Labour’s plans for building more social housing

With the Labour party firmly in the seat of government, the Social Housing Team has been assessing their manifesto to see what’s in store for the sector. 

In the lead up to the General Election we explored the manifestos and discussed some of the potential policies that we might see with a change in government.   

However, now that Sir Kier Starmer is the new Prime Minister, here’s what we can expect in the coming months and years of his administration. 

Building more homes 

Fundamentally, the Labour manifesto promised that their government would build many more social housing homes, with a focus on sustainability and affordability. 

They said: 

“[We] will deliver the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation. We will strengthen planning obligations to ensure new developments provide more affordable homes; make changes to the Affordable Homes Programme to ensure that it delivers more homes from existing funding; and support councils and housing associations to build their capacity and make a greater contribution to affordable housing supply.” 

Labour also claimed it would construct new social rented homes and safeguard the existing stock in the UK.  

Of course, this would involve re-evaluating the enhanced ‘Right to Buy’ discounts introduced in 2012 and strengthening protections for newly built social housing. 

They added to this, by saying:  

“We will take steps to ensure we are building more high-quality, well-designed, and sustainable homes and creating places that increase climate resilience and promote nature recovery.” 

This is, arguably, their most important policy on the matter – they’ve been fairly quiet on most other aspects of social housing. 

Outside of their manifesto, they promise a huge 1.5 million new homes before the end of their time in Parliament.  

Criticisms, budgets and timelines 

The Guardian reports that, in many ways, the Labour party has been overly optimistic in their goals. 

They say “Labour will miss its target of delivering 1.5 million new homes this Parliament without an emergency cash injection into the affordable housing sector” according to providers. 

To build over 1.5 million homes in the next five years is going to require considerable organisation and planning before you even consider the labour and resources involved.  

The Birketts view 

The party promises could all have significant consequences on everything from the value of your portfolio to your personal compliance requirements, whilst the new home target presents an array of opportunities within the sector.  

As further updates are published over the coming months, we will keep you informed of the areas that may require closer attention and those that could present new opportunities. 

When more social housing is built and portfolios grows as a result, we generally see our clients’ workloads increase in three key areas: 

• Client management  

• Inspections  

• Reporting and documentation 

The first one is fairly self-explanatory – with more properties comes more clients and with more clients comes more management responsibilities. 

It might become harder for your team to oversee numerous client issues – especially in the rare case that you have multiple complaints come in at the same time – so you should prepare to meet this challenge accordingly.  

Equally, with more social housing we’re likely to see a growing number of inspectors employed to keep the stock in check. 

Again, if your team are having to deal with multiple inspections in a short amount of time – or even multiple inspections over the course of a year – they could quickly become overburdened.  

Finally, no one likes doing paperwork and with growing stock comes increased record-keeping obligations.  

This is often not a problem when you only manage one or two homes, but if you’re overseeing a large portfolio, you could find yourself buried under a mountain of forms and reports to fill out.