By Keith Cooper

The government has today fired the starting gun on its multi-billion pound funding competition to deliver hundreds of thousands of new cut-price homes. Over the next decade, £39bn will be distributed to organisations via Homes England.

But unlike previous programmes, this funding boost will not just put a dent in housing waiting lists. It will spark a radical transformation in the way publicly funded housing as we know it is developed, owned, and kept up to scratch.

By the time the Social and Affordable Housing Programme (SAHP) 2026-2036 comes to an end, most social homes in England will be in the hands of international equity investors alongside a smattering of insurers and pension providers from Coleman Street, London, UK, to Elizabeth Street, Sydney, Australia.

Those once-comfortable slippers, known as non-profit housing associations, will be largely relegated to the role of estate management. Their umbrella body, the National Housing Federation, will be subsumed by the British Property Federation. The re-branded, United National Property Federation (UNPF), will welcome non-profit and for-profit members alike.

And the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) will no longer be run by dyed-in-the-wool civil servants. Its chief and chair will have cut their teeth at a big four consultancy and magic circle law firm respectively. Both will be necessary backgrounds for unpicking the complexities of the multinational investors which own the majority of stock. It will even be renamed, His Majesty’s Inspector of Social Housing after the Treasury agrees to replace housing grant with tax breaks.

While this might feel like a flight of fancy these predictions are all based on hard facts.

A plan to fund housing with tax breaks is being pushed by an “informal collective” of housing luminaries called Homes for People We Need. This is “convened” by Grainger, a major listed private landlord in possession of a sizeable for-profit of its own. It’s a tempting proposition for a cash-strapped Treasury and would almost certainly require official checks on for-profits’ tax affairs.

And while there’s little prospect of an NHF/BPF merger anytime soon there is in fact pressure on the former to be more welcoming of for-profit providers. Several of its association members are spawning their own for-profits. “The NHF needs to wake up and smell the coffee,” one consultant, close to them, says.

The idea that associations should flog their homes to investors was first floated by John Kingman, a former senior Treasury official who now chairs Legal & General. It a proposition the pension giant continues to push “unashamedly”. And what’s more, Sir John and other interested investors are pushing at an open door, it seems.

Housing associations are increasingly selling their occupied homes to stay afloat or “maintain viability”, as the RSH so eloquently put it in its last annual check of their financial health.  And the only purchasers in town are of course the for-profits providers which are in rude financial health.

While many associations are even struggling to cover their interest payments with income, for-profit providers are drowning in cash. Sage Housing backer Blackstone made $71bn in a single quarter of 2025, according to its latest financial report.

The financial strength of for-profits put them in a strong position to score big in the SAHP grant competition. Sage Housing and Legal & General were collectively awarded ten times more housing grant in the last affordable housing programme than the previous one. How much more will they take this time?

Beefed up by association sell-offs and large chunks of government grant, for-profits will no doubt be a major force in affordable housing in years to come. That’s no flight of fancy. It’s the inevitable outcome of a £39bn injection of public money into housing when their non-profit competitors are in financial crisis.