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More than 14,000 social rented homes lost last year as sales and demolitions dwarf new supply
More than 14,000 social homes were lost in England last year, according to new government figures.
Data from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) showed that 21,638 social homes were either sold (18,881) or demolished (2,757) in 2021-22, while only 7,500 new homes for social rent were built. This represents a net loss of 14,100 socially rented homes.
It brings the total of social homes lost over the past decade to 165,000.
Homelessness charity Shelter said there are 1.2 million households stuck on waiting lists for a social home in England – a rise of 5% in the past two years.
It has urged the government to make building more genuinely affordable social homes a central part of its new Levelling Up Bill.
The charity said the move is “essential” to combatting the country’s housing emergency.
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Polly Neate, chief executive of Shelter, said: “We are firmly in the red when it comes to social housing.
“We lose far more homes than we build every year and the losses are mounting up.”
She stated that the social housing deficit is “at the heart of the housing emergency”.
“The fundamental lack of genuinely affordable homes has pushed millions of people into insecure, expensive and often discriminatory private renting.
“It is why we have over a million households waiting for a decent social home and thousands of homeless children are growing up in temporary accommodation,” she added.
Ms Neate said the solution is to build more social housing.
“The government can’t afford to allow this decline to stretch into another decade, if it has any hopes of meaningfully levelling up.
“Instead, it must invest in a new generation of the homes we really need – secure, genuinely social housing,” she explained.
Government figures showed that just under 11,000 social homes were sold by councils under the Right to Buy in 2021-22, with more than 3,000 sold by housing associations under the preserved Right to Buy (available to residents where their home was transferred from a council to a housing association).
A further 4,700 social homes were sold by housing associations to tenants under other schemes.
The 2,757 demolitions were comprised of 1,340 by councils and 1,417 by housing associations.
Shelter has assumed that all of the demolitions and sales were social rented properties. This is likely to be accurate as higher affordable rents were only introduced after 2010 and are likely to be too new to be listed for demolition.
They are also primarily built by housing associations, where new residents will not qualify for Right to Buy.
In addition to the 7,528 social rented homes built, there were also 26,569 affordable rent homes and 3,080 London affordable rent.
This means a total of 37,177 below market rent homes were built – a net gain of more than 15,000. But many of these will be at a far higher rent, especially in higher market areas such as London.
DLUHC said it refutes Shelter’s analysis, which it described as “misleading”, because the statistics are not broken down by tenure, while the analysis compares losses of all rental tenures with supply of new homes for social rent only.
A spokesperson said: “Increasing the number of genuinely affordable homes is central to our levelling up mission.
“Since 2010 we have delivered over 620,000 affordable homes in England, including over 160,000 for social rent.
“But there is much more to do and that is why we’re investing £11.5bn to build more of the affordable, quality homes this country needs.”
