2026年第三季度住房展望

Q3 2026 Hannah Aldridge Britain’s new Prime Minister has put “council housing” at the heart of his programme forgovernment.1The case for building more affordable homes is strong: near-record numbersof families in England are living in temporary accommodation today, and 1.3 millionhouseholds are on local authority housing waiting lists. But whether Andy Burnham meansbuilding more homes for social rent, councils building more themselves or both, there is aprice tag attached. As social rent homes need more upfront subsidy than other ‘affordable’ tenures, buildingmore social rent units means spending more or delivering less. We estimate if all of theGovernment’s £39 billion grant programme was ring-fenced for social rent, just under25,000 affordable homes annually could be delivered compared to the current target of30,000. But other levers could be pulled to offset that loss. At least while demand is weak,private developer contributions via Section 106 could be tilted towards ‘affordable rent’(which requires less subsidy), adding around 2,000 additional homes a year. Likewise, thenew National Housing Bank’s £2.5 billion low-interest loan facility for housing associationscould deliver another 4,700 affordable homes a year. Carefully pulled, these three levers would allow the new Prime Minister to boost thenumber of social rent homes built and increase the total number of affordable homes overthe rest of the Parliament. But this is still a far cry from the “biggest council house buildingprogramme since the post-war period” that Burnham has promised. That would requiresignificantly more money, especially if local authorities that currently build just 2,000homes a year are to be at the helm. And with the best will in the world, new homes still take years to build. But those at thesharp end of our housing crisis cannot afford to wait for the diggers, so as the gap betweenhousing support in Universal Credit and actual housing costs heads towards a record level,the Government must re-peg housing support for lower-income private renters to actualrents come the Budget. Putting ‘council housing’ centre-stage is a welcome, albeit ambiguous,promise The new Prime Minister has pledged to put building “council homes” at the centre of hisprogramme for transformation.2His commitment to boosting the number of affordablehomes is welcome in the face of growing housing need: in England, for example, privaterenters spend, on average, more than a third of their income on housing costs; a near-record high 134,000 households are living in temporary accommodation; and 1.3 million householdsare on local authority housing waiting lists, the highest number since 2014.3 But how could this laudable ambition be achieved? To begin, this depends on exactly whatBurnham means when he says he wants the country to build “more council homes”. Thephrase is ambiguous: it could refer to all types of ‘affordable housing’, which include homesfor ‘affordable rent’ (priced at around 80 per cent of the market rate) or shared ownership(whereby households buy a share of their home and pay a sub-market rent on the part theydo not own).4But colloquially, ‘council housing’ is most often used to refer to homes let at asocial rent (equivalent to around 50 per cent of the market rate), regardless of whether theyare owned and operated by local councils or housing associations.5 A pledge to build more homes of this most affordable tenure would be welcome indeed. AsFigure 1 shows, the number of affordable homes built for social rent has fallen considerablyover time. In the 1990s, an average of 42,000 social rent homes were built each year (79 percent of the total). But during the 2010s, the tenure rapidly fell away: in the past ten years,78,000 social rent homes were built overall, a number that would have been achieved in lessthan two years in the 1990s, and equivalent to 14 per cent of the total affordable housingbuilt. This drop in social rent happened when the central government funding available tobuild affordable housing was cut: shifting from social rent to affordable rent meant that lessmoney was needed upfront to make each home viable, and so the total number of affordablehomes being delivered did not fall as much as did the funding. Directing more grant to social rent means building fewer homes or spendingbillions more So, what options are open to a government with its sights set on building more socialrent homes? The most direct way that central government supports the development ofaffordable homes is through grant funding programmes, the current version of which is theSocial and Affordable Homes Programme (SAHP) 2026-2036. With a funding envelope of£39 billion, the SAHP is the largest grant programme since 2011 and aims to deliver 300,000affordable homes over its lifespan. It expects at least 180,000 (60 per cent) of these newhomes to be social rent, a big shift given the SAHP’s predecessor programme which had nosocial rent target. In fact, ju