The housing crisis is going nowhere. 2026 must offer a better vision for the future

As 2025 dawned, over 165,000 children in England woke up with a temporary roof over their head, possibly just a room in a B&B, possibly miles away from their school and friends, probably overcrowded and unsuitable.

By June this had risen to over 172,000. In 2010 this number was 50,000.

It is worth pausing to remember that each one of those children has a story, has dreams, has friends, and has potential.

Despite all the focus on housing in politics, the media and national discourse, which is as high as it has ever been in my decades working to provide homes, this one figure underlines that the housing crisis has maintained its rapidly rising trajectory of daily misery and lifetimes of lost opportunity. There are other shaming statistics too numerous to mention.

The new year offers new hope, but this is a crisis decades in the making, so we cannot expect it to all be over by Christmas 2026.

To their credit, ministers from the prime minister down appear to recognise this, and we have been promised a long-term housing strategy early in January.

My hope is that this is genuinely a long-term strategy that is prepared to make uncomfortable choices about what is offered in the coming years in pursuit of outcomes that could be decades in the future but that are ultimately better for us all.

This is where great care must be taken with the government’s 1.5m home target, which is the right ambition and one that my own organisation mirrors as the second largest builder amongst housing associations.

I can understand the need for simplicity and the power of Steve Reed’s ‘Build Baby Build’ narrative, but government must be careful as it seeks to accelerate the pace of delivery.

There is a risk that as the target gets harder to achieve, the levers that are pulled deliver housing numbers but not successful homes or places.

Success in housing isn’t someone moving into a home, even if that person has been homeless.

That is just a moment, which can be a moment of great joy or relief, but it is only a beginning.

That person must enjoy a better life in that place, potentially over decades, and so must their neighbours, and the local businesses and services need to prosper, also over decades.

For me and the people I work with, our real success will only be known in 20, 30, 50, or even 100 years from now if the communities that we invest in today are still giving people a place to thrive through generations of inhabitants.

This is the change in mindset that we need when setting an approach to creating places for people to live. As a country we must start to think bigger than the home on its own, or even the street or estate it is part of.

Well-planned and cared for places make a huge difference to people’s lives, especially those who are in need of social housing.

The acute shortage of homes means that the people who come into social homes are more vulnerable, and need more support, have less access to a car, or are less mobile. So we have to design places that are well connected for public or active transport so that the people living there can access work, shops, doctors, dentists and all the services that they will need, in many cases more than the wider population average.

They may also need more storage, benefit more from access to nature, and from a home that is cheaper to heat.

Behind this plea for long-term strategic action is the hard experience of having to resolve the impact of decisions made decades ago, often with the best of intentions, now leading to problems for the people living in older social housing.

This includes homes that do not meet all the challenges just listed, and more.

The New Towns Task Force recently revealed the potential locations of the next generation of new towns – a hugely exciting opportunity for anyone who is passionate about homes – mirroring the ambition of the governments of the 50s, 60s and 70s, which was the last time this country built the number of homes needed.

At this point it is worth highlighting that in the late 70s over 6% of government spending was on housing, recently it’s hovered between 1-2%. Over the same time the portion of spending on health increased from 9.4% to around 18%.

The frustration is that housing is a ‘social determinant of health’ as Professor Marmot’s independent review found in 2010, and as Nye Bevan understood as the minister of both health and housing, so spending less money on housing contributes to the need to spend more money on health.  

While this rapid expansion of housing was necessary and good, some of the decisions were short-sighted and the places not designed to last.

In many places there are homes that are simply not going to last for another 30 years in a reasonable state. This reality means that there will have to be sensitive conversations with the people who live in these homes alongside strong support from government to enable good regeneration as part of considered placemaking.

The challenge is always how to pay for these ambitions. The housing sector continues to face the dual challenge of rapidly rising costs as the income to meet those costs falls further and further behind and it is difficult to ask our already stretched customers to pay more.

Fundamentally, the model that has funded affordable housing since the late 1980s is starting to fail under the pressure of rapidly rising and well-intentioned expectations not meeting resources. We cannot continue as we are, no one can have their cake and eat it.

It’s hard to see the private housebuilders being in a position to deliver what is needed. The overall housing market remains relatively weak, especially in London, and given economic uncertainty it is hard to see sales recovering to the point that that affordable homes through section 106 are a silver bullet.

A recent critique of the government is that it has found its mission to reduce inequality at the expense of economic growth.

Read more:

• Is Labour really going to end homelessness?
• GPs and teachers to be told when kids become homeless as part of Labour’s child poverty strategy
• Sadiq Khan condemns ‘unfair profiteering’ from sales of Right to Buy homes back to councils

Housing delivers both in a way that is unlike almost every other type of investment. This is not a plea for more direct government funding. Given the public finance constraints, the housing sector cannot expect a better deal than the one that we have received from the chancellor in the spending review.

So, we need a different solution. The housing bank that is due to come into being in April offers some interesting opportunities and, again, there have been positive signs that this could deliver change.

There is also the prize of the billions of pounds a year that are wasted on temporary accommodation and public funding for the private rented sector, which costs far more than its social housing equivalent for poorer outcomes.

A truly game-changing approach would be for ministers to invest their time and their convening power to bang heads together from across departments, housing providers, banks and investors, and the housebuilders to find a solution to this mess.

None of this is impossible, but it takes vision, a strong long-term strategy, and the resolution to maintain that long-term ambition when rocked by the events of today.

Through the people who work in housing, alongside the government, I hope that in decades to come we can look back and say that this was the year that ended the devastating experience of homelessness for hundreds of thousands of children.

Mark Washer is CEO of Sovereign Network Group (SNG)

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