Councils which adopt design guides should get more capital funding for social housing, report says

Councils which adopt design guides specifically tailored to social housing should get more capital funding from central government, according to a new report backed by MPs from both sides of the House of Commons.

The Policy Exchange, an independent right-leaning think tank, outlined the measure in a report which said 100,000 new council homes a year are needed to fix Britain’s affordable housing crisis.

The report says adoption of national or local design guides for council housing should make local authorities eligible for increased funding to support the construction of new social rent schemes. It also proposes a compulsory flat rate and locally set Infrastructure Levy to strengthen councils’ fiscal positions.

Politicians who have backed the 128-page report include Labour MPs Danny Beale and Margaret Mullane and Conservative MPs Kevin Hollinrake, former housing minister, and David Simmonds, shadow minister for housing.

It has also been backed by Labour peer Maurice Glasman, founder of the Blue Labour campaign group and former Labour MPs Jon Cruddas and Ruth Kelly.

The report’s proposed 100,000-home-a-year target would be a huge uplift compared to current levels of social housing delivery. The government’s £39bn Affordable Homes Programme will support 180,000 social rent homes over ten years, potentially providing 18,000 units a year for the next decade.

The think tank said the government “can and must go much further” with capital investments in council housing aiming to reduce the public cost of subsidising private landlords through housing benefits.

It said this scale of delivery would ease pressure on public finances by removing the most economically disadvantaged from the private rental market.

Spending on housing benefit payments was nearly £29bn in 2019-20 and could reach £71bn by 2050 if recent trends in rent hikes and population increases continue, the report said.

The UK’s council housing stock has declined dramatically in recent decades from 28% of all housing stock in 1969 to just 6% in 2023. 

While the 1980s Right to Buy policy has played a role in this decline, the report laid most of the blame in the failure to replace what had been sold. The report’s nine key recommendations include a new ‘Requirement to Build’, proposing primary legislation which would impose a statutory requirement on councils to build one council home for every council home sold.

It also calls for beauty to be put at the centre of the design approach for social housing schemes and for delivery bodies to learn from the “traumatic” legacy of brutalist estates which characterised social housing in the 1960s and 70s.

While it does not attempt to define what beauty is, the report says councils should “accept that beauty is important”, arguing the legacy of post-war council estates had shown what happens “when the state does not consider beauty to be important”.

Recommending diversity in design, the report heavily criticised the “near-militaristic totalitarian repetition” of post-war council housing, which it said had “served to crush the nuance, spontaneity and individuality that not only represents the human condition but generates the most liveable places”.