A Playbook Approach to Accelerating Social Rent Housing Delivery

The Temporary Accommodation (TA) and refugee housing crises are at breaking point. In England, we now have 105,750 households living in TA costing the taxpayer £1.7bn a year, a 100% increase since 2016. The cost of not building the homes we need has now become too great, both economically and socially, and we must act.

These numbers, brought to life by the appalling stories of housing insecurity and adversity, are the shameful consequence of our broken housing system and severe shortfall of safe and secure social rent homes. We refer to this shortfall as the ‘structural deficit’ in the UK housing supply.

Over the past year, we have brought together more than 60 organisations and curated content from 25 authors to create the Social Rent Housing at Pace Playbook.

Why a playbook?

A playbook identifies an end goal and outlines a strategy to take advantage of the assets in play to achieve it. It captures both what has been successful before and new actions worth trialling. A playbook also articulates a unifying narrative and the preparation required to enable a group of individuals (or organisations) to deliver effectively together. In this instance, to build the quality social rent homes we need at scale and pace.

We’re convinced that as it is local government that suffers the economic consequences of the unmet housing need, it is local government that must now step in and take the lead. The Playbook is a strategic tool for local authorities facing the human and economic cost of the current housing crisis who need to release a “winning” response.

This response isn’t primarily about the number of homes. The real challenge is to embrace collective leadership and commit to embark on a journey to develop, test and refine a new social rent housing delivery model.

Our premise is that the barrier to solving the housing crisis is not technology, land or money. While it’s true we’re not building enough homes, the real problem is we’re not building the right kind of homes for the right people.

We desperately need to build more social rent housing.

However, as the cost of development and land has increased, the viability of social rent has continued to decline, meaning fewer organisations are willing and able to respond to the growing need.

The market has tried to address this issue, but the challenges of viability and scale have proved considerable, and government intervention has been ineffective. To illustrate, in 1980 we built over 90,000 social rent homes, but in 2020 we built just 7,500. It is time for a local government-led national strategic plan to increase delivery that can be supported by national government.

The Ecosystem Solution

The Playbook captures a plan to enable local authorities to start once again to deliver social rent homes at pace and scale, utilising land they have, leveraging available money and incubating an additional supply chain of housebuilders waiting in the wings.

It presents an ecosystem solution with three essential components:

Build homes in a new way

The opportunity for the public sector to incubate a new supply chain of factory-manufactured housing to accelerate delivery.

Unlock unlikely land

The opportunity for the public sector to unlock a “new” supply of land (such as small brownfield land in public sector ownership) and address the associated viability and planning challenges.

Recalibrate the economics

The opportunity for the public sector and capital investors to rethink value and unlock alternative sources of capital for social rent housing.

The plan also highlights the critical opportunity for a human-centric, outcome-led approach that embeds values into the design and delivery of new homes to benefit residents, communities and wider society.

The vision and ambition are set, but we intend for the playbook to become a ‘living document’ that will evolve. We recognise that it cannot address the multiplicity of elements that make up the entire ‘housing crisis,’ but the ecosystem solution can significantly contribute to eliminating the structural deficit. It will also help to incubate a much-needed additional house-building supply chain with a different business model that is contingent on the delivery of homes separately to land value. This is a space where local and national government can partner to both save public money and provide better outcomes for the most vulnerable in our towns and cities.

Many local authorities have already begun this journey and the Playbook includes their case studies and success stories. This post begins a series of blogs that will unpack the ecosystem solution in greater detail.  

Download the Playbook, or explore other blogs.

As you engage with the Playbook, we encourage you to reach out to the contributing organisations to inform your learning. No single organisation’s product, process or passion can fix the problem. Change will come through creativity, collective wisdom and the will to roll up our sleeves, get involved and work together to do things differently!