes contribute to the Government’s ambition to provide 1.5 million additional homes by the end of the Parliament and fulfil its commitments to getting more affordable homes both through the planning system and the Affordable Homes Programme (AHP)?

The research undertaken by Ben Clifford and I (2017, 2019, 2021 and 2023) shows that Councils are providing homes through a wide range of means and for a range of tenancy/sale models which are not generally recognised in the media. The level of council home delivery in England is regarded as low when viewed through the government’s figures on social housing completions but this hides both the commitment and contribution that councils are currently making and there can be increased delivery if these current initiatives are recognised and supported more proactively. 

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More sustainable funding

Council homes built using the AHP applies to approximately 50% of current local authorities in England with Housing Revenue Accounts (HRA) that did not transfer their stock. To enable this group of councils to increase their delivery through this programme, our research shows that the current barriers to delivery including cost of materials and construction, funding costs, land prices and the levels of subsidy to support delivery are well known and each can be acted upon by government with some initiatives including those already started.

But our research has highlighted other ways in which councils could provide more homes. The first is to give local authorities five -year funding to deliver a social housing programme, as is given to the Mayor of London and Housing Associations, rather than requiring them to seek individual project funding through Homes England. This would enable councils to employ a housing development and delivery teams, improve their skills and enable these teams to work on the wider provision of housing as is the case in the London Boroughs.

The second way to increase council housebuilding is to abolish the HRA. This is not an accounting principle used anywhere else in the world and is peculiar to the UK Treasury. Although some will argue strongly that the HRA provides a ring-fenced fund for housing within councils, its arcane rules operate retained, centralised control. How do other countries provide social rent homes without using an HRA approach? They have the freedom for prudential borrowing against their whole asset base and then use cross subsidy models to provide social rent homes – in some countries by multiple providers. If the Treasury made good its 2007 promise to introduce the International Financial Reporting Standard to local government, then local authorities would be in the same position as housing associations, the private sector and rest of the OECD member states to provide homes.

Thirdly, the subsidies available for social rent homes must be more realistic within the current costs context and also be more flexible in their provision. The government can do more on this by reducing costs of borrowing for homebuilding by councils and enabling those councils still paying off government housing loans taken when historically high interest rates were prevalent, such as the 1990s, to pay these down early if they replace this debt with that used for new home provision.

Embracing alternative models

It is generally assumed that councils without an HRA do not provide housing, but our research found that this was not the case. In 2023, 94% of all councils were supporting housing delivery such as providing land, buildings, funding, partnerships with housing associations and/or developers, rent guarantees, advocacy and other planning requirements that, in some cases, have resulted in higher delivery of affordable homes than those with HRAs.

However, these contributions, also made by councils with HRAs, are hidden because housing associations and developers are shown as delivering this affordable housing with no acknowledgement of council contributions. We need a better way of demonstrating how councils are supporting delivery through other institutions which recognises their role.

Strengthening council housing provision in planning

There are other ways in which council housebuilding can be increased. In the planning reforms recently announced, the government has stated that local authorities will need to demonstrate the need for social rent homes in its plan making evidence. However, once identified, no other parts of the planning system have been changed to enable these needs to be translated into delivery. This starts with the lack of requirements to identify and safeguard enough land for social and affordable housing needs in local plans, continuing the planning assumption that all homes are provided by the private sector, with affordable homes provided as a market residual. Reforms in land acquisition costs recently consulted upon by government could make some difference but at the same time, the land could be more easily made available if identified at this earlier stage.

Another initiative used in Scotland could be extended to England. When homes are negotiated through Section 106 agreements in planning applications, the council has an almost guaranteed right to subsidy for these homes to enter the council’s stock and they are not left empty or negotiated away because no housing association will take on their management.

Institutional reform to prioritise social housebuilding

The role of housing associations collaborating with councils in social housing delivery also needs to be reset. In their tradition and heyday, the main purpose of housing associations was the provision of social and affordable housing. Since they have been able to become developers, the social rent mission has increasingly been overlooked. The Housing Regulator is having to remind them of their responsibilities to keep their existing homes in good repair, as should be required as a consequence of their access to private finance. Further, some housing associations are selling off social rent homes in higher priced areas without replacing them and it is in these areas that the housing need for such homes can be its most acute.

Finally the reforms underway in Homes England and their relationship with the mayors of the new Strategic Authorities should be promising for local authority housebuilding but old cultures die hard. Their focus on regeneration and land acquisition has slowly increased with only a third of the Homes England budget in the last five tears being spent on affordable housing. It is time to increase the percentage of this budget to the AHP and develop land its holds through sales to councils and housebuilders with covenants that require social homes to be built as a condition of the land sale.

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10-year plan for housing Blog Post

Adapting to the digital age in the Government’s 10-year plan for housing

Any ten year plan for housing has to at least try to grapple with some of the Rumsfeldian “known unknowns” – in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world, the more we know the more we know we don’t know. 

Nowhere is this as prevalent as the impact that better and faster technologies continue to have on the transition from an analogue world, where knowledge is held in tangible form, to an increasingly digital one where knowledge is held in the form of “ones or zeros” in a server farm in the middle of nowhere.

This is hard stuff for humans, and the organisations they have created for the analogue world, to adapt to.  The rate of technological progress already far outstrips the rate of evolution of the human race – and that’s before quantum computing (QC) becomes widely available.  To give an idea of the power of quantum, Google reported in 2023 that their Sycamore quantum computer managed in seconds to crunch numbers that using the Frontier supercomputer (then the most powerful computer in the world) would take over 47 years – that’s roughly 10 million times quicker.   

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Is QC with all that potential to boost speeds and productivity going to develop to be in the mainstream in the next 10 years?  Nobody knows – it is for now firmly in VUCA territory.  But its not contentious to say that technologies are bringing advances at an exponential rate – as the surge in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in the last 3 years has shown.  The pace at which the potential of these technologies will grow seems unlikely to slow.

To suggest that the housing world has been slow to adopt and adapt to the increased pace of digitalization over the last decade is also not contentious.   Customers judge their landlord not against its performance with some other landlord, but against the speed, price and effectiveness of other organisations they deal with in their lives.  And relative to the very best out there, social landlords continue to fall behind.  As an example, car manufacturers will now call drivers to alert them to a drop in tyre pressure – but few landlords have any equivalent way of knowing that pressure in a boiler has dropped and the heating has stopped working, let alone devised ways of working to take advantage of this insight.

Put simply, technology and digitalization has the potential to change the game for the biggest gripe there is between landlords and residents: moving the mindset for repairing homes from one based around “you tell us its broken, we will fix it” to “we can predict this will break, so we are coming to fix it before it does”. 

Of course, in the general economy, the invisible hand of the market assures that there are rewards for those who “move with the times” and penalties for those who do not.  In fields such as social housing, that hand has to be driven through regulation.  And for the next 10 years, Government and its associated Regulator, has to up its game in relation to technology and data expectations.  Perhaps there are four areas to prioritise:

  1. Getting the basics right.  For three consecutive years, the Regulator for Social Housing (RSH) has been warning that social landlords’ data and digital practices are not up to scratch.  Residents, the Housing Ombudsman Service, MPs and local councillors all know it from the range of complaints they make or have to deal with; and the Information Commissioners Office knows it from the reported data breaches.   But regulatory action has not followed; Government should ensure that on such an important aspect of modern service delivery, the Regulator can no longer be ignored with impunity.
  2. Moving to real-time. Once data is comprehensive and accurate a transition to real-time becomes possible.  Many possible improvements flow from this such as: evidencing compliance can become continuous, rather than episodic; service charges can be calculated precisely for the services provided for the extract duration of the tenancy; and real time data sits at the heart of the automation (and enhanced efficiency) of service delivery.
  3. Transparency. When data was kept on paper, inside files, and office floors groaned with the weight of many filing cabinets, making information visible to others was hard.  Digital data faces no such barriers.  The time has come for Government to mandate that all data about a resident’s tenancy, their home and the services they receive is available without asking, so the “I know what they know” test is passed
  4. Professionalism and skills. With a pause in the launch of the Competence and Conduct standard, the Government has a chance to rectify the glaring omission from the consultation document – in which neither the word “data”, “digital”, nor “technology” appear.  You cannot be a professional today without this skill set, let alone in 10 years’ time.   

In short, the government should set a direction and regulatory expectations for housing organisations to have “Digital in their DNA” – where technological and digital competence is so deeply embedded in the landlords’ culture and capabilities, its leadership style, and its associated systems and processes that it has stopped even being a thing organisations have to think about.  And to do that, first, the digital competence of the RSH itself has to be prioritised and invested in so it no longer uses an old map to navigate a very different new world.

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10-year plan for housing Blog Post

What does an NHS fit for the future need from the ten-year housing plan?

The Prime Minister and Chancellor visit Coventry Hospital by No.10 Downing Street is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Since 2006, the vision for the NHS has been to shift care closer to home. Development of the 10-year health plan goes further; patients should be able to say:

  • I can stay healthy and manage my health in a way that works for me
  • I can access the high-quality and effective care I need, when and where I need it
  • My care is integrated around my needs and I am listened to
  • I am treated in a fair and inclusive way, irrespective of who I am

For these to be true, what should we expect a ten-year housing plan to include? And how will it support the planned shifts in health care: from hospital to community; sickness to prevention; analogue to digital?

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It’s worth restating what we mean by a healthy home. We mean homes in which the population can start life, live and work, and age well in. A healthy environment, free from all hazards (not just damp and mould), which will increasingly include overheating. A suitable environment, with space and design that is inclusive, accessible and adaptable to everyone’s needs. A stable environment, providing a sense of safety and security. Genuinely affordable; people can afford to live there and aren’t pushed into poverty. Homes located in a healthy and supportive neighbourhood.

It’s also important to understand that building new homes will not enable healthy homes for all. 80% of the homes we will be living in by 2050 have already been built. We have some of the oldest housing in the developed world, and the highest proportion of inadequate housing in Europe.

Lord Darzi’s review of the NHS drew attention to the housing crisis, highlighting the significant impact that homelessness and poverty have on health outcomes, the increase in homes with damp problems, and noting the link with poor mental health.

It’s estimated that almost one third of NHS patients live in circumstances that present a risk to their health and wellbeing, including people living in unsafe, overcrowded, unsuitable and poor-quality homes, people living in fear of losing their home, in temporary accommodation or on the streets.  These circumstances directly impact on patients’ access to, experience of, and outcomes from health care and, with the largest workforce in England, this will include many NHS staff.

National housing, homelessness and welfare policy is a considerable way off supporting ambitions for the NHS. There’s no evidence of a systematic consideration to where people live, their health and wellbeing, the impact of unhealthy homes on the NHS, other public services, productivity and the economy.

Labour has an opportunity to change this, taking the ‘health in all policies’ approach described in its manifesto and Devolution White Paper. Improvements in the population’s health and wellbeing and health equity should be the primary outcomes of the housing plan.

A ten-year housing plan that supports the ambitions for the NHS would:

Describe a vison for healthy homes, sharing outcomes with the ten-year NHS plan and the national care service.

An independent housing strategy committee, and cross-departmental Homes and Health Board would inform, oversee and deliver necessary systemic and operational changes, including measuring the impact national and local housing decisions have on health. Data would be gathered at a granular enough level so that housing, health and care systems at all geographies can act.

In the shorter term, it would require and resource localities to develop an integrated housing, health and care strategy for local populations who would benefit most from joined up homes and services, such as people with disabilities and those in inclusion health populations.

Recognise the role of the housing workforce in improving health and wellbeing and  commit to workforce development, integrated with that for the NHS and social care.

This would begin with investment in local housing and public health leadership capacity and capability, including planning, occupational therapy and environmental health professions.

This would enable localities to better integrate homes with health and care, targeting combined resources to patients who need it most, and would quickly see a return on investment.

The frontline housing workforce, particularly in homelessness and housing support roles, is filling gaps in the NHS and care workforce. Plans to end homelessness must consider the health and wellbeing of this workforce, and what the future holds for them.

Take a health-led approach to improving, adapting, renewing and regenerating existing homes.

Existing homes across all tenures, including temporary and supported housing, must benefit from health-led improvements, underpinned by the more granular local understanding of homes, health and wellbeing, and sustained and flexible funding so that localities may target resources effectively. This would include:

  • Retrofitting alongside other measures to improve warmth and reduce emissions
  • Tackling other hazards which result in avoidable ill-health, including falls and fire
  • Adaptations and assistive technology, enabling disabled people, people with long term health conditions, and people as they get older to live independently
  • Climate adaption, including building resilience to new extremes of flood and heat

Immediate action should be taken to improve local system’s knowledge of, and capacity to act on:

  • Unhealthy homes for patients whose health and wellbeing is a priority for the NHS, enabling safe, timely and effective transfers of care from NHS and care settings to the community, and ensuring that people experiencing homelessness are not lost to health services
  • Unmet housing, care and support needs, enabling people to live independently

New homes and regeneration must meet the TCPA’s healthy homes principles and include 90,000 social rented homes a year, specialist and supported housing, and technology enabled homes. A review is needed of the impact of social housing allocations and lettings policies and practice for their impact on the population’s health and wellbeing.

Raise awareness and enable access to national and local information, advice and guidance services, to empower people to understand how their home impacts on their health and wellbeing, and options available to improve matters.

Developments in technology in the home need to enable residents to have choice and control.

Community capacity to improve homes should be invested in, whether this is through a local handyperson scheme, or community-led housing.

For one-third of NHS patients, home is not just a social determinant, a building block, of their health; it determines how effective the NHS is in preventing, treating and managing ill-health. An NHS fit for the future demands a ten-year strategy for homes that is honest about how old and unhealthy our homes are, and commits to action now. Care closer to home cannot be achieved through new build alone.