The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham recently marked 100 years of the Becontree Estate in November 2021. Social housing has been around for some time and it’s huge in the UK.

The Becontree Estate is the biggest council estate in the UK and the most ambitious of the country’s interwar housing estates. The first of 27,000 houses for returning war heroes and working families were built on the four square-mile east London estate in November 1921, with the ‘Garden City’ houses and iconic ‘Banjo’ closes recognised across the world.

It was started in remarkably similarly turbluent times in the year or two following the Spanish Flu (many more people had sadly died then than during the 2020s pandemic), the highest level of UK unemployment ever (versus the great opt-out of today), industrial action verged on civil war over inequalities, the USSR (Russia) was about to take over the Ukraine, Winston Churchill put the gold standard in place for the pound with the objective of securing the role of the UK in world’s financial markets against a backdrop of uncertainty in international trade and the roaring twenties economic boom was about to start.

By the late 1970’s around one in three households lived in council housing. The socio-economic base of the nation had been strengthened within 60 years by functional housing provision.

Supply reducing while demand increases
Since 1978 social housing stock has reduced as a percentage of the market to a much smaller fraction via:

• the right to buy scheme with a couple of million homes moving across to private ownership assisted by discounted prices.
• limited building programs or housing.
• the large scale stock transfers to housing associations who with councils house around one in six households.
• more of the state monies moving to rents versus stock.

But the demand is more than 20% above the current provision. Over 1m more homes are required in social housing, now.