PUBLIC BUILD TO RENT A walk in the park?
 | Jackie has 40 years’ experience in property, specialising in public-private sector partnerships. A former specialist adviser to government on urban regeneration, Jackie now runs Urban Strategy, an urban regeneration consultancy. She was part of the Grimsey Review team on the future of the high street. Jackie is co-author (with Peter Bill) of “Broken Homes”. She is Independent Chair of the UK Innovation Corridor, a bottom-up partnership of 15+ local authorities, six universities and hundreds of innovation and science companies in the London-Stansted-Cambridge sub region. Jackie is a Board Member of the London Legacy Development Corporation and a member of the “Planning After Dark” podcast team. She is an Honorary Fellow of ACES. |
Jackie was a member of the Housing Delivery panel session at ACES National Conference in September 2026 [see conference write-up in this issue]. This is a recent article she wrote for the Municipal Journal, so thanks for allowing it to be repeated in ACES’ Terrier. |
Impossible demands
In his first set-piece speech as Prime Minister, Andy Burnham pledged to "oversee the biggest council house-building programme since the postwar period". No indication as to how to deliver this, of course.
It is my not-very-educated guess that the esteemed readers of ACES’ Terrier are too battle weary even to engage. Alongside the exhausting struggle just to keep afloat, members and officers are subject to the renewed relentless push for Devolution - and Mayors - against a backdrop of Local Government Reorganisation, let alone all the other Burnham "stuff". Ricocheting around like a beleaguered steel ball in a pinball machine, council leaders face increasingly impossible demands. We are all so distracted. In the meantime, the day job ain’t going away. Big promises on "fixing adult social care" and "ending rough sleeping" sound very good but, thus far, there's nothing to take any pressure off local authority obligations right now.
And on top of all this, we somehow have to build 1.5 million council houses? It's a walk in the park. No?
A housing crisis that’s not new
I am an ardent advocate of the wholesale resurrection of council housing (and I used to work for a Conservative Cabinet Minister!). Having looked at the housing crisis - backwards, sideways, forwards - I long since came to the conclusion that the last time we didn't have a "crisis" was in the late 1970s, when the state directly intervened to provide homes. But back in the 1970s, local authorities were geared up with huge teams; long gone are the days of the Borough Engineer, the Borough Surveyor and the Borough Architect. Post austerity and all else, we no longer have the skills, let alone the capacity, to take on this task. Not to say that it shouldn’t be done. Just to say we're going to have to find a new model for delivery, one that pushes as much as possible onto the private sector.
The Public Build to Rent model – the answer?
Enter stage left, a new(ish) private sector housing model, known as Build to Rent (BTR). A housing model and an industry that is looking to scale up at some speed. We could utilise that energy. A specific programme could be forged which empowers local authorities, and other public sector landowners, to develop land, in partnership with established BTR developers, for social rental homes; this programme to be funded through a designated recyclable fund administered by Homes England and termed Public Build to Rent (PBTR) - or perhaps even "Modern Council Housing".
Only a fraction of the public sector property estate (estimated to be worth some £450bn) would be appropriate to be put forward for housing development. Nevertheless, a good start point for any PBTR approach would be to build homes on publicly owned land to demonstrate the model; although, of course, the programme need not be restricted only to publicly owned land. The central suggestion is that local authorities should acquire (or utilise existing) land that is suitable for housing, within the provision of their local plan (even if it is still only “emerging”), give it planning consent for housing, and then commission the delivery of new social rental homes. Once built and occupied, these PBTR homes would be sold to institutional investors.
Local authorities have a wide range of levers to deploy, notably planning and Compulsory Purchase Order powers, and the ability to borrow money at preferential rates through the Public Sector Works Loan mechanisms.
Even against the backdrop of a push for devolution to the Mayoral/Combined Authorities, it is still the local authorities that hold these powers, so delivery would start with them. Having said that, the huge potential for aggregating the powers to deliver homes held by constituent local authorities in a Combined Authority (in order to achieve investible scale) has already been indicated by tentative steps in both the Greater Manchester and the West Midlands Combined Authorities.
Many (not all) local authorities have assets, but more important is their formal powers. And councils also enjoy invaluable convening powers: the ability to establish creative partnerships to meet social policy objectives.
But council leaders are going to need serious support to deliver. Mr Burnham is going to have to put in significant measures decisively to help and empower. It's going to need solid work: policy frameworks, expert guidance, fiscal incentives, and that's just for starters. It is far from a walk in the park.
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