Provision of Council Housing 2025-09-15

Opened the debate

Council housing is the first, most important and only viable solution to the housing crisis. The provision of council housing is essential to meeting the needs of low-income earners who cannot find affordable homes in the private sector. Since 2015, England has seen a significant increase in net additional dwellings but the number of households on local authority waiting lists has risen by over 74,000. The scale of our failure to provide homes for all citizens is staggering and reveals the folly of relying solely on the private sector. Council housing should offer rents linked to local incomes and hundreds of thousands of them are needed. This approach was championed by Aneurin Bevan who believed that speculative builders build what makes them most money, while councils need to assess community needs and directly deliver for them. A mass council house building programme could help drive down private sector rents. Restructuring the housing revenue account debt is necessary so that local authorities can borrow more to build new council housing.

Government Response

I congratulate the hon. Member for North East Hertfordshire on securing this debate, noting the importance of council housing provision to the Government. We are asserting the necessity and value of social and council housing as a crucial national asset after decades of marginalisation due to insufficient numbers of social and council homes being built in England. The Government have begun turning around the situation by kick-starting a decade of social and affordable housing renewal, setting out ways to lay groundwork for reinvigorating council house building. We stood for election with a manifesto commitment to deliver the biggest increase in social and affordable house building in a generation, addressing urgent need for homes for those unable to cater for themselves on the market while supporting wider housing delivery. Boosting supply of social and affordable homes is at heart of efforts to ramp up housing supply generally and meet needs across the country. While direct delivery by councils has been key to high rates of house building in past, getting councils building again remains essential part of strategy. We have announced £39 billion for a successor to the affordable homes programme over 10 years from 2026-27 to 2035-36, with at least 60% of these homes being for social rent. We believe this could deliver around 300,000 social and affordable homes over its lifetime, including around 180,000 for social rent. The programme will support regeneration schemes that provide a net increase in homes and permit acquisitions. To improve financial capacity and long-term planning, we have announced a 10-year social housing rent policy and are consulting on how to implement a social rent convergence mechanism. We also introduced transformative changes to the right to buy scheme, returning maximum cash discounts to between £16,000 and £38,000, enabling councils to keep 100% of their receipts for reinvestment in new and existing homes. Since 2023, a preferential borrowing rate from the Public Works Loan Board has been available for council house building, enabling councils to borrow £6 billion so far. We will confirm our approach to this discounted rate at the autumn Budget. We have launched a council house building skills and capacity programme backed by £12 million of funding this year, aimed at upskilling existing workforces, recruiting new graduates, and driving engagement with social and affordable homes programmes. This Government remains committed to delivering the biggest increase in social and affordable housing in a generation. We are prioritising the delivery of social rented homes and taking steps to enable councils to once again build at scale.