Tag: Housing

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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.

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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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Boosting housing supply in Australia and Canada: much more than planning de-regulation

‘The national project to make housing more affordable is focused entirely on increasing supply [and] … The plan for meeting the supply target is to change planning laws and allow more density in middle suburbs…’ So wrote revered Australian economic analyst, Alan Kohler in 2025.

Especially when it comes to the official narratives accompanying national housing policy in the 2020s, similar comments could be made for other countries including Canada and the UK, to name but two.

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Even so, Kohler’s pithy summary underplays the diverse range of approaches that governments are nowadays deploying in their housing supply-focused efforts.

Moreover, while largely centred on planning reform and other ‘market enabling’ measures, initiatives in Canada and Australia now include direct commissioning and funding of housing construction on a scale without recent precedent.

To identify internationally adaptable approaches to boosting housing supply, our new study compared the post-pandemic housing market challenges and policy approaches of Canada and Australia, two of the world’s most comparable nations.

Structural factors

In both countries housing affordability challenges have come to the fore in policy and political debate since the 2010s, with rising house prices and rents generally outpacing incomes. Thus, Canada’s national house price-to-income ratio rose from under 4.0 in 2003 to 7.7 by 2022, with a similar increase observed in Australia.

At the same time, the nature of the housing supply challenge in the early 2020s contrasts significantly across the two countries. Most notably, trends in apartment construction have markedly diverged. By 2024, such building starts had fallen by 48% from their 2016 peak in Australia, whereas Canadian unit commencements had surged by 71% over this period.

The main explanation for this contrast appears to be the revived vitality of Canada’s purpose-built rental (PBR) apartment industry in the post-Great Financial Crisis era. This is a sector far more strongly represented here than in Australia. Canada’s PBR construction surged more than threefold in the decade to 2024, representing a remarkable 42% of all housebuilding by that date.

As shown by the Canadian PBR industry’s relatively stable output in the immediate post-pandemic era, this speaks to the product’s resilience in the face of challenging market conditions. While abetted by favourable lending and mortgage insurance policies, the main explanation is probably the over-riding priority PBR investors place on long-term rental returns. This leaves them relatively sanguine about short-term market conditions and prospects.

Encouraging planning liberalisation

Efforts to both liberalise land-use zoning restrictions and streamline development approval processes are indeed central to contemporary pro-housing supply efforts in the two countries. However, federal administrations are constitutionally constrained here. Lacking powers to mandate planning policy (controlled by state/territory/local governments), federal influence must be transmitted indirectly.

In Australia this has been recently progressed under the Albanese government via the 2022 National Housing Accord. Central to this inter-governmental agreement was the commitment by signatory federal, state/territory and local authorities to ‘[i]mproving zoning, planning and land release’.

Accord participants also endorsed a national housebuilding goal to construct 1 million new dwellings 2024-29, later upped to 1.2 million homes within that timeframe. The federal government pledged a $AUD3B ‘New Home Bonus’ payable to state/territory governments conditional on achievement of jurisdiction-specific building targets.

Parallel Canadian efforts have centred on the federal Housing Accelerator Fund (HAF), a $CAN4B program to incentivise planning and other relevant reform by local governments. More subtly, HAF payments are intended to support municipalities growing housing supply ‘faster than [the local] historical average’.

As operationalised since 2023, Canada’s HAF program has involved federal-municipal agreements where, in exchange for pledged federal payments, lower tier governments have committed to specific planning reforms and other undertakings to expand housebuilding.

Beyond their status as ‘reward payments’ for relaxing or simplifying land use planning’, Canadian HAF subsidies fund other municipality actions on housing supply. This includes local commitments to channel such funds into affordable housing construction.

Other pro-supply measures

As unpacked in our research, though, pro-housing supply measures in both countries extend well beyond planning liberalisation. As represented to some degree in both Canada and Australia, these include:

  • Infrastructure funding support
  • Low-cost debt facilities and development de-risking
  • Federal property tax reform
  • Workforce capacity building
  • Technological development
  • Government-funded housing production
  • Identifying and allocating public land for affordable non-market development.

Generally, these interventions have been disproportionately larger and more ambitious in the Canadian case – especially when it comes to de-risking private housing development, and in financial support pledged for pre-fabricated (or ‘modular’) housing construction.

But, while ‘market enabling’ measures remain dominant, recent initiatives have seen both countries also pledging muscular interventions in the commissioning and funding of housing for both sub-market rent and sale. The new Build Canada Homes agency launched by the Carney government is tasked with ‘[constructing] affordable housing at scale’ – including $CAN4B loans and $CAN6B contributions to [non-market] ‘deeply affordable housing, supportive housing, Indigenous housing, and shelters’.

Meanwhile the Australian Government pledged in 2025 to commission 100,000 homes for (ring-fenced) sale to first home buyers over eight years. This revives a practice which contributed significantly to expanding Australian home ownership under the Keynesian consensus of the early post-war period, although subsequently absent for half a century until now.

The modern pre-occupation with expanding housing production while doing little to dampen housing demand remains highly questionable. But the range of pro-supply initiatives proceeding in countries such as Canada and Australia is far broader than the dominant ‘planning deregulation’ narrative implies. These extend to measures that, in their interventionist nature, arguably challenge decades of neo-liberal orthodoxy.

Much like its Australian and Canadian counterparts, the Starmer government’s housing reform narrative has overstated the scope for easing housing affordability through planning reform.

Lessons for the UK

As in those comparator nations, UK governments need to shift away from over-reliance on blanket efforts to boost market supply through development approval deregulation. Instead, taking a leaf out of Canadian and Australian books, the promised national housing strategy for England should embrace a wider range of pro-supply initiatives.

Emulating recent boundary-pushing measures under Premiers Carney and Albanese these measures should include more direct interventions that recall an earlier post-war era when such actions were standard practice.

Hal Pawson is an Emeritus Professor at the University of New South Wales Sydney. Steve Pomeroy is an Industry Professor at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.

A version of this article first appeared on Australia’s Fifth Estate site. 

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Labour’s first year in Government has kickstarted a generational uplift in social housebuilding

Like many in the Labour movement, fixing the housing crisis has been a key priority for me before and throughout my journey into politics.

Throughout my early career working on planning reform in the Treasury, to co-ordinating between boroughs at regional and sub-regional levels, to directly programming and delivering social homes in local government, the challenge and potential of social housing has been ever-present to me.

Every social home we build represents a household with a stable roof over their head, shielded from the increasingly unaffordable private rental sector. It is a child who is protected from moving miles to a new school after being rehoused into temporary accommodation; it is a pensioner freed from the worry of their rent increasing beyond their fixed income; it is a carer whose Local Housing Allowance is being reinvested into the state rather than funnelled into a landlord’s bank account. Most importantly, every social home we deliver puts the sector as a whole on a firmer footing, guarantees stable income to run a sustainable service, and provides a tangible asset for registered providers to lend against in building even more social homes.

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It is easy to pin the blame for the state of social housing on the first introduction of the Right to Buy, which led to the mass sell-off of council homes, but we cannot let the past 15 years of neglectful Tory Governments of the hook either. From cutting the Affordable Homes Programme by 40% upon entering office, to supercharging the Right to Buy, as well as suppressing rents for years, the Conservatives enabled the sell-off of social homes while stripping away the ability to build more. From 2012 to 2024, 124,000 homes were sold on the Right to Buy, at the same time as the number of households in temporary accommodation increased to 127,890.

This alone is challenging enough, but the Conservatives’ decisions on housing delivery were also deeply harmful by letting developers off the hook with a range of intermediate tenures. The introduction of affordable rent in 2011, and the inclusion of student accommodation and build-to-rent housing within planning guidance from 2019, have all funnelled crucial developer contributions towards other tenures and further weakened social rent.

The fact that this has come at the same time as a historically difficult environment for delivery has resulted in a perfect storm preventing new social homes. Supply chain inflation and skills shortages have all increased the cost of building, at the same time as social housing providers have faced financial squeeze from introduction of important regulation in building safety, social housing regulation, as well as the pressing need to decarbonise our housing stock.

The result has been profound for the sector, as the delivery of new social homes slumped from 60,000 in 2010/11 to under 10,000 in 2023/4.

We need safer, warmer, and better-managed social homes, and we cannot expect social providers to deliver this alongside more homes without substantial support.

And this is exactly what the new Government has provided. Within a single year of power, Labour has introduced a number of reforms which will not only prevent the sell-off of social homes and laying the groundwork for a generational boost to this most important tenure which was laid out in our manifesto.

The Government has curtailed the Right to Buy, reducing the available discounts and setting forward a number of new reforms including ensuring that council tenants are truly long-term residents by ensuring that they have lived there for ten years, removing newbuild council homes from the Right to Buy, and preventing homes sold through the Right to Buy from being let out in the private rental sector.

Importantly, the Government also made it easier to build new social homes, through reforms to planning and focus increasingly on social rent. Three particular changes here have been particularly exciting to me: the decision to instruct England to focus Affordable Homes Programme spending on social rent; the new Compulsory Purchase powers in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill which will allow local authorities to purchase land for social homes at use value, rather than inflated ‘hope value’; and the ‘golden rules’ allocated to ‘grey belt’ sites of low-quality land on the edge of cities, which will prioritise the development of affordable homes.

Finally, the Government has provided a stable financial footing at the most recent Spending Review for registered providers to increase supply at pace. Alongside the much-discussed £39 billion Affordable Homes Programme, other grant funding for decarbonisation and building safety will reduce the pressures faced by the sector to bring existing stock up to date, and a ten-year rent settlement will bring their revenue in real terms back up to 2015 levels and enable for longer term business planning.

The significant investment in social housing by this Government shows a key recognition of the value of a social tenancy.  But we cannot rest on the laurels of this progress and we need to continue to find and address faults preventing the development of new social homes.

One of these has to be around developer contributions, the Section 106 process and viability assessments. Local authorities and housing campaigners rightly complain that developers too often sidestep contributions, make the most of loopholes, or renegotiate affordable housing requirements after Section 106 agreements are made, and discerning what is a reasoned response to a fast-changing delivery environment is challenging. This is particularly the case as we look more and more on land value uplift to deliver what the state has failed to do for the past 15 years, whether that is building roads, GP surgeries or schools, or building social homes. We need streamlining of this process to ensure that agreements are conducted transparently and enforced effectively. Prioritising social rent and empowering local authorities to scrutinise developer claims, would all help in this area.

The Government also needs to press forward in its work to reform the Building Safety Regulator. Social housebuilders are those with the least resources and are more likely to be looking into building high rises than homes for market sale, and so ensuring that mandatory guidance is given beforehand and that feedback from failed applications is readily available is crucial as the new regime embeds itself.

Finally, social homes need to be at the heart of the Government’s New Towns vision. If these are to live up to their promise and deliver genuinely new communities in new settlements or urban extensions, then affordable and secure options need to be present for those priced out of home ownership.

Labour’s record of delivery on housing policy in its first year of government has been impressive, and I am proud of the work already done to lay the groundwork for the generational boost in social housing as promised in our manifesto. Undoing decades of decline under the previous Government’s tenure will have a meaningful impact on living standards and make meaningful progress on the human consequences endured by the hundreds of thousands of people in temporary accommodation.  We must continue to act quickly and decisively and to prioritise any measures which will create more social homes, and to deliver the change which millions of people voted for a year ago.

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‘So what has Labour done differently?’ – 50 housing wins from Labour’s first year in power

General Election campaigning, Reading, United Kingdom - 18 June 2024 by Keir Starmer MP is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

One year ago, we asked the question ‘but what will Labour do differently?’ on housing ahead of the 2024 general election. Ahead of the polls, Labour was making substantial promises around its housing plans. 1.5 million homes, a generational boost in social housing, as well as fixing fundamentally flawed tenures in the private rented sector and leasehold among other promises gave hope to a sector which had been so neglected under the Conservatives.

While Labour’s first year in Government has been challenging, with difficulties at home and greater uncertainty abroad, few would have expected that it would get so much done in its first year on housing.

At the first anniversary of the election, now marks the perfect opportunity to review all that Labour has achieved in housing since entering Government, as well as looking ahead to what the next year could hold.

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The road to 1.5 million homes

The Government’s flagship policy on housing was its pledge to build 1.5 million homes in this Parliament. And, while figures in industry, and even the Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook, have admitted that this is likely a stretch target, the progress which the Government has made will set the UK on a permanent path to delivering more homes.

Shortly after the election, the Government set out addressing issues with individual sites, reversing ministerial vetos on individual sites such as around Liverpool Docks (1), and establishing a New Homes Accelerator to take direct action on individual sites (2). This has also been partnered with a new subsidiary of Homes England, the National Housing Bank, with £16 billion of capital leveraging an additional £53 billion of private investment to build half a million homes (3).

Crucial to this has been making the planning system more favourable to delivering more homes at greater speed. This has involved updating the NPPF to restore housing targets (4), to reallocate low-quality ‘grey belt’ land for new homes (5), and to mandate that local authorities have a 5-year land supply and a local plan (6), the Government has undergone a number of ambitious steps in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. This has included modernising planning committees to empower councillors to deliver better-quality projects (7), delegating more decisions to officers to allow for more rules-based planning decisions (8), and streamlining planning for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs), so that homes are not left without critical infrastructure (9). This work is supported by the recruitment of an additional 300 planning officers to improve capacity in local authorities (10).

Nor are the Government’s changes purely a charter for large developers, and they have included mandating faster build-out rates to prevent developers from a ‘slow-build’ approach to prioritise profit over homes (11). More support has also been provided for SME builders through establishing a new ‘medium site’ category with reduced planning rules (12), setting aside more Homes England land for smaller builders (13) and establishing a Small Sites Aggregator to unlock small sites which otherwise would not be developed (14).

However, reaching 1.5 million homes cannot be reached through planning alone, and the Government has also been active in ensuring that there is a sustainable workforce to produce the homes that we need. This has included setting up Skills England, a national body for addressing the skills shortage (15), setting aside an additional £600 million for construction sector skills (16), and establishing a Construction Skills Mission Board with an aim of recruiting an additional 100,000 new construction workers per year (17).

Key to the Government’s long-term plans are also New Towns, and while there were fears before the election that these would be unfeasible, not only did has the Government set up a New Towns Taskforce (18), but they identified 100 sites for these, with work due to start on at least 12 before the next election (19).

(See more on what the Government is doing to address the skills shortage from Lauren Edwards MP)

(See more on the Government’s plans for New Towns from Shaun Davies MP)

A generational boost to social and affordable housing

While boosting housing supply is critical, it is social and affordable homes which are most crucially needed for those with greatest housing need. While the last Government allowed 120,000 homes to be sold through the Right to Buy, Labour has already curtailed this, not only reducing discounts severely (20), and announcing that newbuild social homes will be exempt from the Right to Buy for 35 years and that social tenants will have had to have lived in their home for 10 years before being eligible (21).

Not only has the Government stopped the outflow of social homes, but they have meaningfully set the groundwork to increasing the delivery of more social homes, through instructing Homes England to direct funding primarily to social homes (22), and reforming Compulsory Purchase Orders in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill to allow local authorities to buy land at existing use price rather than inflated ‘hope value’ for social housing (23). Finally, increasing the funding for social housing featured prominently at all of the Government’s major fiscal moments, with £500madded to the Affordable Homes Programmein the Autumn Budget (24), £2 billionat the Spring Statement (25), before an increase of 50% from the Conservatives’ Affordable Homes Programme to spend £39 billion on affordable homes in the recent Spending Review (26). This is combined projected to increase social housebuilding sixfold, building 300,000 new social and affordable homes over the next decade, 60% of which will be at social rent.

Finally, housing associations and local authorities have been supported to have greater financial stability, not only by being included in Government funding for cladding remediation (27), but providing greater certainty of social rent, with a ten-year rent settlement to bring social rents back to 2015 levels in real terms, and plans for social rent convergence so that artificially reduced rents are brought up to standard (28).

Improving the quality of existing stock

While delivering new homes is crucial, critical issues with our existing housing stock persist, particularly in larger blocks and in social housing. This is somewhere where the Government has taken direct action, implementing Awaab’s Law into social housing later this year (29), and setting out plans for a new Decent Homes Standard for social and private rented homes (30), alongside a first-ever Minimum Energy Efficiency Standard in social rented homes (31).

The Government has also established a plan to act on all 58 recommendations of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry (32), including introducing a single construction sector regulator. This has been alongside setting out a Remediation Acceleration Plan to fast-track the vital work to address building safety defects on high rise buildings (33).

The Government has also put their money where their mouth is on housing quality, setting aside £13.2bn for a Warm Homes Plan to bring 300,000 homes up to EPC C level (34).

Read more about the Government’s plans for building safety from Darren Paffey MP)

Fixing flawed tenures

The 4.7 million private renters and 5.3 million leaseholders in England and Wales know well that the arcane rules governing their own homes are in stark need of reform. And the Government has recognised this, launching a bold programme to fix these tenures.

In the private rented sector, the Government is on the verge of passing the Renters’ Rights Bill. Not only will this outlaw ‘no-fault’ Section 21 evictions (35), it will outlaw rental bidding wars (36), introduce a mandatory private rental sector database (37).

The Bill contains a myriad of other improvements, from the right to request a pet (38), to capping rent advances at one month (39), as well as establishing rent tribunals for tenants to charge unreasonable increases (40), but a list of 50 achievements could likely include reforms from the Renters’ Rights Bill.

Meanwhile, the Government has set out plans to implement their predecessor’s rushed Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act (41), as well as fast-tracking reforms to the Right to Manage to ensure that leaseholders can hire and fire their managing agents with greater ease (42). The Government has also published a Commonhold White Paper (43), with plans to publish a full Leasehold and Commonhold Bill later this year (44), with a range of commitments already made, including mandatory qualifications for managing agents (45).

Addressing homelessness head-on

The most immediate symptom of the housing crisis is that of homelessness and rough sleeping, with the number of families in temporary accommodation reaching 126,400under the Conservatives.

The Government has acted here head-on, not only setting a Cross-Government Taskforce on Homelessness chaired by the Deputy Prime Minister (46), but putting their money where their mouth is, with a £1 billion boost to funding at the Autumn Budget (47). Attempts are also being made to address the use of bed and breakfasts as temporary accommodation with Emergency Accommodation Reduction Pilots in the 20 local authorities with the highest B&B usage (48).

While the recommendations of this taskforce are still to be seen, a number of crucial steps have already been taken. These have included exempting care leavers and survivors of domestic abuse from punitive ‘local connection tests’ for local authority housing support to ensure that they can receive critical help to prevent homelessness (49), and establishing a commitment to repealing the cruel and outdated Vagrancy Act in the Spring of 2026 to finally decriminalise rough sleeping (50).

Check out more on tackling temporary accommodation from Naushabah Khan MP)

Looking ahead: what do we need in Year 2?

Despite this progress, the Government cannot rest on their laurels, particularly with the number of new starts on site decreasing, the numbers of households in temporary accommodation on the rise, and rents continuing to increase in the PRS.

A lot of the achievements on this list, while laudable, consist of plans, targets and goal-setting. While this is undoubtedly needed in the first year of a new Government, tracking their progress and ensuring their implementation is key.

When it comes to new rights in leasehold and the private rental sector, resourcing needs to be provided to local authorities, regulators, and the First Tier Tribunal to take the increased caseload, and any gaps and loopholes need to be carefully monitored.

Moreover, blocks to delivering new homes, particularly social and affordable homes, need to be reviewed and analysed in-depth. Concerns continue to be raised with the Building Safety Regulator, as well as with viability rules and the difficulty of delivering social homes on brownfield sites. Reforms to these to enable faster delivery of homes from registered providers may well be needed to meet the Government’s housing ambitions.

Finally, while the Government has undoubtedly done a great deal of work in these areas across this year on fixing the housing crisis, more needs to be done to make the political case that these changes will actually improve voters’ lives. Even if all of Labour’s housing goals are met, showing that a slower increase in rents or prices, or slightly faster movement in social housing waiting lists, is down to the Government of the day is difficult at the best of times, and even more challenging in a competitive multi-party system. The Government needs to identify a compelling housing story to tell which links together all 50 of these accomplishments, and really sells it to voters, not just for its own sake, but to achieve a long-term political consensus for sustained housing action.

One year in, and the Labour Government is moving with remarkable speed and ambition to fix the housing crisis, proving that, when it comes to housing, change is being delivered. What this change amounts to could well be decisive both politically and substantively for Labour’s legacy.

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Get on and build

Castle Reach in New Road develpopment for five bungalows and houses - site of the Old Drill Hall, image by Framlingham History Society.

Commentators from all corners have noted that successive Governments’ targets for housebuilding have not been reached in decades.  Labour has moved fast on planning reforms which lay the groundwork for a step change in land supply through changes to planning policy, introducing mandatory targets and opening up ‘grey-belt’ brownfield land for development.

The issue of slow building and under-delivery has been looked at by many in government and industry.  The 2018 Letwin Review into housing build-out found that lack of diversity in the housing market and over-reliance on a few large housebuilders was a fundamental driver of slow build-out of permissions.  The recent Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) housebuilding study  found that whilst planning is a major impediment to delivering, for open market sale homes the primary determinant of build-out rates is how many homes developers expect to sell without reducing prices.

The government recently published a working paper suggesting some measures to increase the pace of building.  But with just a handful of major housebuilders delivering around half of the homes in England, the key question is can they pick up the pace of building? 

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A slow-build business model

There is a public perception that developers ‘land-bank’, a practice of gaining a planning permission for a site in order to uplift the value of the land, without having any intentions of building on it. But this can be partly explained by volume builders generally needing around five or so years of permissions which create the “pipeline” for development.  Research from Lichfields has shown that it takes around than five years from first permission to the first homes being ready for occupation on sites with very large numbers of homes.  However, once they start building, even the largest sites rarely complete more than 150 dwellings per annum. 

The investor reports and trading statements of the largest publicly-traded housebuilders all report the key metrics including the number of new home sales per outlet per week, and the average selling price (ASP) for new open market homes.  The prime directive to optimise price is always present.   This can be seen in developer priority statements like “Continue to prioritise value over volume” in theTaylor Wimpy results for FY2023.  This makes sense to continue to achieve the consistently extraordinary levels of profit housebuilder shareholders expect.

Smaller regional and SME housebuilder have a much higher rate of build-out as a percentage of site size.  A scheme of 50 or so dwellings is commonly completed within one or two years, allowing the small builder to move on to delivering the next project. 

There are solutions

Many of the proposed reforms in the current consultation are quite modest and centred around monitoring and reporting.  These will help provide everyone better evidence on progress, but, with many councils struggling to allocate a planning officer to monitoring delivery, it’s not clear how this will have much impact.  The consultation raises the prospect of allowing councils to refuse permissions for specific applicants where they weren’t building out fast enough, though how further restricting permissions will help delivery is unclear.

The consultation also floats the idea of a ‘delayed homes penalty’, which would place a charge on developers in some circumstances where delivery falls behind a pre-agreed schedule.  The idea of charging council tax from the moment a permission is granted is a similar approach which has been discussed for a decade or more. On smaller sites this might be a manageable nudge, but on strategic sites of 1,000 or more homes it could render development unviable and might impact social landlords.

All the research and papers highlight that diversity in housing delivery does increase the rate at which new homes are completed.  Sites delivering higher percentage of affordable housing or build-to-rent, and smaller SME and self-build sites are not constrained by the number of market home buyers, so there is less motivation to build more slowly.  Another working paper from MHCLG, Reforming Site Thresholds, contains some proposals which may support this diversity by reducing planning burdens on smaller and medium-sized sites.

But can build-out be increased?

Where larger numbers of social homes are purchased on site, outside the open market, these come forward quite rapidly.  Improvements in construction, including building all or part of a dwelling off-site, can deliver significant time and cost efficiencies.  But if developers only build open market dwellings at the speed at which they will sell in a specific area, increasing build-out rates will be difficult.

There is no single magic bullet to get 1.5 million homes built in a timely fashion, but the Government has this issue in the spotlight.  Clearly the supply-side measures of funding for social housing and increasing opportunities for SME and smaller builders are fundamental.  Mandatory housing growth focusing the minds of local authorities on getting land allocated and permitted for future years to meet the land supply figure.  But we have a housing crisis now, and as the current consultation says “no-one can live in a planning permission”.

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Housing issues loomed large in Australia’s Labor’s historic election win

Prime Minister Keir Starmer attends CHOGM Summit in Samoa -Day 2 by Number 10 is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Prime Minister Keir Starmer attends CHOGM Summit in Samoa -Day 2 by Number 10 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Perhaps providing some much-needed cheer for the British Left, Australia’s Labor Party romped home in the nation’s recent federal election.

Seeking a second three-year term, Anthony Albanese unexpectedly routed the conservative Coalition, dominant for most of the post-war period. Having been odds-on to lose only six months previously, ‘Albo’ scored the biggest winning party victory – in seats – in modern history.

And, while it probably didn’t decide the election, housing policy was a fiercely debated central issue during the campaign, with Labor’s pitch (and record) generally landing better with the public.

Such was the importance attached to the topic as a hot button issue, that both major parties chose to reveal major housing initiatives as centrepiece announcements at their official campaign launch events.

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Labor’s housing pitch – building on recent initiatives

Before going into these new proposals let’s rewind for a bit of context.

The recent election came at the end of a three-year Parliamentary term after Labor’s win in 2022, ending nine years of Coalition rule.

During that period federal housing policy was largely limited to home ownership initiatives. Previous social and affordable housing programs were terminated, with the federal government arguing that, under a narrow interpretation of Australia’s constitution, housing for lower income groups is the responsibility of the states, rather than the federal government.

Having regained power in 2022, Labor dramatically ramped up federal housing policy action – initiating a social and affordable housing investment program, the ‘Housing Australia Future Fund’; as well as creating a national shared equity home ownership scheme for first home buyers and reforming foreign investor tax settings to encourage build to rent construction.

It also initiated a broader housing affordability push – the ‘National Housing Accord’ – based on the stated belief that this is largely a housing supply problem. Therefore, at least at the level of political rhetoric, the solution is to be found largely through corralling the states into streamlining their planning systems.

Much of the media also buys this argument. It is also, of course, popular with the housebuilding industry as well as with market liberal economists.

Somewhat echoed by UK Labour, the centrepiece of the Accord is the aim, jointly pledged by federal and state governments, to enable construction of 1.2 million homes over five years. Largely thanks to difficult market conditions, however, current industry output is lagging way below what would be needed to achieve that.

Labor’s election 2025 offer

Now back to the election. Federal Labor launched two new policies ahead of polling day, both targeted on first home buyers. The first substantially expanded an existing mortgage guarantee scheme enabling FHBs to secure a housing loan with only a 5% deposit.

No doubt, this will have been electorally resonant, although it was fairly heavily criticised in the media as inflationary. But since it doesn’t involve a ‘tax expenditure’ as such (unlike, say, stamp duty exemption) this might have been a bit excessive.

Albo’s second new housing pledge was a much bigger deal, and more consistent with the overarching ‘supply focus’ mentioned earlier. If re-elected, Labor pledged $10 billion in federal funding to work with the states in directly commissioning 100,000 new homes ring-fenced for first home buyers over 8 years.

By implication, these homes will be sold at ‘cost price’ – likely lower than market price thanks to having no need to factor in developer/builder profits. Over the long term, therefore, the program could be close to cost-neutral from a public accounting perspective. This is reflected in the committed funding, $8 billion of which is for concessional loans rather than grant.

This is big. Although they continued to build public rental housing at some scale until the 1990s, Australian governments have barely operated build to sell programs since the 1960s. Doing so notably challenges neo-liberal presumptions about the proper extent of direct state involvement in supplying a commodity that is (especially in Australia) largely provided through the market.

As a potentially counter-cyclical initiative that expands overall housing production (assuming no crowding out), it could help in slightly moderating prices, market-wide, as well as benefiting the homebuyers directly involved.

The Coalition’s election pitch

Meanwhile, in its election offer, the Coalition pitched its own radical homeownership policy bid: the introduction of mortgage tax relief for first home buyers.

Labor’s initial fear that this could prove to be a game changer in marginal seats soon receded when the policy came under heavy fire from just about every economist in Australia. This criticism mainly highlighted the scheme’s likely inflationary impacts; the prime reason that UK housing experts breathed a sigh of relief when Britain’s MIRAS was finally culled in 2000.

A second Coalition home ownership pledge was to enable first home buyers to dip into their otherwise locked retirement savings accounts to fund mortgage deposits. This was justified on the highly resonant argument that individuals should have freedom to access ‘their own money’.

But again, the initiative was heavily criticised as inflationary – as well as risking a net loss for participants if devalued retirement savings were to outweigh the benefit of accelerated access to home ownership.

In support of its own claim to support increased overall housing supply, the Coalition also promised $5 billion in loans and grants to fund housing-enabling infrastructure. But the emphasis on greenfield sites conflicts with the conventional wisdom that Australia already has too much urban sprawl, so infill development should be encouraged.

What was missing?

Both of the major parties failed to include any new social or affordable housing programs in their 2025 election platforms.

Neither Labor nor Coalition announced any significant new initiative to relieve rental stress at the lower end of the housing market that affects millions of Australians. Measures that might, at least indirectly, help stem the rising tide of homelessness that now sees more than 10,000 newly homeless persons being taken on by support providers every month.

But Labor has a much better excuse for this omission because the Albanese Government’s 2022-25 initiatives were only just getting going at the end of the previous Parliament. While these can be justifiably criticised as very modest in scale by comparison with the level of need, the Coalition made it clear they would be simply scrapped if it won the election. A return to the approach of 2013-22 when the federal government essentially left this field.

Many have also criticised the recent major party offers as ignoring the hugely overdue need for fundamental housing tax reform.

On the Labor side that is the blunt reality. But the Coalition’s big pitch, parachuted into its campaign launch, in fact amounts to a striking proposal for a major property tax re-set.

Unfortunately, though, this would have piled yet another damaging ‘market distortion’ on top of all Australia’s existing property tax breaks. Concessions that have, over decades, contributed to today’s housing affordability problem, as their value is capitalised into higher prices.

What is the UK relevance of any of this?

Perhaps the most UK-relevant ‘housing policy’ aspect of the story relates to the new ‘Build to sell’ scheme which, with the election now decided, we can expect to see beginning to take shape in coming months.

I think this may resemble aspects of the state role in the UK’s post-war New Towns program. Maybe it’s envisaged that such an approach would form an element within the renewed New Towns initiative planned by the Starmer Government.

It may be that Angela Rayner’s department would benefit from finding out more about the way that the Australian Government plans to roll out its own version during the new Parliamentary term.

Where I am, we hope that MHCLG’s promised national housing strategy for England provides some strategic planning inspiration for Australia.

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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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Blog Post

How Labour’s Planning and Infrastructure Bill will get Britain building again

Working people in Britain are paying the cost of our failure to build new homes and infrastructure over the past 50 years. Housing supply has fallen far short of demand, driving up prices, making homes harder to afford, and leaving too many people without any decent options.

Labour has pledged to build 1.5 million homes over this Parliament to address the crisis. But to do so, we need to fix the planning system, streamline decision-making, and ensure that land is available for new homes.

The Planning and Infrastructure Bill, recently introduced by the Labour Government, is a major step towards achieving these goals. By cutting unnecessary hurdles, freeing up land, and ensuring local authorities have the tools to support housebuilding, this Bill will increase the number of homes built and make housebuilding faster, fairer, and more predictable.

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Faster planning decisions

A major barrier to house building in the UK is the slow and unpredictable planning process. This is bad for everyone — it annoys local people as they cannot be sure if or when building will commence; it makes building more costly as housebuilders have to spend more on lawyers and consultants; and it frustrates councils as it delays targets to meet local housing needs. The new Bill introduces several key reforms to make planning decisions quicker and more efficient:

  • Cutting unnecessary delays: The Bill streamlines the process for approving planning applications, ensuring that unnecessary bureaucracy does not hold back development. It will reduce the number of statutory consultees from over 25 to a more manageable size that ensures that council time isn’t wasted.
  • Delegating more decisions to planning officers: A national scheme will determine which planning applications can be approved by officers rather than committees, helping to reduce unnecessary delays and saves committee time for the big decisions.
  • Mandatory training for planning committee members: Poor decision-making and a lack of confidence at the local level can often hold up new homes. Under the Bill, planning committee members will need training and certification before making decisions, ensuring they understand the planning system.
  • Councils can set their own planning fees: This will ensure local planning authorities (LPAs) are properly resourced and can invest in service quality improvements.

These changes will mean that planning applications are determined faster, with greater consistency and fewer bureaucratic delays.

Making development work for communities

The Bill will make it easier for the Government to take action and deal with the housing crisis. Too often landowners and vested interests make it difficult to build the homes we need. The Bill tackles this issue by making more land available at a fairer price:

  • Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) reform: Local authorities will have more power to buy land for development at lower prices by removing ‘hope value’ — the speculative premium that landowners expect based on future planning permissions.
  • Stronger powers for Development Corporations: These public bodies will be given greater flexibility to plan and deliver large-scale housing projects, ensuring that major new communities are built in a coordinated and strategic way.
  • New Spatial Development Strategies (SDS): Combined authorities will be required to create regional housing plans, setting targets and identifying growth areas. This will enable cross-boundary cooperation, ensuring housing needs are met across multiple local areas.

These reforms will prevent land speculation from driving up costs, making new housing developments more viable.

Making housebuilding happen

Major housing developments often get stuck in a cycle of delays and legal challenges, even after receiving approval. The Bill includes measures to streamline large-scale developments:

  • Faster approval for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs): Large housing-led infrastructure projects will no longer be bogged down in endless consultation and legal battles.
  • Regular updates to National Policy Statements (NPSs): These statements guide major infrastructure and housing decisions. The Bill requires updates every five years to ensure policies remain aligned with housing targets and investment needs.
  • Limiting judicial review challenges: The Bill removes paper permission stages for judicial reviews and restricts appeals for cases deemed “totally without merit”, preventing frivolous legal actions from delaying housing projects.

By ensuring that major housing developments proceed quickly and efficiently, the Bill will unlock thousands of new homes that would otherwise be stuck in legal and bureaucratic limbo.

Infrastructure and energy reform to support new homes

A lack of supporting infrastructure can be a major barrier to housebuilding. The Bill tackles this by ensuring transport, energy, and utilities can keep pace with new developments:

  • Better transport planning: Faster approvals for road, rail, and public transport projects will ensure new homes are built with the necessary connectivity.
  • Electricity grid reform: The shift to a “first ready, first connected” system for energy projects will prevent housing developments from being delayed by slow grid connections.
  • EV charging expansion: The Bill removes licensing barriers for installing electric vehicle charging points, ensuring new housing developments are future-proofed for sustainable transport.

By addressing infrastructure bottlenecks, these reforms will remove key barriers that prevent new housing developments from being delivered at scale.

Labour to get Britain building

Labour’s Planning and Infrastructure Bill represents the biggest planning reform in a generation. By speeding up planning approvals, unlocking land for development, and ensuring infrastructure keeps pace with growth, it lays the groundwork for the Government’s ambition to deliver 1.5 million homes over this Parliament.

For too long, a broken planning system has stifled communities, locking out renters and first-time buyers. With this Bill, Labour is removing some key obstacles, creating a fairer system, and getting Britain building again.

If we want to solve the housing crisis, we need bold action. The bill is a great foundation to deliver it.

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Blog Post

Labour’s Planning Bill is the keystone of its housing delivery plans

Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner NPPF visit by No. 10 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

On Monday 24th March, the most ambitious planning reform in a generation will be debated in the House of Commons. Labour’s’ Planning and Infrastructure Bill is the latest in a number of changes to the planning system, and will be central to the Government’s plan to deliver 1.5 million homes over this Parliament.

What does the Planning and Infrastructure Bill do?

The remit of the Bill goes well beyond housing and targets the planning obstacles to delivery in a number of key areas:

  • Simplifying the approval process for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs), including by reducing consultation requirements for these.
  • Establishing a Nature Restoration Fund for developers to pay into to address issues like nutrient neutrality.
  • Compulsory Purchase reform, so that councils can acquire land for social housing at existing use value rather than inflated ‘hope’ value.
  • Reforming planning committees, including the introduction of compulsory training and a delegation scheme to empower non-political council officers to make more decisions.
  • Introducing sub-regionally developed Spatial Development Strategies to encourage councils to work across their borders.

The Bill also has a number of other measures such as the devolution of planning fees, and reforming and strengthening development corporations to make their roll-out easier.

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How will this address the housing crisis?

In essence, the Bill eliminates some important reasons for which homes do not make it through the consenting process, or are stalled after approval.

For instance, introducing a Nature Restoration Fund will help to unlock 160,000 homes blocked by nutrient neutrality rules.

Reforming Compulsory Purchase Orders will also make it easier for local authorities to deliver council homes. Hope value can inflate agricultural land by as much as 275 times its existing value, and can result in councils having to decrease the percentage of social homes on a site.

Measures around spatial development strategies and reforming committees should also help to resolve issues where large sites are made more contentious due to the lack of existing infrastructure. By ensuring that councils are coordinating across boundaries to provide key services, and by ensuring that more decisions are made by council officers, political factors should play less of a role in discretionary planning decisions.  

A keystone to other Labour’s plans:

The Bill cannot be seen in isolation, and instead has to be viewed as part of a package of measures which the Government is using to achieve a much-needed uplift in housing delivery.

It comes alongside an update to the National Planning Policy Framework, which restored and strengthened housing targets, alongside allocating low-quality ‘grey belt’ land for high quality developments with affordable and social housing and the enrichment of green space.

There have also been a number of reforms to boost delivery in urban areas, not least the introduction of brownfield planning passports, so that development on brownfield sites automatically goes ahead if it meets local planning requirements. Also in this category are plans to allow for ‘zoning’ around train stations.

Finally, the Government has added £800 million to the Affordable Homes Programme, and refocused it on the delivery of social housing, so that private housebuilding is supplemented with crucial state provision.

Labour’s ‘everything theory of housing’

It was clear from the outset that the Government had a ‘Housing theory of everything’. Solving the housing crisis will be crucial to a number of Labour’s aims to improve living standards, generate growth, and solve the climate crisis, and Labour clearly understands this.

But the way in which they have gone about this programme also shows that they have an ‘everything theory of housing’, using a range of levers to boost delivery, and clearly identifying which issues need solving through primary legislation, which through policy tweaks, and which through further funding.

Doing this alongside passing a generational boost to the rights of private renters, reforming the feudal leasehold system and introducing commonhold as a default tenure, boosting funding for homelessness prevention and setting up a cross-Government homelessness taskforce, increasing resourcing for the Building Safety Regulator and accelerating the remediation of dangerous cladding, investing £3.4 billion into a new Warm Homes Plan, and identifying 100 sites for urban extensions or new towns, shows a Government in hyperdrive to fix this most pressing of crises.

Planning reforms have so far primarily addressed stalled housing delivery in exurban and rural areas, where delivering new homes is, in theory, easiest. Going forward, the Government also needs to tackle other critical barriers to building new homes, such as the cost of building homes, and the construction sector’s skills shortage, not to mention issues around densification and regeneration or urban sites. Looking ahead to the Comprehensive Spending Review, finding ways to support councils building as has been laid out in Red Brick’s 10-year plan for housing series will be welcome to boost much-needed council homes.

But, for the present, the Second Reading debate of the Bill on 24th March should provide an opportunity to celebrate legislation which will meaningfully contribute to ending the housing crisis, and to make the case for how important it will be going forwards for this to remain at the top of the Government’s agenda.

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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.