Inside Housing – Home – More than 14,000 social rented homes lost last year as sales and demolitions dwarf new supply

Government figures showed that just under 11,000 social homes were sold by councils under the Right to Buy in 2021-22, with more than 3,000 sold by housing associations under the preserved Right to Buy (available to residents where their home was transferred from a council to a housing association). 
A further 4,700 social homes were sold by housing associations to tenants under other schemes.
The 2,757 demolitions were comprised of 1,340 by councils and 1,417 by housing associations. 
Shelter has assumed that all of the demolitions and sales were social rented properties. This is likely to be accurate as higher affordable rents were only introduced after 2010 and are likely to be too new to be listed for demolition. 
They are also primarily built by housing associations, where new residents will not qualify for Right to Buy. 
In addition to the 7,528 social rented homes built, there were also 26,569 affordable rent homes and 3,080 London affordable rent. 
This means a total of 37,177 below market rent homes were built – a net gain of more than 15,000. But many of these will be at a far higher rent, especially in higher market areas such as London. 
DLUHC said it refutes Shelter’s analysis, which it described as “misleading”, because the statistics are not broken down by tenure, while the analysis compares losses of all rental tenures with supply of new homes for social rent only.
A spokesperson said: “Increasing the number of genuinely affordable homes is central to our levelling up mission. 
“Since 2010 we have delivered over 620,000 affordable homes in England, including over 160,000 for social rent. 
“But there is much more to do and that is why we’re investing £11.5bn to build more of the affordable, quality homes this country needs.”



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