By Peter Brown, chair of Keniston Housing Association (Peter is writing in a personal capacity) 

Shared Ownership is sold to the British public as a ladder — an affordable first rung on the path to full homeownership. Four decades and an estimated £10 billion of public money later, it has proved to be anything but. The evidence is now overwhelming and the verdict is damning.

Three major independent bodies have delivered the same conclusion: the House of Commons Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee (March 2024), the Housing Ombudsman (September 2024), and the National Audit Office (March 2026) have all pointed to the same failures. This is not bad luck, poor implementation or an unfortunate run of circumstances. It is the inevitable result of a scheme built on a fundamentally flawed foundation.

The six failures at the heart of the scheme

Full repair bills, fractional ownership. Shared owners who hold as little as a 25% stake or less are nonetheless required to pay 100% of maintenance, repair, and service charge costs. They bear the financial burden of full ownership without possessing it.

Service charges that spiral without limit. Fees routinely surge well above inflation, compounding the twin pressures of rent and mortgage payments into a genuine financial crisis for many households.

Staircasing that leads nowhere. The myth of full ownership — buying additional shares over time — becomes practically impossible as rising property values and steep transaction costs price buyers out of their own homes. Only 2% of shared owners have staircased to 100%.

Properties that cannot be sold. Rigid housing association rules, compounded by unresolved building safety liabilities, have turned many shared ownership flats into assets that simply cannot be disposed of at any viable price.

Leasehold costs with no freehold rights. Buyers pay ground rent and leasehold expenses in their entirety while holding zero control over the freehold. The obligations of ownership are imposed; the rights of ownership are withheld.

An asymmetry of knowledge that is never corrected. People in housing need — often young, often under financial pressure — are expected to navigate labyrinthine legal arrangements they have no background to understand and little incentive to scrutinise until it is far too late.

Costs individualised, consequences deferred

Repeated attempts have been made to paper over these cracks — reducing the minimum purchasable share, tightening lease terms, tweaking transaction rules — yet the fundamental architecture of the scheme remains intact, and so do its fundamental problems.

The root cause is structural: in shared ownership, debt is personal rather than collective. Entry costs are initially compressed to appear affordable; the true costs — rising service charges, major repair bills, mortgage rate increases and transaction expenses — arrive later and must be borne alone. For renters, such costs are absorbed collectively. For shared owners, they are a private liability with no escape valve.

The result, particularly for flat owners, is a financial vice. Rising costs depress valuations precisely when owners most need to sell. The scheme traps the very people it was designed to help.

The political origins of a poisoned idea

The origins of the scheme reveal that its problems are not accidental. Shortly after his election to parliament in April 1974, John Stanley published Shared Purchase: A New Route to Home Ownership, a pamphlet endorsed by shadow environment minister Margaret Thatcher. The 1979 Conservative manifesto subsequently promised to “encourage shared purchase schemes which will enable people to buy a house or flat on mortgage, on the basis initially of a part-payment which they complete later when their incomes are high enough”.

The name change from “shared purchase” to “shared ownership” was no accident. Stanley explained it himself:

“[W]hat we now come to is shared purchase, which I then decided shared ownership was a better phrase, because shared purchase just suggests a one off. But shared ownership has a greater … at least I felt it was a stronger phrase and it is, it’s ownership. So that’s why I rechristened it.”

As Cowan, Carr and Wallace (2018) observe, this terminology was far from politically or technically neutral. It gave the scheme undeniable appeal to a Conservative Party determined to create a nation of homeowners. And it carried a deliberate ideological payload: an owner has responsibilities. In the standard full repairing lease, the occupier was — and remains — responsible for 100% of repairs and all outgoings, regardless of their ownership share.

That asymmetry was acknowledged from the outset. In Stanley’s own 1974 model, the arrangement was described as “slightly unfair” but justified as a “fair quid pro quo for the small element of subsidy in the scheme”. Half a century later, that small unfairness has ballooned into a systemic crisis for hundreds of thousands of households.

A market deliberately narrowed

The damage inflicted by shared ownership extends beyond the scheme itself. Its promotion came at the direct expense of alternatives that might have served the public far better.

The right to buy channelled the best of the social rented stock into private hands at deep discount — 90% of the properties sold were houses. The 40,000 co-ownership schemes, under which members jointly owned property and shared the mortgage costs, were wound up rather than reformed. Funding for housing co-operatives was withdrawn. The later Leasehold Schemes for the Elderly was short-lived. The 1984 Housing and Building Control Act enabled individuals within co-ownership schemes to purchase their properties outright, extinguishing the collective model entirely.

The Thatcher government did not simply promote homeownership — it actively suppressed every alternative. The result was a housing market homogenised around individual ownership, stripped of the diverse tenures that allow a diverse population to find stable, affordable homes.

The reckoning

On 16 June 2025, the BBC reported that complaints about shared ownership were rising faster than for any other housing tenure. A subsequent radio broadcast gave voice to the human cost: powerful, individual testimonies of financial desperation from people who entered the scheme in good faith and found themselves unable to leave.

More than £10 billion of public funding has been channelled into shared ownership since its inception. What has it bought? Not the homeowning democracy it promised, but a significant proportion of people financially marooned — paying the full costs of ownership while holding only a fraction of the rights, unable to sell, unable to staircase and unable to escape.

Minor fixes will not do

For most people today, accessing stable, quality housing means pursuing individual homeownership — not because it is best, but because decades of ideology have eliminated the alternatives. As Thatcher proudly proclaimed, “There is no alternative”. Tweaks to transaction costs and lease terms address the symptoms, not the disease.

What is required is a fundamental reassessment of how public housing subsidy is deployed. A disproportionate share has been used to prop up individual ownership at the expense of a genuinely diverse housing market — one that could serve renters, co-operative members, social tenants and owners alike. Instead, Conservative housing policy has produced a monoculture: homogenised, fragile and failing.

The idea that shared ownership represents a route to housing security was always more political slogan than policy reality. It is past time to say so plainly — and to build a diversity of tenure in its place.

Source: Dave Cowan, Helen Carr & Alison Wallace (2018) “Thank heavens for the lease”: histories of shared ownership, Housing Studies, 33:6, 855–875. https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2017.1408782