Green MP Siân Berry: The Labour government should learn from us by buying up existing homes for affordable housing

For far too long the conventional wisdom of the housing sector has been a chant of ‘build, build, build’. This mantra has been repeated endlessly by the Labour government of the past two years.

The practical reality, however, is that it will take more than a century to clear the social housing waiting list at the current speed of building. And with record numbers of children now living in unstable and often dangerous temporary accommodation, we must do better and look to other ideas too.

The opportunities for buying housing are to me much more exciting and immediate. While building and buying can both deliver new jobs and new council homes, buying offers speed, improves existing stock to make it safer and more resilient, and creates jobs through renovation. It also removes all the delivery risks that come with construction and are slowing up the achievement of targets for new social housing in every part of the country.

“Families who might otherwise be offered new builds far away from their friends, family and schools, could instead be offered homes in their current neighbourhoods”

With Buy the Supply, homes can be bought that are connected to existing transport networks, near high streets and parks. Families who might otherwise be offered new builds far away from their friends, family and schools, could instead be offered homes in their current neighbourhoods, meaning no interruption to their children’s education and happiness.

And where developers and councils are driven by high land costs and delivery targets to build one or two-bed flats not suitable for families, councils adding acquisition to their strategies can – often for less than the opportunity cost of low-density new building – purchase family-sized homes with gardens to start to fulfil this significant unmet need.

And while new building has failed to deliver, Right to Buy and demolitions have continued to represent a leaky bucket dragging down progress and cutting the net gains achieved. The evidence is clear that relying on building alone will continue to fail to deliver the 90,000 homes a year Shelter estimates we need to build for the next decade. 

Excitingly, a growing number of local authorities are already employing as fierce a strategy of creating social housing through acquisition as they can manage. In 2021, with my Green colleagues, I persuaded the mayor of London to use unspent and unallocated government housing grant to set up a dedicated fund for councils to buy homes from the market.

The mayor’s Right to Buy-back fund delivered around 1,500 affordable homes across the city. And the strategy continues, with his updated Council Homes Acquisition Programme targeting a total of 10,000 homes purchased during the next few years and asking for new funding to help achieve this. 

Kirklees and Nottingham councils have also been steadily buying back the local homes sold off under Right to Buy, and community groups and charities have come together across the country to do the same. In Grimsby, community group East Marsh United is operating as an “ethical landlord” and has bought and renovated 14 homes for local people as part of its “community housing revolution”.

Brighton and Hove City Council can, I am proud to say, be held up as a stellar example of Buy the Supply success. Under both Green and Labour-led administrations, consistently since 2017, the council has purchased over 600 homes for social rent and has pledged to spend £50m to acquire another 200 homes over the next few years.

But these pioneering mayors and councils still need much more support. The government’s Social and Affordable Homes Programme (SAHP) is primarily geared towards building, not buying.

“Since 2017, the council has purchased over 600 homes for social rent and has pledged to spend £50m to acquire another 200 homes over the next few years”

The funding can support a limited number of acquisitions, but comes with many restrictions, and the amount available remains a drop in the ocean compared with what could be achieved towards meeting dire housing needs across the whole country.  

I believe that a Treasury-backed, separate national Buy the Supply fund should at least match the investment being made through the existing SAHP and – importantly – not be taken out of it. We absolutely still need to build new social housing, but acquisition programmes must be expanded hugely alongside this.

With my fellow Green MPs I have written to Mr Burnham as he prepares for power, with a clear challenge for him to take up progressive policies that would transform our society for the better: proportional representation for elections, wealth taxes, water under public ownership, serious action on the climate and nature crisis, rent controls, and of course the idea of a massive national Buy the Supply fund and all that it might achieve.

As Inside Housing readers well know, the housing crisis has been exacerbated into a genuine emergency by the non-stop failure of successive governments to take decisive actions like this.

To me, and anyone else who hears and sees the personal stories of families facing homelessness, overcrowding and terrible conditions on a daily basis as part of our jobs, this amounts to one giant moral failing where radical action cannot be put off any longer.  

I believe Mr Burnham shows signs of being a more plural politician, one who might listen to other parties and their ideas, compared to our outgoing prime minister. I hope that Buy the Supply is something that will appeal to his aims for locally led action on our biggest problems, and I hope to meet him soon to lay out my full case for this potentially transformational idea. 

Siân Berry, Green MP, Brighton Pavilion