Labour MP Calls For Nationalisation Of Housing Association Properties
L&Q is one of many housing associations in the UK. (Credit: Marcin Rogozinski / Alamy Stock Photo)
3 min read
Peter Lamb, Labour MP for Crawley, has called for nationalising housing association properties as the “lowest-cost” way of boosting council housing.
The 2024 intake MP, who was the leader of Crawley borough council for eight years before entering Parliament, said the move would increase council housing stock in the short term and bring in rental income that could be used on housing in the longer term.
In an interview with The House magazine, Lamb said: “It would be a big boost to the council housing sector – not just because you're turning all these social houses into council houses but because it enables those councils that can’t currently build.
“It shouldn't be that radical, I don’t think. These are not profit-making organisations.”
He said that the Treasury is “going to have to come up with some solution for those local authorities that don't currently have their own stock”.
“That's going to be a big challenge. This is, to the Treasury, the lowest-cost approach to boosting council housing,” he added.
Housing associations are private, not-for-profit organisations that provide homes at affordable rents. These fall under the definition of social housing.
Being responsible for maintaining their stock, housing associations are sometimes criticised by councillors and MPs for doing that job poorly.
“Every MP and every councillor will have lots of casework dealing with problems with maintenance of housing association properties, or sometimes with increases in prices that are unfair,” Lamb said.
The Labour MP said there is a “democratic deficit” in housing associations.
“They’ve got their boards and they have representatives on them. But very often, that amounts to almost nothing… If you're an average member of a housing association, you're not going to have much of a chance of getting to be a member on that board.”
In the 90s and 2000s, it became popular for local authorities to transfer ownership of their entire council housing stocks to housing associations. This was often partly as a way of circumventing the ‘right to buy’ policy that allows social housing tenants to buy their homes, as most housing association properties are excluded from right to buy.
As a result of the stock transfers, many local authorities do not have control over any housing. Lamb argues that reversing these transfers would be an efficient way of allowing councils to increase their housing stock further.
The Labour backbencher said Crawley council was able to build lots of new council housing because it already had a large stock: the resulting rental income brought money into the council’s housing revenue account, which was ringfenced for housing.
“Take the rents, subtract out the interest, subtract out the cost of maintaining those properties – that's your budget left for building new council housing. Now that doesn't exist anywhere where that hasn’t got a housing revenue account, and those are all the places that lost their council housing,” Lamb said.
“One of the easiest ways of resolving that is essentially to reverse the stock transfer.”
Lamb also said he does not believe planning deregulation is a magic bullet in addressing the housing crisis.
“We already have 1.5 million planning permissions unused in the system, and it’s going up every year. The easier it gets to get planning permission, the more unused planning permissions you have,” the MP said.
“I’d feel more confident if some of the voices around this had greater experience of how the system operates.”
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