Lots of interesting stuff in @Shelter's big new social housing report - will tweet the highlights. But striking that it goes out of its way to play down fact that we're in Europe's top three in terms of social housing stock (and bottom five in terms of ownership). See here: 
Report's focus is overwhelmingly on flow of social housing rather than stock - presumably to put more weight behind its argument that the solution to the housing crisis is to build millions more council houses.
Anyway, the report! (Linked to here england.shelter.org.uk/__data/assets/…) Much of this is familiar, but really does bear repeating.
First up, renting is really, really expensive. Even more so in London and the South-East. Makes hard to live, and near-impossible to save (eg for a deposit)
Housing costs are also one reason, they argue, why homelessness is on the rise
What's happening? Our housing market is, to use a technical term, screwed
And home ownership is going ⬇️
Big feature of the market - as we set out in our Help to Own report - is the rise of private rental cps.org.uk/publications/f…
This is especially bad for families
Social housebuilding has certainly fallen - though has been partly replaced by affordable, which has a higher actual-rent-to-market-rent ratio
Meanwhile, the Right to Buy has become steadily less important. BOO.
Upshot of all of this (via @resfoundation) is that home ownership is going to be MASSIVELY lower among this generation than the last, unless we do something pronto. Which is a VERY BAD THING.
@Shelter solution is build millions more council homes for social rent. We're focusing on planning reforms to get more building done (they kind of write off private sector which is deeply unfair given broken system it's had to work with) - but also to turbocharge home ownership
But this really is genuinely (IMHO) the most significant public policy challenge we face, and the one thing above all that we need to fix. So no apologies whatsoever for banging on about the topic...
