The government has committed £39 billion to social and affordable housing through what it calls the biggest programme of its kind in a generation. Housing Secretary Steve Reed, speaking at Lloyds Banking Group’s Social Housing Forum on 6 July, confirmed that council housebuilding has reached its highest level in 25 years, with social housing starts by Homes England and the Greater London Authority doubling under the current administration.
The numbers aren’t abstract. There are 134,000 households currently living in temporary accommodation across the country. More than a million families sit on council housing waiting lists. And the housing benefit bill has nearly doubled since 2010, with taxpayers subsidising private landlords to rent out homes that were, in many cases, originally built with public money.
One statistic from Reed’s speech stands out above all others. Four in ten homes sold under right-to-buy are now rented out privately, often at two or three times the rent charged when they were council properties. The taxpayer, meanwhile, picks up the difference through housing benefit.
“It’s better to spend taxpayer’s cash building new homes than subsidising buy-to-let landlords,” Reed told the forum. The government is now overhauling right-to-buy to prevent newly built social homes from being sold off, while still supporting tenants who want to own their home.
This isn’t a philosophical shift. It’s arithmetic. Building a social home costs less over the long term than subsidising the same home’s private rental for decades. The question is whether the pace of building can match the depth of the waiting lists.
The Social and Affordable Homes Programme sets a target of at least 60% of new homes for social rent, the most affordable tenure in the housing system. A £2 billion initial tranche announced in March 2025 is already translating into bricks and mortar. In York, the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust is building 117 homes through that early funding, with 60% designated for social rent.
Reed also confirmed the national rollout of the Small Sites Aggregator, a model developed with the private sector to build social homes on smaller plots that traditional volume builders tend to ignore. The target is ambitious: 10,000 homes a year by the end of this parliament.
For context, England delivered roughly 10,100 social rent homes in 2023-24, according to government statistics. Doubling that output would require not just funding but a significant expansion of construction capacity, planning bandwidth, and land availability.
East Anglia’s housing pressures mirror the national picture, with local variations that make social housing particularly important. Coastal and market towns across Norfolk face a well-documented squeeze between holiday lets, second homes, and a working population that can’t compete on price. South Norfolk District Council’s housing register has grown steadily, and Norwich City Council has been among the more active local authorities in exploring new council housebuilding.
The Small Sites Aggregator model could prove particularly relevant here. Norfolk and Suffolk have no shortage of smaller development sites, from former agricultural land on town edges to infill plots in established villages, that don’t attract the big housebuilders. A national programme designed to unlock exactly these sites would fit the region’s development pattern well.
For private property owners, the implications are indirect but real. More social housing eases pressure on the private rental sector, which in turn affects yields and demand for buy-to-let properties. In towns like Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn, where private rents have risen sharply against relatively modest wage growth, additional social stock could gradually temper the most extreme rental inflation.
The overhaul of right-to-buy has a less obvious consequence for the wider market. If fewer social homes are sold off and converted to private rentals, the supply pipeline of cheaper investment properties narrows. For years, ex-council flats and houses have been a reliable source of high-yielding rental stock. That particular seam is being deliberately closed.
Landlords who built portfolios on the back of right-to-buy stock will need to look elsewhere. And with the government’s clear intention to protect newly built social homes from sale, the era of buying discounted council property and renting it back at market rates is drawing to a close.
Ambition isn’t the issue. The government’s willingness to commit £39 billion and set hard targets for social rent represents a genuine policy shift. But construction capacity remains stretched, planning departments are under-resourced, and the building materials inflation of recent years hasn’t fully unwound.
Reed acknowledged the need for “rebuilding the capacity of councils and registered providers who were hammered by austerity and soaring inflation.” That rebuilding takes time. Skilled tradespeople, planning officers, and housing association development teams don’t appear overnight.
The programme’s success will be measured not by the scale of its budget but by whether keys are handed over to families who’ve spent years on waiting lists. For Norfolk and Suffolk, that means watching whether the Small Sites Aggregator finds traction locally and whether council housebuilding ambitions translate into completions. Ivybridge’s 324-location property market reports track these supply-side shifts as they feed through to prices and activity across the region.
The housing market doesn’t exist in isolation from housing policy. This £39 billion bet on social housing will reshape the supply picture for a generation, and every corner of the market, from first-time buyer flats to premium family homes, will feel the effects.
