Tag: Council housing

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New regulation means social housing tenants should be heard and respected – the reality is different for many tenants

When Maria first reported the mould spreading across her children’s bedroom walls, she believed help would come quickly. She had done everything tenants are told to do. She filled in the forms. She called repeatedly. She sent photographs. Weeks turned into months. The smell worsened. Her youngest son’s asthma became harder to manage. Eventually, she stopped believing anyone was really listening.

On another estate, a housing officer leaves a community meeting shaken after being subjected to racist abuse while trying to explain local housing allocation rules. Online rumours had spread through the neighbourhood claiming migrant families were being “given homes first.” Facts no longer mattered. Frustration had already found a target.

These stories are uncomfortable because they are not unusual.

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Across the UK housing sector, conversations about race, equality and inclusion are no longer optional extras.

They are becoming central to regulation, tenant trust and the future legitimacy of housing providers themselves.

Yet for many ethnic minority tenants and staff, everyday experiences still feel disconnected from the promises organisations make publicly.

Housing has always been deeply personal. It shapes health, safety, identity and opportunity. When people feel ignored, excluded or stereotyped within housing systems, the impact reaches far beyond bricks and mortar.

Economic pressure, housing shortages and political division are creating increasingly tense conditions in many communities. Public conversations around immigration and social housing have become heavily politicised, often fuelled by misinformation online.

Housing associations and councils now find themselves operating at the centre of wider debates about fairness, belonging and social cohesion.

At the same time, the inequalities experienced by many ethnic minority households remain stark. Research from Shelter continues to show that Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities are significantly more likely to experience overcrowding, poor housing conditions and homelessness than white British households.

Government data has repeatedly shown overcrowding rates are substantially higher among Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Black households.

But statistics alone do not fully capture the emotional reality behind these experiences.

Feeling consulted, not heard

My report, Is There a Seat at the Table? Ethnic Minority Voices in Tenant Engagement, explored these issues through surveys involving hundreds of tenants and staff across 25 housing providers.

What emerged was not simply frustration, but exhaustion. Many respondents described engagement structures that appeared inclusive on paper but failed to create genuine influence in practice. An overwhelming 94% believed their organisations could do more to attract ethnic minority tenants into decision-making roles. Nearly every tenant agreed that current engagement systems failed to reflect the diversity of their communities.

Again and again, people described feeling consulted rather than heard. That distinction matters.

For many residents, trust in institutions is already fragile. The legacy of the Windrush scandal still shapes how some ethnic minority communities view public services, including housing providers. When organisations fail to communicate clearly, respond fairly or acknowledge lived experiences, mistrust grows quickly.

This places the housing sector at an important crossroads. Providers are no longer judged solely on repairs, rent collection or development targets. Increasingly, they are judged on fairness, transparency and cultural competence.

But regulation alone will not rebuild trust. Engagement itself must evolve.

Too often, tenant involvement becomes performative. Residents are invited into consultations, focus groups and advisory panels, yet key decisions remain unchanged. People quickly recognise when participation is symbolic rather than meaningful. In many cases, tokenistic engagement damages trust more than no engagement at all.

True inclusion requires intentional effort.

It means holding meetings at times working families can actually attend, providing interpreters and translated materials, and recognising barriers such as digital exclusion, childcare responsibilities and cultural needs. It also means working alongside trusted faith groups and community organisations rather than expecting residents to adapt entirely to institutional systems.

Most importantly, it means sharing power rather than simply collecting opinions.

Misinformation and division

One of the most damaging challenges facing the sector today is the spread of misinformation around housing allocations. The myth that migrants or ethnic minority households unfairly “jump the queue” for social housing has become increasingly common online and in community conversations.

In reality, housing allocations are governed by legal frameworks based on need, vulnerability and local connection – not race or ethnicity. But misinformation spreads faster than policy explanations, particularly on social media platforms designed to reward outrage and division.

The consequences are very real.

Frontline staff experience increased hostility. Tenants become suspicious of one another. Communities already struggling with economic hardship become even more divided. And organisations often find themselves reacting defensively rather than building trust proactively.

Housing providers can no longer afford to remain passive observers in these conversations. Clear communication matters. Explaining allocation systems in plain language matters. Sharing real tenant stories matters. Community-led conversations are often far more effective than corporate statements because people are more likely to trust lived experience than institutional messaging.

Accountability after Awaab Ishak

The sector also faces a growing accountability challenge. The tragic death of Awaab Ishak in 2020 fundamentally changed the national conversation about housing conditions and tenant safety. The introduction of Awaab’s Law has placed new legal responsibilities on landlords to respond to hazards such as damp and mould within strict timeframes.

This matters enormously because ethnic minority households are statistically more likely to experience overcrowded and poor-quality housing conditions.

Yet many tenants still do not fully understand their rights or feel confident using complaints systems. Language barriers, fear of repercussions and previous negative experiences often discourage people from escalating concerns. For some residents, particularly those from communities with low trust in public institutions, silence can feel safer than complaint.

That silence can become dangerous.

Housing providers therefore have responsibilities that extend beyond legal compliance. They must ensure tenants understand their rights clearly, accessibly and in ways that feel culturally competent. Accountability only works when residents genuinely believe their voices will lead to action.

The next five years could become a defining period for the housing sector. Stronger consumer regulation, greater scrutiny of equality outcomes and increasing expectations around tenant voice are already reshaping organisational priorities. Conversations around ethnicity pay gaps, workforce diversity and representation at leadership level are becoming harder to avoid.

There are also emerging risks around technology and AI-driven decision-making within housing services. While automation may improve efficiency, poorly designed systems can unintentionally reproduce existing inequalities if bias is not actively monitored and challenged.

Ultimately, however, this conversation comes back to something deeply human.

Housing is about dignity.

It is about whether people feel safe in their homes. Whether they feel respected when they raise concerns. Whether they believe their experiences matter. Whether they feel they truly belong in the communities they live in.

The organisations that succeed over the next decade will not simply be those with the strongest financial performance or largest development pipelines. They will be the organisations that communities trust.

And trust is not built through slogans or strategy documents alone.

It is built slowly, consistently and visibly – when tenants feel heard, protected, respected and represented every single day.

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Blog Post Renters' Rights Act

People Power for Rent Controls and Council Homes 

The Renters’ Rights Act’s passage at the beginning of May 2026 signals the possibility of a shift in how we approach the private rental sector in this country. No longer will landlords be able to evict tenants at whim through Section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions, alongside a host of other protections for tenants including guaranteed rent renewals, periodic tenancies, and more. These changes are the direct result of tireless organising by tenant unions, housing justice organisations, community groups, trade unions, and NGOs – the product of organised people coming together to create organised power. 

But many of these changes are not radical transformations to the housing crisis, but processes that bring the UK in line with most other similar countries. And while there is cause for celebration of the renter power that went into the Act, the RRA does not allay the cost of living crisis that imperils renters. Renters can now challenge unreasonable rent rises by filing with the rent tribunals – and legally do not have to pay the increases during the process of the tribunal. This is a huge step, and at the LRU, our members have been putting together resources to support all renters to challenge rent rises and push for a fairer housing system, collectively. 

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However, on paper, the tribunal can only rule against rent rises that exceed market rent for the units in question – which provides meagre protection to working-class tenants and families in gentrifying neighbourhoods where rents are increasing rapidly and out of line with the incomes of longtime residents of the neighbourhood. One need only look at Hackney, Brixton, and Walthamstow to see who sets the market rent – landlords – and witness that this too can function as a form of violent social cleansing. Should tribunals get to determine who stays, based on who can pay at a market rate set largely by developers and speculation? 

Already, we have seen members of the London Renters Union and their neighbours receive massive rent rises at the end of their contracts. Others face evictions under grounds still allowed under the RRA, such as if the landlord decides to sell up. It is our members who are the hardest-working, and the most vulnerable, who are facing the shortest end of the stick. What makes London a global city is its ability to create community for those at all income levels, from diverse backgrounds and cultures – we only lose if the city continues becoming a playground for the rich. 

I witnessed this first-hand from 2019 till the current day. During the pandemic, I lived in Dalston with a group of friends, lucky to be able to pay for a room at a price that would now be unthinkable. The eviction moratorium at that time protected renters further. I had to leave that space for various reasons, and re-entered the housing market in London earlier this year. When house hunting recently, we were lucky to find a room for almost double the price from 2019. This is not a material increase in the quality of housing, or the immoveable whims of the market – this is profit. This experience is shared by tenants across LRU and beyond.

Other countries handle this differently. Across Europe, North America, and even Scotland, governments apply regulations to the amount that landlords can charge in rent across the board – not just to tenants who are able to offer the time, and fee, to challenge their increases. While fears abound about rent regulations decreasing supply or dissuading landlords from making repairs, recently-released research from IPPR, NEF, and JRF debunks this myth. And support for rent controls is massive across England – a recent housing demonstration for rent controls and safe, affordable council housing showed over 5000 people taking to the streets, making it the largest demonstration for housing justice in over a decade, and a massive show of unity in the housing movement. Tenant unions from across the country were joined by NGOs, trade unions, community groups, and everyday neighbours. Over 80 organisations endorsed this march, and continue to support rent controls across the board. A recent statement from Andrea Egan, the General Secretary of UNISON, emphasises that only rent regulations can protect the majority of workers represented by UNISON in their homes – workers without whom, huge swaths of the country and the city of London would cease to function.  Renters across England want, and deserve, real affordable rents now – and rent controls can achieve this. This would alleviate stressors on the majority of renters who spend more than one third of their income on rent, fearing an upcoming rent rise and cutting back on essentials. And the recent rumour concerning Rachel Reeves’ support for a rent freeze shows that there is political will to push a real system of rent controls through. That’s why, at the London Renters Union, and with dozens of tenant organisations and community organisations across the country with Homes for Us and Homes for All, we’re fighting for a visionary system of rent control for all tenants, coupled with a demand for safe, affordable, accessible council homes. We believe that we should all fight for rent control – that it protects migrants, people of colour, trans and queer people, youth, the elderly, the disabled, and all those pushed to the fringes of society. This is a natural extension of our fight for housing justice through the Renters Rights Act; a normal and fairly uncontroversial system of protection in most countries; and a politically feasible – and winning – system here. The cost of living crisis, global wars and genocide, many voters’ loss of faith in Labour, alongside the rise of Reform, show that everyday people need real change. This is the moment for renters to contact their MPs and join a tenant union in their area to fight for the system change we need – starting with rent controls and measures for real affordability, long term.

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How to increase housing supply: Use every tool in the box

Norwich city by pam fray, CC BY-SA 2.0

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.

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

  1. Make this speculative development model as easy, smooth and profitable as possible
  2. 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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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:

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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Why the construction sector needs social housing

Two construction workers with a block of flats behind them

With 169,000 children growing up in temporary accommodation – the highest number since records began – the case for the government’s manifesto commitment to ‘deliver the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation’ is overwhelming. This situation damages children’s health and development, and it is costing councils across England £7.7 million every day. It is a national scandal whose social and financial costs are well-understood.

But social housing does more than provide an alternative to poor-quality homes. It is also the foundation of a successful housebuilding system. Building social homes at scale – including during market downturns – can underpin the government’s response to the crisis in construction skills and innovation. Far from being in conflict, social housing and market housing can support each other.

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The inherent limitations of the UK’s development model

In a housebuilding system which relies excessively on speculative market housing, developers compete against each other to pay the most for land. Having taken on a large upfront risk through high land costs, developers then need to recoup their investment, building as slowly as necessary to maintain prices. But when sales prices soften, even moderately, market housing starts plummet. Developers are not incentivised to start new schemes if they will have to sell homes for less than they assumed when buying land.

To make matters worse, in tandem with increasing dependence on this speculative model of market supply, the UK’s social housing supply model has become pro-cyclical. Post-war social housing developments were close to 100% social housing. Most costs were covered by grant, and land was assembled at low cost outside the speculative market. This model was insulated from market cycles, allowing the supply of social homes to continue during downturns in private housebuilding. In other words, social housing supply at this time was counter-cyclical.

From the 1980s, the dominant supply model for social housing flipped: grant rates were cut, borrowing costs rose, social landlords had to start competing with private developers in the land market. As a result, an expanded range of ‘affordable housing’ tenures (with costs pegged to market prices) has become increasingly dependent on cross-subsidy from the profits of building market housing. Far from smoothing out the boom and bust cycle of speculative private housebuilding, this model of building social housing intensifies those peaks and troughs. This doesn’t just affect how many homes are built. It shapes how the construction sector itself operates.

Supporting the UK’s construction sector

Ratcheting down: Private housing completions in England since 1946

Over repeated cycles of the housing market, the total output of speculative development is ratcheting downward. As housing starts plummet, so too does the demand for skills and materials. Many construction workers simply leave the sector, often permanently. It is no coincidence that construction workers are more likely to be self-employed than workers in any other sector. Today, more people are leaving the construction sector than joining it, and productivity has remained stubbornly flat for decades. Why would housebuilders maintain a large permanent workforce, or invest in the skills of that workforce, when they know they will need to retrench supply as the market turns?

Because firms cannot predict demand, materials prices have become more volatile. Official statistics show sharp swings in construction output and brick deliveries, worsening shortages and price spikes in an import-dependent system. As the construction industry has adapted to manage the risks of cyclical demand, construction capacity has atrophied.

The long-heralded shift to modern methods of construction (MMC) has also stalled. The speculative, stop-start nature of the industry makes the expense and risks of investment in innovation unattractive. Investors are reluctant to commit to factories which will be moth-balled at the first signs of the next housing market slowdown.

From stop-start to build, baby, build

A more balanced system would combine market housing with a counter-cyclical social housing programme, alongside new market models based on stable demand such as Build to Rent.

When governments fund and enable social housing at scale, it can be built as fast as need demands and construction capacity allows. As the Farmer Review of the UK Construction Labour Model found in 2016, a major programme of social housing would support predictability of demand for labour, skills and materials, resulting in a less risky operating environment for housebuilders, developers and planners. The booms and busts of cyclical market supply are smoothed out by counter-cyclical social supply, so capacity can be maintained and increased despite housing market cycles.

In countries such as Japan and Sweden, innovations and new technologies have thrived on this certainty, creating new opportunities to expand development capacity. It is no coincidence that the last time that modern methods of construction made a major contribution to overall housing supply in the UK was during the post-war social housing boom.

Of course, the benefits of a more sustainable skills base and of innovation in construction today would be felt far beyond the developments which first enabled them. If social housing schemes keep construction workers in the sector during market downturns, those experienced workers will be available to the private sector when the market recovers. If social housing schemes provide enough stable demand to keep MMC providers in business, market housing will be able to benefit from their services, too. While construction capacity is often seen as a constraint on building more social housing, the reverse is also true. A stable pipeline of social housing would expand capacity, supporting more jobs, stronger skills, and greater innovation across the sector.

The government’s new Social and Affordable Homes Programme 2026-36 represents the most significant policy shift back towards a counter-cyclical social housing supply model in decades. A future blog will explore how this could work in practice, and what further changes are needed.

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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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Blog Post

How building Council housing can help Labour beat Reform UK

How to beat Reform UK? It’s the question many in the Labour Party are now asking, with increasing desperation.

Alienated from mainstream politics and politicians, Reform UK supporters see Labour as the ‘establishment’ with little concern or understanding for their lives or their problems. To reach Reform supporters, Labour needs to show in practical, concrete ways that it ‘gets’ Reform voters’ concerns. Labour needs to deliver practical and concrete improvements across the country.

The answer is straightforward. Labour needs to build more council homes and create more non-graduate jobs. And we can do both at the same time using the same money.

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Building more council homes in every part of the country will directly benefit those families who are currently in housing need. Those who are overcrowded or who need a smaller home. Those who are homeless and living in expensive and substandard private rented accommodation. Those whose children and grandchildren are paying through the roof to private landlords for very basic accommodation.

Many of these families have lost faith in mainstream politics after 14 years of failed Conservative governments when few new council homes were built and many continued to be sold off. We need to show, by our actions, that the needs of the non-graduates living in non-metropolitan parts of the country are just as much a priority for Labour as anywhere else.

The new council homes Labour builds should benefit the widest range of families. When new council homes are being built, existing residents should know that they will benefit, too. A central message should be that the new council homes are not just for ‘other people’ or ‘outsiders’, they are for people like YOU. Using local housing allocation policies in operation on many Labour councils already, half the new homes should go to those families who have been waiting patiently for a bigger or smaller home. The other half should go to those who are currently homeless or have been languishing on the housing waiting list.

Building new council homes needs a range of traditional non-graduate skills – bricklayers, plumbers, electricians, plasterers, scaffolders, painters, decorators, carpenters. Just watch an episode of Nick Knowles’ DIY SOS to see the wide range of non-graduate trades needed to build or renovate a house.

Using existing construction companies, local subcontractors and their employees will benefit, too. Many of these subcontractors will be small businesses and will get a real boost by Labour’s council house building programme. Local council house building programmes will give small construction companies the long-term commitment needed to plan their investment.

Working with local colleges, we need a massive construction skills training programme, equipping people of all ages with a skill that will form the basis of a lifetime working career. Construction skills give access to jobs in every part of the country and to any country in the world. You can work for a company or be your own boss, working hard to build a business that gives you and your family financial security and independence. The construction workers benefitting from Labour’s council house building programme will have a real and tangible stake in the economy and in society.

When the new residents move in, some will want new furniture, new carpets and new white goods. Buying these will help local shops and help grow the wider economy. Others will want to paint or paper the walls and add a few personal touches, benefitting local DIY shops.

And don’t forget that the new council tenants will be paying rent to the Council which will then be used to pay back the money it borrowed to build the new homes.

As John Harris wrote in a recent ‘Guardian article, the politics are very basic,

“Four decades ago, many of Reform UK’s older supporters had their lives transformed by Margaret Thatcher’s policy of encouraging people to buy their council houses at huge discounts; now, their daughters, sons and grandchildren live with the dire housing crisis that policy caused. If you understand at least some of the rising ire about immigration as fear of even more competition for scarce resources, housing is right at its heart: in my experience, no other issue comes near its impact on everyday life.”

We have it in our power to embark on the biggest council housing programme since 1945. If we don’t take this opportunity and then lose out to Reform UK in 2029, it will be our own fault. Let’s not make this mistake!

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Blog Post

Delivering Labour’s Council house mission

Image by Angela Baker is licensed under Unsplash free license

Labour’s mission to ‘Get Britain building’ is off to a flying start. Within weeks of winning power, Deputy Prime Minister and Housing Minister, Angela Rayner has announced a raft of new initiatives to meet Labour’s pledge to build 1,500,000 new homes by 2029:

  • Mandatory local housing targets for each Council, totalling over 370,000 new homes a year.
  • Low-quality “grey belt” land in green belt areas will be prioritised for new homes with 50% of the new housing affordable.
  • Essential infrastructure, such as schools, doctors’ surgeries and transport links will be provided, too.
  • A new generation of New Towns will be built.

“This is only the first step – we plan to do so much more,” Rayner told Parliament.

And so much more will certainly be needed. In a recent Fabian Ideas pamphlet, ‘Brick by Brick’, Simon Graham sets out the scale of the task:

  • The social housing stock has decreased by a net 21,800 homes a year over the last decade.
  • There are currently 1.3 million households on council housing waiting lists, up from 1.1 million in 2018.
  • In February 2024, London’s largest housing associations said they would start building just 1,769 homes in 2023/24, compared to 7,363 in 2022/23.
  • Over 2 million council homes in England have been sold through the Right to Buy and, following resales, 40% of them are now owned by private landlords.
  • Councils spent £1.7 billion on temporary accommodation in 2022/23, an increase of 62% since 2018.

In July 2024, a cross-party group of 20 local authorities reported that “England’s council housing system is broken and its future is in danger. New analysis from Savills shows that councils’ housing budgets will face a £2.2bn ‘black hole’ by 2028.”

Such is the parlous state of social housing finance, that in July 2024, the ‘i’ newspaper reported, “A snapshot survey of 13 major house builders found that in January each had an average of 1,000 affordable homes with detailed planning permission that were held up because they couldn’t find a purchaser for affordable homes built under s106 planning deals.” If Labour wants to deliver “the biggest increase in social and affordable housing in a generation”, as its Manifesto states, then it needs to find the cash for these 13,000 new homes.

Attlee’s post-war Government transformed the lives of many, building 1 million new homes between 1945-1951, 80% of them council houses. Conservative Housing Minister Harold Macmillan continued Labour’s example, building over 245,000 new council homes in 1953 alone.

From the 1950’s – 1970’s, the country built around 300,000 a year – half by housebuilders for sale and the other half by local councils for rent. The Government will not reach its 1,500,000 new homes target without a massive council housing building programme.

Building new council homes also benefits the economy and saves money. A Local Government Association report argues that every £1 invested in new social housing generates nearly £3 in the wider economy. Also, every new council home saves around £800 a year in Housing Benefits payments to landlords. And, because tenants pay rent, the council homes pay for themselves over time.

To achieve 370,000 new homes a year, local councils need to build at least 150,000 council homes every year. The only way in which this can be done is through every local council in the country playing a part. The maths is daunting. Building 150,000 council homes a year means building over 400 new homes a day, every day, weekends included, for the next 5 years.

So, here is a 10-point plan to deliver Labour’s mission:

  1. Every council should design plans for new council homes on land they own for 50% of the council’s housing target. Councils should also identify other public sector land and start discussions with the landowners.
  2. Using local architects, funded by the MHCLG, plans for each site should be put to local consultation to get buy-in locally.
  3. Where planning permission has been granted for new housing but not yet implemented, councils should discuss with landowners how to get development started, including councils funding development in return for a proportion of new social rent homes.
  4. Metro Mayors should work with constituent councils to coordinate the delivery of local council housing and private sector homes.
  5. In areas where there are no elected Mayors, regional ‘Housing Commissioners’ should be appointed by MHCLG to coordinate housing delivery.
  6. Each Mayor and Regional Housing Commissioner should be responsible for managing construction skills training in liaison with the CITB.
  7. A national Housing Commissioner should be appointed by MHCLG to oversee the delivery of the Government’s housing mission and coordinate the work of the Mayors and Regional Housing Commissioners.
  8. Right to Buy discounts on existing and new council properties should be reviewed and limited to, say, £1,000 for every year the applicant has been a council tenant and capped at £25,000.
  9. The Mayors and Regional Housing Commissioners should report monthly on the number of new housing starts and completions and construction skills trainees and graduates.
  10. Planning rules should be strengthened to stop the current abuse by landlords who let residential property as Airbnb-type short-term lets, taking homes out of residential use.

Finally, building the promised 1,500,000 new homes is a full-Parliament job. In Attlee’s Government, Aneurin Bevan held Minister of Housing job for five years, Harold Macmillan had the job from 1951-1954. This is Angela Rayner’s opportunity to join the ranks of those few Housing Ministers who truly made a difference.

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A bold housing strategy means tackling more than building

The UK’s housing crisis is reaching a critical point. Rents are soaring, whilst homeownership remains out of reach for many after years of house price increases outpacing wage growth. In the late 1990s, the average house price was 3.5 times the average income in England – as of 2023, this had more than doubled to 8.2 times, with prices exceeding 12 times incomes in many areas of London. All of this means that homelessness is skyrocketing – with Britain having by far the highest rate of homelessness in the rich world when you include those in temporary accommodation, which is the largest form of homelessness. Combined with decades of declining social housing stock, demand for social homes now far outstrips supply, and local authorities are being forced to spend record amounts on high-cost, poor-quality temporary accommodation from the private sector, driving them into severe financial difficulty. In 2022/23, £1.8bn was spent by councils on temporary accommodation, over double that spent in 2018/19.

It’s in this context that this month, Positive Money and London Renters Union, a grassroots tenants union representing over 7,000 members, brought together parliamentarians, renters unions and policy experts for a discussion in parliament, Beyond Building: Fixing the UK Housing Crisis.

The discussion reflects a growing awareness that addressing the multiple crises that our housing system not only reflects but is exacerbating – from inequity that runs along racial, class and generational lines, to the climate impact of British homes – requires a fundamental shift away from homes from being treated as assets for accumulating wealth. Positive Money’s Banking on Property report sets out why approaching the crisis as a problem of housing supply alone will likely do little to solve it. Available academic evidence (plus UK Government modelling) also suggests that meeting the house building target of the current government is unlikely to bring house prices to an affordable level. As a problem driven by a toxic combination of the weakening of financial regulation and monetary policy, and wider housing policy choices including tax incentives, The Right To Buy and the deregulation of the private rental market, a housing policy agenda fit for the situation we’re in must address these drivers head-on.

Those at the sharpest end of the housing crisis, including private renters, intuitively understand the need to confront the distribution and price of housing. Yet despite an abundance of evidence and the vocal campaigning of those most impacted by the crisis, policy discussions often remain laser-focussed on how to increase the building of new homes. And despite Rachel Reeves’ welcome announcement that ‘a house should be a home not an asset’, Labour has so far announced little in the way of policies that truly reflect this ambition. Doing so undoubtedly requires a bold and multi-faceted policy programme, and a willingness to challenge the interests of those who benefit from our extractive housing system. But with housing costs making up one of the biggest items of expenditure for any household, there is a strong case that doing so would pay off for a future government.

The discussion brought together a range of voices to discuss the solutions needed, focussing on two key policy areas that, in our view, should form important components of a long-term vision for a more affordable, safer and healthier housing system: local authority acquisitions of privately-rented housing for use as council homes; and proper regulation of the private rented sector to provide security and affordability for tenants. As Beth Stratford, economist and co-founder of the London Renters Union, highlighted, the two ideas dovetail well. Since much of the pushback against regulation of the private rented sector cites concern that it could cause landlords to sell properties, acquisition programmes offer an out for those private landlords who may indeed choose to exit the sector, whilst providing the social housing we urgently need.

‘Buy back’ schemes are gaining momentum as a way to take advantage of the recent softening of house prices to rapidly increase the stock of council homes and support the sustainability of local government finances. As social housing expert and crossbench peer Richard Best reflected upon during the discussion, such programmes are not new – in the 1960s and 70s, tens of thousands of privately rented-properties, often ‘entire streets’ of houses in poor condition, were purchased and renovated by local councils. London’s buy-back schemes are key recent examples, but remain limited in scale in comparison, and do not match the ambition of similar programmes being pursued in cities like Barcelona.

Alex Diner, Senior Researcher at the New Economics Foundation (NEF), presented an analysis of how London’s buy-back scheme would more than pay for itself through both directly reducing council payments to private housing providers, as well as indirect benefits from health and earnings improvements. NEF’s proposed reforms, including establishing a national fund to support acquisitions at scale, could replicate such savings across the country whilst providing much-needed social housing. Similar programmes could be designed to support the acquisition of privately-rented homes for community-led housing, like cooperatives and community land trusts. But as speakers discussed, central to this will be a new government setting a goal to actively shift tenures away from the private rented sector’

Whilst acquisitions could offer a rapid route to expanding social housing stock, it’s unlikely that even the most ambitious agenda could alleviate the urgent situation faced by so many renters. As members of the renter unions in attendance highlighted, in the face of record price increases, insecurity, and poor quality of privately rented housing that disproportionately impacts Black, Asian and ethnic minority communities, rent controls in some form are needed.

As representatives of Living Rent, Scotland’s largest tenants’ union, explained, Scotland’s experience – where a temporary in-tenancy rent freeze has led to landlords’ hiking rents for new tenancies – is something that the rest of the UK can learn from. Policymakers should take solace from the fact that far from being put off by such experiences, major unions like Living Rent and the London Renters Union, which organise thousands at the sharpest end of the housing crisis, are instead mobilising members to call for long-term and well-designed policies to get rents under control.

Perhaps the clearest message that emerged is that many of those involved in developing and campaigning for policy solutions to the housing crisis understand that building new homes, while useful, is not a silver bullet solution. We need a suite of measures, which must include reversing financial deregulation and tax changes that incentivised property speculation, which have been major drivers of house price inflation. But reclaiming privately rented homes, and protecting those in the private rented sector, must be key pillars of a progressive housing agenda.

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What’s holding back estate regeneration? Personal reflections and hopes for joined-up policy

Sylvia Court, Hoxton, Simon, is licensed under CC-BY-2.0

I don’t know exactly when it started to set in, this pessimism about housing I’ve had lately.

If I had to put a date on it I’d say 2021, probably the summer, when I was working as a Housing Operations Manager, responsible for thousands of residents’ homes across different estates and schemes across London. I knew our plans for the renovation of 1940s walk-up blocks were held back again by failure demand, due to the mounting backlog of routine and emergency repairs to our homes and estates which stripped away our allocated maintenance routine and planned budgets. Inflation, to my eye mysteriously low until now at a headline level, could also go up at any time.

The Office for National Statistics Housing Construction output prices indices shows that between June 2018 and June 2020 the cost of housing repairs and maintenance rose from 104.8% of 2015 prices to 106.9%. Between June 2020 and June 2021,  it rose to 109.3%. Thereafter, the index spiked sharply, peaking at 120%) where it has stayed since. Our economic circumstances in housing and homelessness are now vastly different, just like those early Covid-predictions.

From my viewpoint, financial instability, deprivation and lack of clear national direction were already biting local communities, holding back housing reinvestment and regeneration and stressing our social housing workforce.

The national headlines about an exponential rise infood bank and emergency food relief usage were played out in the real world in front of our eyes as residents set up or expanded food banks and emergency food delivery schemes, which we supported financially and with our own system of well-being calls and free food deliveries for those who needed help.

While this was ongoing,  the pressure on our finances began to tighten with soaring maintenance and repair costs, cross-subsidy demands for new building, loan repayments, while our income was restricted by rent freezes, capped increases and constricting credit systems that usually serviced a 100,000 unit housing association smoothly but were starting to tighten as interest rates began to rise.

This meant residents and some frontline housing workers – many living in social housing themselves – were not only living through a pandemic but also an outbreak of delayed and broken promises of home and estate improvements.

Across the country, we knew from forums and Inside Housing, some of the most alert housing associations were scrambling to adapt to a new post-pandemic future – they didn’t expect much yet from the government given how little they were used to being guided on housing management since de-regulation after 2011 and 2015!


When Covid started looking serious in early 2020, we’d been so relieved both for our residents, and as a team,  that the first phase of the renovation plans were completed, not knowing how long or severe the disruption to housing services would be. Never had the phrase “fix the roof while the sun is shining” had so much relevance when storm clouds were gathering around again. 


This was work for me, but it was personal as well. As we discussed in the neighbourhood office every day, long-term plans for individual homes and whole neighbourhoods underpinned thousands of people’s lives. People who I quickly learned from doorstep conversations, in meetings and by email frankly didn’t care much about what their social landlord thought. As long as they could get on in life with their lives, education, work, personal challenges, life plans – they were happy to leave their social landlord to competently operate in the local economy and manage their home and neighbourhood in partnership with the council, social services, police, faith and charity groups.

Trust was fragile, and there’d been very little of it in the area when in autumn 2018 I was first set a very stretching target of implementing plans rapidly developed with residents to rebuilding trust with the residents’ associations and residents of several estates, all told it would amount to around 3,000 homes.

I was determined to rebuild that trust with my team and colleagues, by driving rapid improvements to estate reinvestment and regeneration locally, improving routine maintenance and delivering neighbourhood communication for the age of social media, enabling people to live in their homes without the need to chase their landlord or complain.

Trust needed constant work with a section of residents, many with lived experience of homelessness, with bad experience with private landlords or insecure housing in the past, as we understood from speaking with them.

From the many personal conversations I had with residents on the doorstep and in meetings, emails, Twitter and newsletter feedback received to our dedicated inboxes between 2017 and 2022, I also knew that some also felt that delay and disappointment from their social landlord meant they were reliving their own journeys of the insecure private housing, being asked to leave or being evicted and then approaching hard-pressed local authority housing departments, only to be advised of long queues to be offered the chance to bid on precious social housing flats. 


As a trainee, in constant dialogue with the residents’ associations and local Labour councillors, I’d drawn estate reinvestment plans for each of the big estates with an assembled taskforce of senior colleagues. 


These had focused on the basics, first cleaning and antisocial behaviour, then security and safety for the day-to-day challenges people faced: including stronger communal doors, new lifts, better lighting, roof repairs, water pumps. These plans were formed only in late 2018 in answer to and with residents’ associations and the local councillors, and were delivered just in time for the end of 2019/20. The next phase would focus on warmth, decency and efficiency: new heating and energy systems including heat pumps, more efficient boilers, solar panels (several residents’ associations had declared climate emergencies and were discussing community energy schemes), and communal cleaning. 

Now I felt sick speaking to my colleagues in the Repairs, Reinvestment, Neighbourhoods Department, as we looked at the plans for 2021/22 and realised how difficult it would be to deliver them. Inflation, already bad after 2016, was going south on ‘specialist’ parts for lifts, door entry systems and for window frames, certain heating system parts. Wages were increasing too. The cost of some maintenance projects had doubled, due to contractors being unwilling or unable to deliver work – they had plenty of quotes themselves. Even with an in-house contractor the same issues with materials and wages arose rapidly, and even our in-house team and trusted suppliers were unable to keep up by summer 2021.

The quotes we’d shared for full transparency with the residents’ associations would now be just promises we’d made standing up in front of a room of residents, that we’d written down and sent to our local councillors. 

Should I have felt so ashamed and angry about the prospect of my organisation, which I was proud to be the local face of for many residents, being unable to deliver everything we’d promised? 

Well, reflecting on it, the picture was more complicated. After all, successive Conservative Governments had caused a great degree of this instability, successive rent freezes and rent caps and with price shocks, material shortages, distortions in the skills and labour market, meaning that Maintenance and Planned Reinvestment and Regeneration budgets, often possible to squish together in the process of cutting them to meet straitened income was increasingly stretched or disappeared to build new homes, service debts or deal with other more pressing issues, especially fire safety checks and works.

Looking back, I can see from a policy perspective what I knew from a personal conversation with a resident talking to their housing teamthat each disappointment of a delayed repair, each broken promise to fix up their estates communal parts and gardens could seem to compound their history of bad experiences in their homes and with local public services.

But it felt like a betrayal, and we would do all we could to put it right. In the end we delivered almost everything in those neighbourhoods, a little late, to everyone’s relief by the Summer of 2022. But only after some very difficult financial decisions, including rearranging funding allocated to other high need, high priority neighbourhoods, and some brave communication with residents and their associations.

We kicked so many things down the road that residents told us would be needed which we could confirm from our stock data, and which I know will still be needed now.  Not least the local employment scheme, the solar panels, the heat pumps and the fundamental renovation of the fabric of estates and, where the residents and data pointed us, regeneration, things that my predecessors and colleagues had felt forced to push into the far future due to funding pressures and constantly changing political priorities. This showed the Conservative illiteracy of the basics of how social housing ‘worked’ on the ground.

We were far from perfect as a social housing provider, and we welcomed the new Social Housing Regulatory Regime that the Conservatives finally realised was needed, after scrapping consumer standards as a neo-liberal, austerity experiment, and yet we did try to keep up with everything and deliver new homes to boot.

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Tackling Temporary Accommodation: Labour Housing Group’s Recommendations

When we talk about homelessness, our thoughts often turn to people in doorways and tents, living on the streets of our towns and cities. Rough sleeping is the most extreme and dangerous form of homelessness and the increasing numbers experiencing it is easy to see. Shocking as this is, it is just the visible tip of the now vast homelessness crisis.

Earlier this month Hannah Keilloh set out both the human and financial cost of this hidden crisis. 123,000 homeless families are living in temporary accommodation (TA) including 140,000 children. More than £1.7 billion spent in 2022-23 to “temporarily” house people, often in appalling conditions.  Two thirds of the families have been in TA for more than a year, some for more than a decade – their lives on hold as they wait for the settled and secure home that everyone deserves.

There is an urgent need for action to tackle this and last summer I was pleased to join Labour Housing Group’s policy working group to help develop proposals we would like to see Labour’s manifesto.

The Group’s aims were to bring forward proposals to reduce the cost of temporary accommodation and to improve the quality of accommodation being used. But also to work towards a greater mission – to prevent people from becoming homelessness and, when that isn’t possible, to ensure that temporary accommodation is truly temporary and their homelessness ended as quickly as possible.

Strategy and leadership to enable change

Tackling homelessness requires consistent, coordinated action and commitment across multiple areas government – national, regional and local. It requires a true team effort with government and public agencies working hand in hand with housing and third sector support providers and communities.

Adopting an overarching homelessness strategy might not sound like the biggest ask, and yet the UK is one of the few nations in Europe that does not have one. The next government should swiftly correct this. It should be coproduced and delivered in partnership with people with lived experience of homelessness, and the local authorities and voluntary & community organisations working on the frontline. It won’t be easy to break the silos. Strong leadership will be needed to develop and deliver this across government – the report recommends the appointment of a homelessness Tsar, who will need political support at the very highest level.

At its heart, Labour’s approach should have an understanding that the causes and impacts of homelessness are diverse and unequal. Women make up 60% of adults in temporary accommodation with violent relationship breakdown as a leading cause.  Black people are three and a half times more likely to experience homelessness as White British people and a quarter of young people at risk of homelessness identify as LGBTQ+. Labour’s strategy must recognise disadvantage and discrimination. It must enable person centred and trauma informed approaches to meet diverse needs.

Low cost, high impact changes

Preventing homelessness and the need for temporary accommodation is our ultimate aim, but to alleviate the immediate TA crisis Labour must act swiftly to lower the barriers people face to moving on from TA, refuges and other homelessness accommodation. Too often people are stuck on social housing waiting lists and blocked from private rental tenancies. It is in many ways akin to bed blocking – people unable to move to somewhere more suitable and the “beds” in good quality, local accommodation unavailable for newly homeless people.

The report recommends that social housing allocation policies should give greater priority to people experiencing homelessness and that more housing association lettings should be reserved for people experiencing homelessness. The report particularly recommends that policies should far greater support to those who have spent more than a year in TA.

Action should also be taken to remove barriers from securing private rented accommodation. This should include increasing the budget and eligibility for Discretionary Housing Payments and enabling local authorities to expand of funding of deposits and rent in advance. Reforms should also require landlords and agents to accept offers of written guarantees (for instance from local authorities) instead of cash deposits.

Investing in the future

The working group recognises the financial and economic challenges a Labour government would face. However, there is strong evidence that investing to end homelessness is money well spent with PWC finding every £1 invested could save up to £2.80 of spending across the public sector.

We recommend a comprehensive, cross government review of current spending on supporting the homelessness crisis – both direct spend on TA and homelessness support and the hidden costs of homelessness including within health, social care and criminal justice budgets. Our proposals for investment include additional ring fenced funding for homelessness prevention, a local authority TA acquisitions programme and funding of a robust inspection and enforcement regime to ensure existing legal standards for TA are met.

Ultimately Labour must make it their mission to end poverty and destitution. That means investing to tackle the housing crisis by building at least 90,000 new social homes per year and, alongside the new deal for working people, fixing the gaping holes in the social welfare safety net.

With real determination and ambition we believe a Labour government could end the homelessness crisis and we urge Labour to take up this challenge.

Find out more

There will be an online launch for Labour Housing Group’s policy paper on temporary accommodation on Tuesday the 27th of February at 10am. Register for that here.

Click here to read the full report.

Fiona Colley is Director of Social Change at Homeless Link, the national membership body for organisations working directly with people who become homeless in England.