Despite a partial recognition by Brent Council that Shared Ownership is not an affordable housing route for most Brent resident and broader issues with the product, the Planning Committee continues to approve developments that include a shared ownership component.
Previous articles on Wembley Matters have covered the topic.
https://wembleymatters.blogspot.com/2022/11/shared-ownership-lets-have-debate.html
https://wembleymatters.blogspot.com/2022/11/brents-affordable-council-housing.html
I thought that a recent article by SHAC (Social Housing Action Campaign) would be of interest to readers and local politicians.
I thank SHAC for their permission to reproduce the article below that can also be found on their website HERE
By Alison, SHAC Campaigner
Twice a year, the estate agent subsidiaries of the big London housing associations assemble at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster for the London Home Show.
Mortgage providers, conveyancing solicitors, and related service providers also take stalls. It’s a one stop shop for Shared Ownership (SO) flats.
The problem is, SO in neither shared nor ownership. The tenant is responsible for 100% of the costs of the maintenance of their properties, and also, through service charges, the cost of maintaining the building and the area around it.
Service charging is entirely unregulated and escalates quickly. There is no tenure in law that is called ‘shared ownership’ – that is actually a marketing term. Legally, all you have is an assured tenancy, which means that if you get into just eight weeks arrears with rent and / or service charge, the landlord can repossess the entire property and, crucially, not give you back the money you paid for your share (1).
It is sold as an affordable way to get a foot on the property ladder, and with an option for ‘staircasing’, ie. increasing the share of the property that you theoretically own until it reaches 100%. But when rent rises above inflation, service charges increase exponentially, and wages do not keep pace with property prices, it’s no wonder that less than 3% of tenants ever ‘staircase’ to 100% (2).
So, a few concerned housing activists from SHAC went along to the London Home Show on Saturday 26 April 2025, armed with information leaflets for people attending the show. We knew from experience that the marketing people inside – with their bright smiles and their glossy brochures – give information on SO that is so riddled with inaccuracies, omissions, and outright lies, that their conduct constitutes deliberate mis-selling.
By contrast, we had more details and sources for future research, so that anyone thinking about buying SO would know where get accurate, independent, impartial information. We didn’t have banners or placards or megaphones. But what we did have, in abundance, were facts.
It was a lovely, sunny day, and the show was not quite as well-attended as it was the last time there was a demo outside it, in 2022. What we did find, though, was that everyone we spoke to already knew about the problems with SO. Awareness of the problematic nature of the tenure is high, although not everyone knew the details.
Many people were going along to the show out of curiosity, where previously they were going along with the express intention of finding a home. A lot of people were interested in SO only because they viewed it as better than private renting – a low bar if ever there was one – but still were not convinced that it was right for them.
It’s astonishing that the Mayor of London chooses to promote SO as a part of his affordable housing plan, when the Housing Select Committee has found that the scheme is failing to deliver on any of its promises (3).
It is astonishing that Labour spent fourteen years in opposition, becoming increasingly aware through their constituents’ complaints that SO is a problem and the landlords running the schemes are out of control, and yet still have no plan to reform it. But as people are gradually turning away from the tenure, and more and more SO homes go unsold (4), sooner or later something will have to give.
Sources:
(1) Shared Ownership Resources – Shared Ownership – Is It Really Ownership?
(2) SORESEI Blog – Shared Ownership Market Review 2020
(3) Parliament – Shared Ownership is Failing to Deliver an Affordable Route to Homeownership Say MPs
(4) Inside Housing Third Quarter Turnover at L&Q – But Hundreds of Shared Ownership Homes Remain Unsold
11 comments:
Brilliant myth bursting of pseudo-support of home ownership. Local Authorities and Central Government have been hood-winking the electorate with semantic-gymnastics.
Interesting to read in the article at (4) that L&Q had 563 unsold shared ownership homes as at 31 December 2024.
I wonder how many of the 197 shared ownership homes that were "delivered" by housing associations in Brent during the year ended 31 March 2025 (45% of the total number of so-called "affordable" homes which were completed in our borough during that year) are still awaiting purchasers?
What is the use of building shared ownership homes that local people who need genuinely affordable housing can't afford, and in most cases would be foolish to buy a share of?
People want freehold houses with gardens they don't want high rise leasehold flats wth high service charges.
Ditto leasehold reform in law since 2024, still not being enacted by government.
These to UK electorate fails keep the UK housing market attractive to global investors and asset managers.
There is probably nothing wrong with shared ownership as it may work for some people. BUT don't call it affordable if both the price to buy and the rent to pay are effectively market (very high) rent facing people in Brent and London generally.
Affordable like Shared Ownership is a marketing term.
Affordable housing includes affordable rent flats and shared ownership flat. It is a scam and the government allows and supports and presents it to us as something good and these companies that builds the flats are working with the council directly and are proposed for housing grants %%%
They are counted as Social flats mostly and can access local government grants, primarily through funding programs designed to support affordable housing development. These grants can cover various aspects of housing, including land acquisition, design, construction, and sometimes even moving costs.
I disagree with Anonymous (7 May at 10:04) over affordable being just a marketing term.
It is a formal part of national planning policy that a proportion of all new homes built should be affordable, and this was originally meant to mean affordable social housing for people who could not afford to buy their own homes, or afford to rent a home charging "market rents".
The Mayor of London's London Plan polices (the next step down in the planning policies from the Government's National Planning Policy Framework) say the developments of more than ten homes should be expected to provide 50 per cent affordable housing, either by the number of units or number of habitable rooms. The London Plan then delegates to local councils the choice of what percentage of these affordable homes should be for genuinely affordable rent (that is either social rent level or the slightly higher London Affordable Rent level).
Based on the perceived needs in its area, Brent Council set the "genuinely affordable" number at a minimum of 70 percent of affordable homes given planning consent, and no more than 30 percent as "intermediate" affordable homes (such as shared ownership, Local Rent Allowance level, discounted market sale etc.).
If Brent's planners and Planning Committee had stuck to those figures, which are part of the Local Plan policies adopted by the Council, then there would be far more genuinely affordable homes in the borough for the local people who desperately need them.
Sadly, both the Council's Planning Officers and the majority of Planning Committee members, including it's Chair and Vice Chair, have failed to insist that developers comply with the Council's affordable housing planning policies.
Even some of Brent Council's own developments don't deliver the number of genuinely affordable homes that they should! So instead of being able to offer as many homes that local people could afford as should have been possible, they are advising people who are part of Brent 's community to move to cheaper parts of the country.
At the very least, Brent should not allow any of the homes on its developments to be for shared ownership, but bite the bullet and make them for genuinely affordable rent.
There are many things wrong with shared ownership, but I agree that it may suit a relatively small number of people. In London, those people must not have an annual household income of more than £90k a year (and will probably need an income of close to that level to be able to afford to go down the shared ownership route).
The big problem in Brent is that far too many shared ownership homes are being approved and built as part of the already too low percentage of "affordable" homes included in local developments.
Some may claim that this is the only viable way to deliver the new homes target which Brent has been set. But what is the point of building homes that the majority of local people in housing need can't afford, then having them either stand empty or being sold to investors, either for private rent at high market rent levels or left empty simply to appreciate in value?
If people moved and bought homes were they can actually afford to buy them wouldn't we soon see these developers going bust?
Whilst service charges are a scam, why shouldn’t the shared owner, as it’s not a tenant be “responsible for 100% of the costs of the maintenance of their properties, and also, shared cost of maintaining the building and the area around it?” - who do they think should pay
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