Improving social housing

This content applies to England only.

In our view, social housing is key to solving the homelessness crisis, because it provides a vital form of affordable housing.

There is not enough social housing in England to meet current housing need. Shelter campaigns for improvements to social housing, and for an overall increase in the supply of social housing in England.

What is social housing?

Social housing is housing that is let at low rents to people in housing need. It is generally provided by councils and not-for-profit organisations such as housing associations.

The problems surrounding social housing

With a lack of homes to go round, the waiting lists for social housing are at an all-time high, with nearly 1.7 million households in England on local authority housing registers. [1] Some families in desperate housing conditions are now forced to wait years for a home, with only 26% of all new social lets made to homeless households in priority need. [2]

A major reason for the social housing sector shrinking in the past 30 years is that hundreds of thousands of social tenants have bought their homes during this time, after they were given the Right to Buy (council housing tenants) or the Right to Acquire (housing association tenants). This trend, combined with low levels of social house building, has drastically reduced the availability of social housing in England.

As the shortage of social homes in England has worsened, those homes that do become available now tend to be allocated to people with complex social, economic, and health problems, increasing the risk of community breakdown.

Campaign demands

Shelter believes that social rented housing has a vital role to play in providing decent, secure and affordable housing that enables people to find work, settle and establish roots. Therefore it is imperative that the current supply of social housing is improved to make it fit for purpose.

To resolve the current situation, Shelter calls on the Government to:

• Build more social homes: Following years of campaigning by Shelter and other organisations, the Government committed to building more social rented homes. Shelter is now campaigning to ensure these promises translate into new, decent and appropriate social housing actually being built.

• Safeguard and improve the existing social housing stock: The current drive to build more social housing will be meaningless unless the Government also reviews its policy of selling off social housing to current tenants. A sufficient quantity of social housing stock must be preserved so that those needing to live in social housing can do so. The Government must also continue to invest to improve the quality of existing social housing stock.

• Plan better communities: We don't want to reproduce the housing estates built in the 1960s and 70s. Social housing should sit side by side with private housing for sale, as part of truly mixed communities. Tenants with acute social, health, and economic needs should not all be concentrated in the same area. It is not acceptable in the twenty-first century for children's life chances to be determined by the housing into which they are born.

• Safeguard secure tenancies: Recently there has been some debate about changing the law on social housing so that social tenancies are only for a fixed period of time and conditional on activity to seek employment. Shelter strongly opposes such a move, because it would undermine the stability of communities. We believe there are better ways to increase social mobility in the social housing sector and tackle unemployment, that don't exacerbate the problem of homelessness.

• Improve housing advice and support: Shelter believes that housing advice and support for people eligible for, or already living in, social housing needs to be improved to ensure that those in housing need can truly benefit from the services on offer.

[1] Housing Strategy Statistical Appendix Data 2007, Communities and Local Government, 2008.

[2] Annual Digest of CORE Data 2006/07 and Housing Strategy Appendix Data 2007, Communities and Local Government, 2008.