The Silent War against Public Housing that Nobody is Talking about...

UK governments have consistently struggled to meet housing targets for the past 40 years, since Margaret Thatcher's Right-To-Buy scheme sold off over 2 million council houses, handing them over to the open market. The reason for this is also the reason Angela Rayner, the current Deputy Prime Minister and Housing Secretary, has been doomed to fail to meet her target of building 1.5 million homes since Labour's manifesto was written.

Since the 1980s, the number of council houses being built has collapsed, with social housing completions falling from over 100,000 a year in the late 70s to just a few thousand in recent years. Meanwhile, more than 2.8 million homes have drifted into the hands of private landlords—now accounting for roughly 20% of all UK households—turning housing from a public service into a profit engine.

With a growing population and rising demand, the system simply can’t keep up. So, it begs the question- "Why aren't we just building more council homes?"

Land-Banking

The UK’s largest housebuilders have been accused of artificially restricting housing supply to maintain high prices and safeguard their profit margins. A 2022 report by the CMA and further investigation by housing campaigners found that many developers, including Bellway and Barratt, build slowly on land they already own, releasing homes in phases rather than flooding the market. This “build-to-sell” model protects property values and ensures higher per-unit profit, but starves the system of the volume of homes needed.

With fewer homes entering the market, especially in high-demand areas, prices remain high. This fuels a cycle where working-class buyers are pushed out, homeownership declines, and more properties are bought by landlords. The private rented sector has ballooned to over 2.8 million households, or around 20% of all homes in England (ONS). These dynamics don’t just reflect a housing shortage—they reflect a system shaped by those who profit from scarcity.

At the same time, local councils are frequently excluded from accessing this market, unable to compete with developers on land or pricing. Since the 2012 reform of planning contributions, developers have used "viability assessments" to avoid affordable housing quotas by arguing that including council homes would make projects financially unviable. Research by Shelter shows that in some developments, affordable housing targets were slashed by over 50% using these loopholes.

Councils are also routinely priced out of land markets, where speculative investors and developers outbid them for strategic plots. And where councils do try to build, they face restrictions on borrowing (under Treasury-imposed debt caps) and barriers in the planning system itself—barriers the private sector is often better equipped to navigate.

The result is a “natural monopoly” where major developers dominate supply, landlords dominate ownership, and councils are pushed to the margins of housing provision. For Angela Rayner or any minister to break this cycle, they would need to confront not just the housing shortage—but the entrenched market logic and political incentives that keep it in place. This is what happens when you allow the private sector to gain access to public stock, public wealth is eroded.

So How Do We Solve This?

In short, realising that houses are homes and not commodities is the first step in healing the UK's attitudes towards brick and mortar. If I were Angela Rayner, or anybody else in the Ministry of Housing, this would be how I would fix it:

• Abolishing Buy-To-Let is the first policy to abandon; it is abhorrent in principle, as it gives landlords the leg up to profit from other people's struggles, depriving families of home ownership.
• As of now, if somebody dies with no relatives to bequeath their asset to, the house goes to probate, and ends up in the hands of the Crown and is sold off from there. Why not change this so it becomes possession of the council to use for Council Housing?
• Levy a Vacant Properties tax on assets left unoccupied for 6-12 months in major cities to lower house prices and force supply or sale for Landlords. This would not raise much money (£200-500m) for the treasury, but it makes up for this in bringing house prices down.
• On top of Vacant Properties, a Land Banking Tax could prevent Major Housebuilders from holding the working class and the government to ransom. According to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), major UK housebuilders collectively hold land sufficient for approximately 1.18 million homes—comprising around 658,000 plots in long-term land banks and 522,000 in short-term holdings. a 2% tax per plot could raise £2.36bn a year.
• Levy a Land Value tax on those hoarding land in cities that could be used for Extra Housing. Applying a 0.6% LVT to the UK's land value, estimated at £5 trillion, could generate around £30 billion annually.
• I would have a progressive capital gains tax on housing properties, the more you own, the more capital gains you pay. The OBR recommends that in the fiscal year of 2025-2026, capital gains will raise £15.7bn; if the Treasury followed the below. They could generate a sum of £5-10bn annually.

Total Raised: £42–43 billion

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