ABSTRACT
Social housing development is now the preserve of housing associations and some private developers, but it wasn’t always that way. The majority of social homes in the UK are still in the ownership of the councils which built them – some 3.54 million homes in 2002, or 13.8% of all homes in the UK (ODPM, 2003). As indicated in Chapter 1, the social housing development programme (e.g. of around 20,000 homes a year for rent in England (at 2004/05)) comes nowhere near meeting housing need, and the consequences are housing stress and homelessness. There is a good case for boosting housing production for rent, and perhaps for low-cost home ownership, and in recent years the government has increased its commitment to moving nearer to enabling the production of social housing on a more realistic scale, but there is a long way to go.
