Community Led Housing Archives

Britain needs more homes. We should use policy to get empty homes back into use and to encourage people with extra space to downsize – but that won’t change the fact that the UK has been under-delivering homes for decades compared to other Western countries.

Yet our housing crisis is not just a crisis of low supply. It is a crisis of overdependence on a single model of supply. For decades, we have relied overwhelmingly on speculative private development. Developers buy land assuming they will build market sale homes for the highest prices possible in a given local market. They then wait as long as necessary to sell at the prices they assumed when buying land. When prices fall or build costs increase, as they have done recently, supply slows. That is not a moral failing: it is how the speculative development model is designed to work.

The planning system bakes in this housing model, taking for granted that this is how the majority of homes will be delivered, and seeking to cream off some of its profits to build social housing and infrastructure (via Section 106 agreements in England and Wales, and Section 75 agreements in Scotland). No resilient country should rely so heavily on one delivery model for something as fundamental as housing.

There are two basic theories at play in the debate about how to increase housing supply in the UK:

Make this speculative development model as easy, smooth and profitable as possible
Diversify the UK’s housing supply away from this one over-dominant model of housing supply

I would argue it is self-evident that the gains from the first strategy are bound to be too limited to make a difference to most people’s lives. Reforms to planning and regulation matter. Britain does need a faster, more predictable planning system. But planning reform alone cannot solve a housing crisis rooted in overdependence on a single speculative delivery model that relies on maintaining prices where they are. Since current prices are far too high for most people to afford, this supply model will only ever be able to cater to a minority. Increasingly, it sells homes to first time buyers with support from the so-called ‘Bank of mum and dad’. For the rest of us, our only possible hope of buying an average priced home in England is to be in the top 10% of earners in the country.

Now let’s explore the second strategy: free the UK from over-dependence on the speculative model. Healthy housing systems use many delivery models at once: private sale, social housing, community-led housing, Build to Rent, co-operatives and specialist housing for older people.

The most direct way to diversify how we build homes is to use the tried and tested model of mass social housebuilding – as discussed in Labour Housing Group’s 2020 report, The Missing Solution. Policy and funding support must enable councils and housing associations to ramp up supply. To scale up social housebuilding anywhere close to the levels needed, we need two things.

Sources of land protected from speculative housebuilding. If social landlords are competing with speculative housebuilders for the same land, they will either lose or buy land at an extortionate and unsustainable price.
Public grant and affordable finance to cover the costs of building homes, so that rents can be kept low and affordable for social renters and homes can be managed and maintained to decent, safe standards.

It is a moral and economic imperative for governments across the UK to scale up this model as much as humanly possible, as fast as humanly possible. We can and must do more – for example on affordable land supply, front-loading grant, extending low-cost loans, building capacity in councils and community-led housing groups, and supporting acquisitions from the market.

But after 14 years of Conservative misrule of our economy, aggravated by war and international turmoil, it is difficult to see how the UK can scale up social housebuilding as quickly as we need to confront our housing crisis in the way that people deserve. It is going to take time to rebuild social housebuilding after decades of hostile policies.

I don’t want to ask people to wait. I want us to use every tool in the box to get every person in this country in a safe, affordable, decent place to call home. That means using policy to support as much diversification of housing supply as possible:

Build to Rent helps keep supply going when speculative development stagnates, because it does not rely on households being able to get a mortgage. While new-build private rented homes tend to be let to renters with higher incomes, this can free up existing – often more affordable – homes for other renters in the same community.
Tackling the chronic shortage of specialist housing for older people will mean more people have a safe, accessible homes as they age – and will also free up homes for people who don’t have those same needs.
Purpose-built student accommodation – at the right levels and in the right places – can make more existing homes available for local people in university towns and cities.

None of these alternative private development models alone will solve the housing crisis – but done right, they can all help. All have untapped potential to provide more ‘Affordable Housing’ through planning agreements.

I understand why many on the Left are sceptical of new profit-driven development models. But there is no doubt they are playing an important role in diversifying housing supply in other countries with similar housing problems to our own. Britain’s housing crisis is too deep, and too urgent, for ideological purity or single-solution thinking.

We must build far more social housing. We should reform planning. We should support community-led housing. We should use Build to Rent, specialist housing and student housing where they help free up supply elsewhere.

The goal is not to defend one development model against another. The goal is to create space in our housebuilding system for every model that can contribute to ending the housing crisis.

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England’s Leasehold Reforms Risk Harming Community Land Trusts

Leasehold is the legal mechanism that makes the Community Land Trust model work. Without an exemption for CLTs, the draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill risks unintentionally undermining one of the few proven models for permanently affordable, community-controlled land and housing.

In the slow march to end feudal property arrangements since 2017, community-led and cooperative models have been largely overlooked. That’s a mistake, as these models could better achieve some of the Government’s aims.

Governments have been consulting and legislating on this since at least 2017. The Law Commission undertook a major study on leasehold from 2018 to 2020, and the Competition and Markets Authority looked at private estate management in 2023 and 2024.

The reform aims are right – to ban “feudal” arrangements in which homeowners are subject to unaccountable gouging by third-party landlords and managing agents.

But the Government’s solutions are narrow.

In its draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill, the Government wants to replace leasehold with commonhold for blocks of flats. Separate consultations propose moving to resident management companies (RMCs) for estates. Both hand ownership and control back to homeowners. It sounds good, but there are other models that are also resident-controlled and which should be considered.

A better model for democratic local stewardship

Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are already taking ownership of, and managing, blocks of flats and estates. Like commonhold they are resident-controlled and owned, and their statutory definition goes further to ensure they must be non-profit and act for the wellbeing of the community. They decommodify land and buildings in a co-operative structure.

But unlike commonhold and RMCs, their membership includes the whole local community in the neighbourhood, not just the homeowners in the block. Renters can have equal power and voice as owners. CLTs can take ownership of multiple developments across a neighbourhood, instead of setting up dozens of tiny companies and boards, one for each block of flats or new estate.

CLTs balance the interests of current occupants and future generations, ensuring that current occupants pay fair fees and that assets are looked after, while also protecting affordable homes and community assets from carpetbagging. They enable communities to act as wise stewards of their place. Many devolve day-to-day management of the homes and communal spaces to occupants, sometimes leasing them to resident associations or companies, while acting as a steward that can step in to help.

CLTs also have purposes broader than simply maintaining assets. They almost always leverage their ownership of homes and community facilities to proactively develop more, contributing to the Government’s growth and housing agendas. This in turn helps to attract more directors, make them more financially sustainable, and furthers the interests of the wider local community.

The benefit of this model over RMCs became very apparent in the CLT Network’s work on a major Ofwat-funded innovation project looking at ‘water smart communities’. We need to build more water-efficient homes with site-wide rainwater harvesting and flood mitigation. But it would be a tall order to ask small site-by-site RMCs to take responsibility for managing these complex assets, as well as the relationships with the Highways Authority, water companies and other stakeholders. It would be much more viable to do this at a town or neighbourhood scale, through adoption of potentially dozens of developments by a single local authority or CLT.

None of this is to say that commonhold and resident management companies are bad models. They’re just not the only resident-controlled model available, and have risks.

Why Community Land Trusts depend on leasehold

But the Government has largely ignored the CLT alternative. In its Draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill risks ruling them out. Leasehold is the legal mechanism that makes the CLT model work. By retaining the freehold of the land and granting long leases over individual homes and other assets, CLTs separate land value from building value and hold that land in common ownership for the long term. That legal separation is what enables the CLT to lock in affordability, prevent speculative windfalls, and steward assets for future generations.

Take two models common in the USA, There, CLTs buy the freehold of land which they lease to condominium associations (like commonhold associations), enabling occupants to self-manage under their stewardship. They also often buy flats in condominium blocks built by others, selling or renting them as permanently affordable homes. The homeowners and renters can all join the CLT, and a third of board places are reserved for them. Commonhold and CLTs could co-exist.

Ministers should protect CLTs in the Bill

In the two acts of legislation on leasehold reform to date, previous governments have recognised the value of the CLT model and enabled it by exception. CLTs have been exempted from the ban on leasehold houses and residential ground rents. But the draft Bill currently fails to carry this forward and would not permit the two co-existence models common in the USA.

The Government’s consultation on reducing the prevalence of private estate management arrangements similarly focuses on RMCs as a solution and gives little attention to community models like CLTs, though officials have shown interest.

The opportunity here goes wider than ending the feudal leasehold and estate management practices.

The Government is wrestling with the right way to help communities take back control. With the Pride in Place neighbourhood boards, the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill’s unspecified neighbourhood governance arrangements, and now with commonhold and RMCs, the Government risks creating a disjointed patchwork of community voice and control. At the neighbourhood level, communities struggle to stitch these together into something like a coherent approach.

Models like the Community Land Trust offer one solution, creating a general-purpose community stewardship body with a statutory footing that can stitch together new development, regeneration funding, saving existing assets, etc. It would embed democratic, accountable resident control across these priorities with a consistent, understood and robust model. Ministers should look again at a co-operative solution that communities themselves are championing.

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