The majority of local authorities have failed to build a single council home in the past five years, according to shocking analysis that lays bare the scale of the social housing paralysis.
There are now more than 1.2 million families on the waiting list for properties, but figures show that in 2021/22 only a third of England’s local authorities completed any new build homes.
Further investigation by The Independent also revealed that, during the annual year of 2022, more than half of councils did not build a single house.
Our findings come as Rishi Sunak claims the government is on target to fulfil its manifesto quota of building one million new homes for buyers over this parliament, and just weeks after it emerged that Michael Gove’s department handed back £1.9bn to the Treasury - originally meant to tackle England’s housing crisis - after reportedly struggling to find projects to spend it on.
Officials said the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) was unable to spend the money due to rising interest rates and uncertainty in the housing market. The money included £255m meant to fund new affordable housing and £245m meant to improve building safety.
The waiting list for council homes has risen by over 88,000 households in five years, with many of those waiting forced into unsuitable private accommodation in the meantime.
There are fears rising rents, which hit a new record high this week, will mean that many are totally priced out of the housing market, with research showing that people receiving housing benefit can now only afford four per cent of private rental homes.
The property website Rightmove has said the average rent being asked outside of London for a private rental has risen to £1,231 per month, while the asking rent for new tenants in London is at a record £2,567 – up a third in three years.
One housing action campaigner told The Independent that houses large enough for a family of five only came up once a year, and many families were forced into one-bedroom homes in the meantime.
Councils say that they struggle to build more homes for social rent because of a lack of funding from central government and restrictive measures in the way they can finance new builds.
Shadow housing secretary Lisa Nandy said that housebuilding “is falling off a cliff because the Conservatives crashed the economy and Rishi Sunak rolled over to his own MPs on housing targets”.
She added: “There is no solution to the housing crisis that does not involve a substantial programme of social and affordable house building.”
The comments come as the government promises new plans to “unblock” the planning system to encourage developments in urban areas, as well as help homeowners build extensions, convert shops and turn old farm buildings into homes by removing planning law red tape.
However the Local Government Association said the plans risk creating poor quality developments and a lack of affordable housing.
‘There’s mould on the walls, it’s black and totally wet’
Yuli Rodriguez has been on the waiting list for a council home in London for over three years. She told The Independent that her two oldest children Emily, 12, and Adrian, 10, have to sleep in the living room of her two-bed private rental flat because of the water that leaks from the roof in the second bedroom. Her youngest child, Thiago, aged two, has developed breathing problems that Ms Rodriguez believes are caused by the mould on the walls.
She recalled: “I was sleeping with my baby recently and the water was coming from the light in the ceiling. All my bed was totally wet and I called my landlord and he didn’t pick up. I sent so many emails but he doesn’t want to repair anything. There is mould on the walls. It is black and the wall is totally wet.”
Baby Thiago was diagnosed with a respiratory tract infection and given antibiotics to manage his wheezing in the summer of last year. Pictures show the ceiling of the small bedroom covered in water droplets of condensation.
Juana, 51, who works as a cleaner, has been in temporary accommodation in Lambeth for three-and-a-half years while she waits for a permanent council home to become available. She was moved into her current flat after fire service officers and council workers arrived at her previous home and told residents they needed to move out immediately because it was unsafe.
She told The Independent: “It’s stressful waiting and you don’t know when you might be moved out again or where you might be going.”
She explained that when she first arrived at the flat, with her husband and teenage daughter, it was not furnished. She said: “When we first moved in here, we were sleeping on the floor for about six to eight months because we didn’t know how long we were staying there. We didn’t have any bed or anything to bring with me.”
“There was just a cooker and a washing machine and a fridge, that was all the house had. I had to buy all the things from scratch. I was just sleeping on the carpet with a blanket.”
‘Renaissance’ needed
The drop in local authorities building houses has been stark in recent decades. More than 100,000 homes were built a year in England during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, which has dwindled to a few thousand annually in recent years, according to data from the Department for Levelling Up.
In each year of the last five financial years, two-thirds of councils failed to build a single home, analysis of the government data shows.
In 2021-22, 207 out of the 307 councils that provided data to the government had not built a home in that year. A snap survey of district and borough councils in England carried out by The Independent also found that just over half of local authorities did not build a single home in the annual year 2022. Of the 148 that responded, 80 said they had not completed a home last year. This was compared with 73 who had completed no house builds in 2021.
Councils were historically big builders of housing— (House of Commons research library )
Birmingham council had completed the most new homes, with 185 properties in 2022, 97 of which were for social rent. Islington council had delivered 178 properties in 2022, 136 of which were for social rent. And Rotherham metropolitan borough council had delivered 124 homes, with 90 built at affordable rates, 20 for shared ownership and 14 for market sale.
Charlie Trew, head of policy at housing charity Shelter, said cuts during the period of austerity meant a council’s ability to build housing was stripped back.
Changes in grant funding from central government have also added to the problem and left councils increasingly reliant on cross-subsidy (where councils build a mixture of social rent properties and properties to privately rent), he added.
“We would like to see a renaissance in council house building, particularly socially rented homes. We would like to see many more councils getting back into the business of it,” he said.
Talking about the benefits of council-built homes, Mr Trew said: “You’re not getting very many numbers [of social rent homes] through private development because the developer is trying to maximise profit. They are trying to cut the delivery of those homes as much as possible, whereas a council who is responsible for the social housing wait lists and for homelessness has a direct incentive to build homes that are genuinely affordable to local people.”
’The government needs targets’
Elizabeth Wyatt, at the Housing Action Southwark and Lambeth, has seen how the shortage of council homes impacts those in her borough.
“If you need a family-sized council home, then you have to wait years and years,” she said. “In Southwark, you see one five-bed come up once a year for example. The more bedrooms you need, the longer your wait is. Lots of families are overcrowded in a one-bedroom home, which they would happily give up, but the family-sized homes are just not there.”
Explaining the difference in rents, she said: “Housing associations will offer social rent, which can be really similar to council rent, but they also offer affordable rent, which is 80 per cent of market rent. That’s hundreds of pounds of rent difference per week and compared to council rent it is really unaffordable for a lot of families.”
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has faced criticism for dropping the mandatory target of building 300,000 new homes a year by the mid-2020s. The national target, based on the estimate number of homes needed to keep pace with demand, was introduced in 2017 by then chancellor Philip Hammond. But last year Liz Truss branded the target “Stalinist” and said it should be scrapped. Mr Sunak’s government has said the target still exists, but that it is now “advisory” rather than “mandatory”.
Labour has promised to reintroduce the targets and to restore 70 per cent home ownership. They have also pledged to build hundreds of thousands of new council homes, saying that local authorities will not be allowed to opt out of building homes.
Councillor Ahsan Khan, Waltham Forest’s member for housing, said that the scrapping of housing targets was a mistake. “The government needs to have targets and it needs to incentivise all sectors, in particular councils, to bring forward council homes for people on housing registers right across the country.”
Councillor Diarmaid Ward, from Islington council, said: “It costs about £300,000 to build a council home in London and the government grant only covers about a third of that. So you’ve got to find the other two-thirds somewhere. Added to that you’ve got Right to Buy, which depletes the council housing stock. If you mix in the twin evils of inflation and interest rates, it makes for a very difficult environment.”
The Local Government Association, which represents councils, has called for a “genuine renaissance in council house building”. They have welcomed recent government measures to lift the housing borrowing cap and to allow councils to keep all Right to Buy receipts for two years.
However, they have asked for councils to retain 100 per cent of these receipts on a permanent basis and for a new national task force to be set up that would provide additional help for councils who want to get building.
A spokesperson for the DLUHC said the government is supporting councils “by investing £11.5 billion to build thousands more affordable quality homes”. They added: “Since 2010, we have delivered over 632,000 affordable homes in England, including over 162,000 for social rent, and are committed to increasing this number”.
