Who is council housing for?

Historically, council housing was built as a public good for local people who could not afford the market. The question now is whether that purpose still holds – and who should sit at the front of the queue.

Labour’s original plan to shut asylum hotels by funding councils to buy or build homes for asylum seekers – properties that would then join the social stock – has been halted amid Treasury doubts over value for money and housing-department warnings about already crushing waiting lists. Around 200 authorities had shown interest. But the political sting remains: new social homes paid for by the taxpayer, allocated first to people whose asylum claims have not even been decided, while British families wait years.

Reform UK offers the opposite answer. It estimates 540,000 social homes are occupied by foreign nationals and pledges to end their eligibility, evicting existing tenants after a short grace period. Those homes, the party says, would then go to British citizens, with British-born workers under 35 placed at the front of the queue, alongside veterans and married couples with children.

Critics have called the plan divisive, discriminatory and legally fraught. But the raw numbers keep the argument alive. While new social housing actually does go to UK nationals, in London nearly half of social-housing household heads were born abroad and around 31 per cent of occupants do not hold a British passport. Locals watch lists lengthen and draw their own conclusions.

Could we not just increase council stock for everyone? There’s certainly a supply crisis. In 1953, England built 200,000 council houses; by 1990, the figure was 87. Blair’s government managed about 2,000 in a decade. Andy Burnham’s Labour government now wants to make social housing ‘fashionable’ again, with a £39 billion Social and Affordable Homes Programme. For much of the left, this is an overdue fight against neo-liberalism and private ownership and provides a state-sponsored solution to homelessness.

As the Local Government Association says, ‘council housing has been essential in helping the most vulnerable in society gain access to a home’. Surely, with around 1.3million households on the waiting lists in England alone, they have a point. Something must be done.

The problem is that many local authorities can barely manage to carry out repairs, let alone kick start a construction programme. Croydon, for example, set up a development arm called Brick by Brick, lent it about £200million and now has to write off £65 million for a grand total of three council houses. Liverpool Foundation Homes allegedly built 18 properties (none at social rent) and left a multi-million-pound bill. Housing associations now deliver a quarter of total housing supply, but their so-called ‘affordable’ rents are well out of the range of most ordinary people.

Even in Burnham’s own patch, Greater Manchester, genuinely cheap homes lag luxury towers, and waiting lists for the less affluent are barely impacted by new homes built.

Meanwhile, any council-house renaissance needs bricklayers, electricians, plumbers, site managers and a training system that has been neglected for years. Building houses is not easy and certainly not lucrative – as even the private sector will attest. There are around 1,500 private housebuilder insolvencies every year.

If social housing is a scarce national asset, who has first claim on it? Does pouring billions into new stock, without settling eligibility first, produce houses – or only more resentment? And can councils that struggle to mend roofs really become mass housebuilders again?