Bringing private homes into social ownership can rewire the housing system

Our homes should be the foundations for our lives. However, all too prevalent are forms of renting that are high cost, insecure and poor quality, and which therefore hinder our economic security, health and well-being.

It is in this context that socialisation, where councils and housing associations buy already existing homes and convert them to social housing, has become a growing part of the housing debate in recent years.

For proponents of this practice, acquisition offers a chance to rapidly expand social housing supply in the face of unmet housing needs, growing spending on housing benefits, and in economic conditions that make solving these problems by increasing social housing supply more challenging.

However, critics have argued that acquisition programmes risk diverting investment from the building of new homes and, in doing so, worsen access to housing for some private renters.

These are valid concerns. Just 15% of new social housing lettings go to those moving from the private rented sector, with the majority of new social lets allocated to those moving from within social housing, from homelessness, or from living with their friends or family. This means that there is a material risk that acquisition programmes diminish the private rented supply for those reliant on it, without offering a reasonable chance for these households to access this new supply of social housing.

Despite this, we should not dismiss the potential of acquisition and instead must move beyond seeing acquisition as just an alternative to building new homes, but instead as a strategic tool, enabling us to address specific housing issues and actively shape a more equitable and functional housing market. Thereby moving from a system where much housing subsidy has a passive role, to one where it has an active role.

This report offers 3 distinct scenarios in which acquisition can play a role in shaping the housing market and growing new, more equitable housing delivery models.

Reducing cost and raising standards of temporary accommodation

Demand for temporary accommodation (TA) has grown significantly in the last decade, placing significant pressure on local authorities. The number of households in TA almost doubled between Q2 2013 and Q3 2023 (55,840 to 105,840), with significant consequences for homeless households who face spending too long in insecure, poor quality and often inappropriate temporary homes.

Rising costs have been driven by demand, but this has been exacerbated by how the TA sector has changed, particularly the growth of high-cost, low-quality private provision. The use of nightly TA, for example, where private landlords, often working via intermediary companies, rent homes to local councils by the night (at a price premium), has grown significantly in the last decade (rising from a 14% share of TA provision to a 23% share between Q2 2013 and Q2 2023).

This is a dysfunctional situation. Not only are these nightly providers capitalising on the homelessness crisis, nightly TA rates are 5 times more expensive than local authority-owned provision, but they are prolonging the crisis by diverting homes to the social sector that would otherwise be providing long-term housing in the private rented sector.

Acquisition can address this by allocating funds to buy homes to let as TA. This would out-compete these providers, driving down costs for local authorities, and push homes back into the ‘traditional’ housing market as nightly providers either re-let or sell them. It can also act as an anchor to drive up standards in the sector more widely.

This could be achieved by:

• central and local governments working together to establish local housing companies in TA ‘hotspots’, which can purchase, retrofit and then let out homes for use as TA at more affordable rents, this would build on the model of Capital Letters, a local authority-owned social lettings agent that works with private landlords to provide homes for those in housing need
• central government endowing these companies with capital investment to enable homes to be let affordably, with this representing an equity stake in the fund (with the local authorities owning the remaining share), this equity stake could be ‘cashed out’ at a future point, ideally as demand for TA reduces, repaying this initial investment
• the local authority housing companies raising finance either by striking deals with institutional investors such as pension funds, who could provide lower-cost lending in return for long-term, stable returns, or by borrowing through the Public Works Loan Board (PWLB).

This approach would create significant savings for central and local governments. An equity stake of £750 million (the current size of the Local Authority Housing Fund, which is supporting councils to buy homes for those on resettlement schemes) could reduce demand for expensive nightly providers by 33–50%, and achieve annual savings to the benefit system of between £26.4 million and £52.8 million.

Growing a community rented sector in lower-cost housing markets

The private rented sector in lower-cost housing markets such as those in coastal and ex-industrial towns in the North and Midlands has grown considerably in the last few decades. This growth has been underpinned by an extractive model of buy-to-let landlordism, where absentee investors from outside the local area have been attracted to buy investment homes, enticed by lower entry costs and higher yields, and problems of poor quality and poor management are rife.

This is despite these markets being underpinned by significant amounts of public subsidy through the housing benefit system. JRF analysis finds that £3 in every £10 of private rent paid in Blackpool and Hartlepool is paid for with Housing Benefit, as is over £1 in every £4 paid in places including Hull, Great Yarmouth, Hastings, Oldham, Wolverhampton, Bradford and Sunderland.

Community organisations are already showing that there is an alternative to this extractive, poor-quality model. Groups such as East Marsh United and Giroscope are buying homes, retrofitting them and letting them out to local households, using the rent received to maintain these homes and reinvest in the local community.

Acquisition is a route to further supporting these organisations and growing this more regenerative form of landlordism, particularly as the relatively low cost of housing in these areas means that bringing homes into community ownership can often be achieved without subsidy.

This would be achieved by:

• central government providing a new fund that would provide revenue support for existing community groups where they exist – this would enable them to scale up or to support local authorities or other local anchor institutions in establishing new community-led rental organisations where they are needed, but do not currently exist; this funding would also include support for professional fees, staffing and project development of schemes to support organisations in delivering new homes
• addressing the high borrowing costs for community institutions through central government working with social lenders to provide a lower-cost form of borrowing, enabling the acquisition of homes in many lower-cost housing markets without the need for additional grants
• leveraging existing government schemes like Help-to-Heat and the Energy Company Obligation to target capital grants to support community-led housing groups in retrofitting homes for energy efficiency, this would be achieved through partnerships with local authorities and energy companies that could release funding into community-led housing companies.

Reforming the Right to Buy scheme

We have lost and continue to lose a significant number of social homes to the Right to Buy, as homes are bought by sitting tenants and issues in the policy design mean that local councils struggle to replace these homes. JRF analysis in this report shows that there were 23,000 fewer social rented homes in 2021–22 than there were in 2012–13.

Acquisition has often been framed as a way of rebuilding this social stock. While this has strong rhetorical value, we argue that this may not be the best means of addressing this problem. Not least because without reforming the Right to Buy system, central and local governments risk playing catch-up with a diminishing social stock.

The issues with Right to Buy are twofold. First, the rules around discount levels and how receipts are used have meant councils have struggled to recycle receipts into new construction. Second, the system sees the subsidy, the discount offered to the sitting tenant to support them in buying their home, leak out from the system when the home is eventually sold, when it could be captured to support greater low-cost home-ownership and renting. JRF analysis finds that around £35 billion in subsidies has been lost since 1998–99, which could have otherwise been used to provide social homes.

We therefore propose that Right to Buy should be reformed by:

• making permanent reforms that allow councils to keep 100% of Right to Buy receipts, giving them greater resources with which to build new social homes
• capping the Right to Buy discount at 30%, therefore making it more viable for councils to use receipts to rebuild the home or, failing this, to allow councils the ability to set discounted rates to reflect local market conditions
• placing a covenant on Right to Buy homes to prevent their use as private rented accommodation in the future
• making the Right to Buy discount a subsidy in perpetuity. 

In practice, making the Right to Buy discount a subsidy in perpetuity would mean that when an ex-Right to Buy home is sold, a council could:

• buy the property back from the resident, using the discount to enable it to be rented back out as a social home
• require a home to be sold as a ‘first home’, with the 30% discount applied to someone eligible for an affordable home-ownership product
• allow the home to be sold on the open market, requiring that the 30% discount is paid back from the sale receipts in perpetuity.

Were this policy in effect since 1998–99, we estimate that 465,000 homes sold under the Right to Buy scheme could have been brought back in-house by local councils for use as social homes for rent or to own.¹ This would mean the social rented sector would be 10% bigger than it is today.

These 3 scenarios are not the only ways in which acquisition may play a role in the housing system. Rather, they are 3 illustrations of where acquisition can act to rewire dysfunctional aspects of the housing market and grow new models of housing provision.

Nonetheless, they show the power that focusing public spending could have in challenging expensive, poor-quality models of housing provision, building towards a housing system where everyone has access to a decent, secure, affordable home.

The socialisation of homes, where councils or housing associations buy already existing homes to provide social housing – has become a larger part of the housing debate in recent years.

Mayors in London and Manchester, several councils, and the Westminster and Scottish Governments have invested, or plan to invest, in funds to acquire homes from the open market (Mayor of London, 2023a; Burnham, 2023; Scottish Government, 2023).

Recent policy reports, including those from the New Economics Foundation (Diner, 2023), the Smith Institute (Affordable Housing Commission, 2020) and the Fabian Society (Commission on Poverty and Regional Inequality, 2023), have made the case for more comprehensive support for schemes to acquire homes from the secondary market to provide social housing.

This greater focus on our existing housing stock, and who it is owed by, is welcome. As set out in JRF's recent report Making a house a home, the shifting balance of tenure has played a key role in myriad housing problems, from unaffordability and poor conditions to insecurity, and a plan for building a more equitable housing market must reckon with who owns our housing stock (Baxter et al, 2022).

This should take the form of efforts to shift tenure over time, and doing that directly through socialisation could play an important role. However, there are criticisms of this approach, and there needs to be a consideration of how acquisition may be best used within the housing system.

This briefing explores these criticisms, how they may be best overcome, and proposes the best way of deploying socialisation, arguing for a focus on:

• reducing the cost of providing temporary accommodation (TA), while supporting efforts to drive up standards in the sector
• growing a community rented sector in lower-cost housing markets that are otherwise plagued by poor conditions, poor management, and where rental payments are not benefiting local communities
• a wider plan to reform the Right to Buy scheme to arrest the decline of social housing and to keep subsidies in the system.

The growing interest in acquisition has been driven in large part by the growing housing crisis, itself underpinned by the dysfunctional ways in which we support households with their housing costs.

Social security support is not working

Acquisition has often been seen as a tool that could rapidly address the consequences of high housing costs that have led to significant financial pressure for renters and driven homelessness.

Across the UK, the financial pressure on renters has escalated. In the last year, private rents have increased by 9.7%, on top of an 11.9% increase the previous year (Donnell, 2023). Exposure to these high costs means that low-income private renters have struggled disproportionately throughout the cost-of-living crisis.

Research conducted by JRF in October 2023 found that the significant majority of low-income private renters (83%) were going without essentials (skipping a meal, going without a shower or a bath to conserve energy, or lacking clothing appropriate for the weather), up from 79% in May 2023 (Stirling et al, 2023).

These financial pressures have also contributed to a growing homelessness crisis. Between the second quarters of 2022 and 2023, the number of households owed a main housing duty by their council grew by 19%. Over the same period, the number of households with dependent children living in temporary bed and breakfast accommodation, generally regarded to be the worst form of homeless accommodation, grew by 93.1% (Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, 2023e).

This situation has been created as access to social housing – which offers more affordable rents for low-income renters – remains constrained, as supply is mismatched with demand (Earwaker and Baxter, 2020). This is the result of inadequate building and a net loss of homes sold to sitting tenants through the Right to Buy scheme.²

These problems are further exacerbated by limited social security coverage. Local housing allowance, which should support low-income private renters to pay their rent, has been frozen in cash terms in 6 of the last 10 years (Waters and Wernham, 2023), meaning that support has typically lagged behind the cost of renting. This has been a significant driver of the affordability challenge facing private renters (Stirling et al, 2023).

In this context, the acquisition of homes from the private market to be let at social rents has been framed as a means of rapidly, and relatively more cheaply, expanding the supply of social housing to stabilise and grow the social housing stock.

Public money is paying for poor-quality homes

Shifting homes from private to social ownership has also been seen as a way of confronting the problems of quality and management that are rife in the private rented sector. This is despite significant public expenditure flowing into the private rented sector through Housing Benefit.

Housing Benefit, despite its historic insufficiency, comes with a significant price tag. At present, it costs approximately £10 billion every year (Department for Work and Pensions, 2024). This means that each year, the Government currently spends around 4  times more on housing benefits for private tenants than on subsidies to build new homes through the Affordable Homes Programme.

This figure will grow further still following the welcome move in the Autumn Statement to uprate Local Housing Allowance (LHA) to reflect current rents, with the Treasury forecasting spending on housing benefits to increase by to £1.7 billion more a year from 2028–29 (assuming it is refrozen in cash terms)(HM Treasury, 2023).

Housing Benefit plays an important role in the housing system, enabling lower-income renters to access housing. However, the increased reliance on the private market raises questions about value for money.

First, unlike with subsidies for social house-building, the state is not securing an asset on which they can charge rent, or which they can utilise or borrow against to invest in new or existing stock. Second, the quality of privately rented homes being lower than other tenures means that a significant amount of public spending is directed at homes that fail to meet basic, decent standards.

A fifth of homes (21%) in the private rented sector fail to meet the Decent Homes Standard, a government minimum standard for housing that means the home meets a statutory minimum safety standard, is in a reasonable state of repair, has reasonably modern facilities and services, and provides a reasonable degree of thermal comfort.

This compares to just 10% of the social rented homes and 14% of the owner-occupied housing stock. One in 10 (12%) privately rented homes contain Category 1 hazards, making them statutorily unfit housing (Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, 2023a). Despite this, landlords in England who rent out homes that fall below the Decent Homes Standard receive around £1.6 billion in Housing Benefit per year according to an analysis by the Mayor of London’s office (Mayor of London, 2023b). This equates to around £1 in every £5 of Housing Benefit being spent on a non-decent home.

This has led to calls for a more interventionist approach to driving up standards, both of individual properties (Diner, 2023) and of wider neighbourhoods (Create Streets Foundation, 2023), through buying up and retrofitting homes, particularly in lower-cost areas such as seaside communities and towns in the North of England and the Midlands, where these issues are most profound (Create Streets Foundation, 2023; Diner, 2023).

Current market conditions have focused attention on acquisition

Current market conditions have also spurred a renewed focus on acquisition. This is driven by 2 interrelated factors. 

First, current market conditions, largely shaped by the recent rise in inflation and interest rates, are placing downward pressure on house-building, including the supply of social and affordable homes. Social and private housing supplies are increasingly linked as social housing providers rely on the sale of private homes to fund social house-building, and on developer contributions, through Section 106, to acquire a significant proportion of the new homes they deliver. Higher interest rates have led to the rate of new private supply falling as higher borrowing costs have constrained buyers’ budgets, reducing demand, and because housebuilders are averse to selling into a falling market where they would have to accept lower prices (Lloyd et al, 2023).

At the same time, housing providers are struggling to directly deliver new homes, and play the counter-cyclical role that social housing has historically played, as higher inflation has increased housing providers’ costs (salary costs, maintenance and construction costs, and so on), while a below-inflation rent cap has reduced their income (Lloyd et al, 2023). This, in combination with an increased need to invest in their existing stock, to improve its quality and energy efficiency in response to government targets, has led providers to cut back on building programmes (Lloyd et al, 2023). This means that, for at least the next few years, solving housing market issues through additional supply will become more challenging. 

Second, financial pressure from higher borrowing costs is impacting the private rented sector. Higher interest rates, and therefore borrowing costs, have eaten into the profitability of the buy-to-let model, and may lead to increased supply into the market. Modelling by the estate agency Hamptons suggests that interest rates will have made between 14% and 24%of the current mortgaged buy-to-let landlord market unviable (Hamptons, 2023). This has led to some panicked predictions of an exodus of landlords from the market (Phillips, 2023). 

Data on the size of the buy-to-let sector from UK Finance does show that the private rented sector has been shrinking. Since a peak in the latter half of 2022, the number of outstanding buy-to-let mortgages has fallen by around 70,000, or around 3% of the market at its peak (UK Finance, 2023).

A growing interest in acquisition, and the various ways in which its proponents have argued for it to be deployed, should prompt us to step back and consider how best it is used in the housing market. This is important as large-scale, private-to-social programmes of acquisition have garnered criticism.

Growing criticism of calls for increased spending to buy existing homes

There are 2 primary concerns regarding the use of acquisition to increase the availability of social housing. The first objection is that directing funds towards existing housing stock may divert investment from increasing the supply of new social housing.

This is a valid concern. Rates of both private and social house-building have fallen short of the demand for homes for decades (Earwaker and Baxter, 2020), worsening the problems that a programme of acquisition would seek to address. In a world where it is widely regarded that capital budgets for social house-building are inadequate (Earwaker and Baxter, 2020), there is a clear opportunity cost in expanding budgets that target existing stock.

The second objection is that converting private homes into social housing can pit groups of renters against each other. As social housing has become scarcer, those who are allocated it tend to either be those already in social housing and subject to overcrowding, or those who are in the most extreme housing need and moving into social housing from homelessness.

This is demonstrated in Figure 2, which shows that just 17% of new social renting households come from the private rented sector. Just under half (46%) move from within the social rented sector (32%) or from temporary accommodation (14%), and a fifth are new households formerly living with family or friends (21%).

In the context of growing homelessness, acquisition has been seen as a means of quickly growing the supply of social housing, either as permanent housing or as more affordable, higher-quality temporary provision, for those currently experiencing homelessness.

The Scottish Government has recently announced a £60 million National Acquisition Programme that will support local authorities in acquiring private-sector housing to meet the growing need for temporary accommodation (TA)(Scottish Government, 2023).

Meanwhile in England, the Government has allocated £750 million to the Local Authority Housing Fund (LAHF). The LAHF will acquire homes to provide permanent accommodation for those on the Ukrainian and Afghan resettlement schemes who are currently housed in TA, with any remaining funds used to ease wider homelessness pressures (Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, 2023c).

This is easily understandable when looking at the social and financial pressures created by a growing demand for TA. This has been driven both by the growing demand for TA in general, and because of the growth of expensive private providers of TA, attracted by the returns they can make from providing emergency accommodation.

Acquisition can reduce the cost of providing TA for councils by replacing this expensive private provision with more cost-effective, publicly-owned accommodation, while at the same time being part of a plan to drive up quality by using acquisition as a backstop to more exacting standards. Achieving this most effectively means thinking about the best models to procure, own and manage these homes.

Acquisition can help rewire a dysfunctional TA system

Too many households are living, and spending too long, in TA. The number of households in TA in England has grown significantly in the last 10 years, almost doubling from 55,840 in Q2 2013 to 105,840 in Q2 2023 (Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, 2023e). The number of children in TA has grown by 75% over the same period.

This is exacerbated as TA also too often provides low-quality, inadequate housing. Three-quarters of those living in TA (75%) have experienced poor conditions, while two-thirds (68%) lack basic facilities for cooking and laundry (Garvie et al, 2023).

Despite being poor quality and inadequate, the cost of providing this accommodation is significant. Council TA spending has doubled from £790 million in 2012/13 to £1.59 billion by 2021/22, and JRF analysis finds that in over 1 in 10 local authorities, over £1 in every £20 spent by the council is spent on TA. In some cases, this is pushing councils to a financial breaking point (Butler and Goodier, 2023).

Several organisations have made the case for acquisition to be used as a tool for raising the standard of housing in lower-cost housing market areas.

This was the case for a recent report from the New Economics Foundation, which called for an explicit focus on socialisation to be used in bringing housing stock up to the Decent Homes Standard and to higher energy efficiency levels, acknowledging the poor conditions that are rife in the private rented sector (Diner, 2023). The No Place Left Behind commission, led by the Create Streets Foundation, made similar recommendations, including a National Housing Conversion Fund to bring homes into non-profit ownership in lower-cost housing markets, as part of a wider set of proposals for driving up neighbourhood conditions (Create Streets Foundation, 2023).

These proposals are correct, but we ought to think ambitiously about how acquisition can be part of a wider strategy for shifting the nature of the rental market in lower-cost markets, by growing a community rental market. 

Rental markets in lower-cost housing markets are poor quality and extractive

In lower-cost areas such as seaside communities and towns in the North and Midlands, the private rented sector has grown considerably in recent years. Private rental markets in these areas are generally smaller relative to other tenures than those in larger cities, such as London, Manchester and Birmingham, but a large share of private renters in these areas tend to be on low incomes (Elliott and Earwaker, 2021). This has been driven by similar factors to elsewhere in the country, principally the diminishing size of the social housing sector, alongside lower incomes from weak labour markets (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2023).

Accordingly, a significant share of housing costs in these markets is funded through Local Housing Allowance (LHA). As in Figure 5, we estimate that £3 in every £10 of private rents paid in Blackpool and Hartlepool is paid by the Government, as is over £1 in every £4 paid in places including Hull, Great Yarmouth, Hastings, Oldham, Wolverhampton, Bradford and Sunderland.

Acquisition has often been framed as a means of bringing homes previously lost through the Right to Buy scheme back into public ownership. This includes the framing of the Mayor of London’s acquisition programme as a ‘Right to Buy-back’ scheme (Mayor of London, 2023a) and efforts by councils, such as Islington, to reacquire a significant amount of former Right to Buy homes (Delahunty, 2023).

This is understandable given the decline of much-needed social homes, but efforts should look deeper at the flaws in the current model, and how it can be reformed so that subsidy stays in the system in the first place.

Right to Buy significantly impacts availability of social housing

The Right to Buy has had a significant impact on the supply of social housing, particularly the supply of homes for social rent. As Figure 7 shows, in the 10 years between 2012–13 and 2021–22, sales under the Right to Buy were greater than additions of social rent homes in all but 1 year (2012–13). This means that after this period, there were around 23,000 fewer social rent homes than at the outset.

Solving the housing crisis will require action on many fronts. Acquisition can, in targeted ways, play an important role alongside regulation, increasing support for housing costs, and expanding the supply of all types of home. 

As described in this paper, this means focusing on where acquisition can act to rewire dysfunctional aspects of the housing market and grow new models of housing provision.

We have argued this means focusing on using acquisition:

• to reduce the cost of providing TA by replacing expensive nightly landlords who have emerged in response to the higher returns they can get by providing TA
• to challenge an extractive model of landlordism in lower-cost rental markets in which poor conditions and poor management are rife, and where rental payments are not benefiting local communities, by growing a community rental sector
• as part of a wider plan to reform the Right to Buy, to arrest the decline of social housing and to keep subsidies in the system.

While not a comprehensive list of all the options for acquisition, we believe that support as described in this paper would make a significant impact in enhancing the effectiveness of how we subsidise homes for low to middle-income households.

1. JRF analysis of Table 692: Financial data on Right to Buy sales, England.
2. JRF analysis of Table 691: Annual Right to Buy sales by the local authority; and Table 1000: additional affordable homes provided by type of scheme, England.
3. JRF analysis of LHA rates and Local authority revenue expenditure and financing England: 2022 to 2023 individual local authority data – outturn.
4. JRF analysis of Statutory Homelessness Live Tables: Detailed local authority level tables. 
5. JRF analysis of LHA rates and Local authority revenue expenditure and financing England: 2022 to 2023 individual local authority data – outturn.
6. JRF analysis of Table 692: Financial data on Right to Buy sales, England.
7. JRF analysis of Table 692: Financial data on Right to Buy sales, England.

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Darren Baxter is Principal Policy Adviser at the JRF and leads the foundation’s programme of work on housing and land. Prior to joining JRF, Darren worked on housing, UK poverty and environmental policy at a leading progressive think-tank, and in academic research. He also holds a PhD in Social Policy from the University of York.

Joseph Elliott is Analysis Manager at JRF. His role involves providing analysis and evidence, and his current research focus is on housing security and affordability, and on labour market participation. Joseph previously worked in social housing regulation, within policy and analysis at the Northern Ireland Housing Executive, and also in Universal Credit analysis at the Department for Work and Pensions. He has completed a Masters in Political Psychology and has a Chartered Institute for Housing Accreditation.

The authors would like to thank their colleagues Graeme Cooke, Alfie Stirling, Rachelle Earwaker, Peter Matejic, Isabel Taylor, Andrew Wenham and Dan Tomlinson for their comments, feedback and expertise, which were invaluable in producing this report. Thanks also to Jonathan Gibson, Andrew Stennett and Briony Parrott of the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust for their help and advice.

We are extremely grateful to the individuals and organisations who gave their time and provided valuable comments as we developed the analytical elements of this work. This includes colleagues at the CIH, GLA, London Councils, Lewisham, Leeds Council, NEF, the Smith Institute, SOHA, Impact Works, Shelter and the Fabian Society.

The views expressed in this report are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect those of anyone who offered comments or advice.