Social and Affordable Housebuilding and Supported Housing: Next Steps

The majority of the additional £50 million allocated will be used to procure better-quality temporary accommodation so that local authorities can appropriately support local families in need of housing.

We recently invited councils to express an interest in delivering additional housing through LAHF, and we will be contacting those councils shortly to confirm the allocation of both the additional and reallocated funding.

While there are many excellent supported housing providers undertaking crucial work to help vulnerable people get back on their feet and improve their lives, there are still significant numbers of unscrupulous providers who fail to provide high-quality accommodation to their tenants and a minority of rogue exempt accommodation operators who exploit gaps in the existing regulatory regime to profiteer.

The impact of poor-quality, non-commissioned exempt accommodation on vulnerable individuals can be devastating, whether it is the physical and mental consequences of living in squalid conditions, the risks that arise from the absence of effective supervision and safeguarding arrangements, the money gouged from hard-up residents through service charge costs that are ineligible for housing benefit purposes, or simply the inability to sustain an exempt accommodation tenancy, or to move on from one, because of a lack of care or support.

This Government are determined to improve the quality of accommodation in the supported housing sector and assisting local authorities to drive up standards in their areas. That is why we are committed to implementing the Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Act 2023.

We are today announcing that on 20 February 2025, we will publish a consultation on a number of the regulatory reforms contained within it. These include proposals for national supported housing standards and a locally-led licensing regime to give local authorities the powers they need to effectively manage the supported housing markets in their areas.

We are committed to taking a sensible and proportionate approach to the introduction of these planned reforms and we look forward to receiving feedback through the consultation from good providers, local authorities and residents to ensure we get things right.

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