Amelia* is a full-time working mother of two being forced to leave her home because she can’t afford the latest rent increase from her private landlord. On paper, Amelia’s one of the luckier ones: she has a stable job and lives in a city where rents are 35% lower than the national average. Yet for three months, Amelia has failed to find a single alternative home she could afford.

Though she is theoretically eligible for social housing, joining the 1.3m households already trapped on waiting lists won’t fix her immediate crisis. Neither, it seems, will Labour’s flagship pledge to build 1.5m new homes.

Last month, the government promised a £350m increase in affordable housing funds. But what does “affordable” mean in practice? It’s defined as a rent of no more than 80% of market rate. In a market where house prices have risen to nine times average wages in England and Wales, 80% of any such amount has clearly become completely unaffordable for most people.

Of the 2,800 new affordable homes to be built with the extra funding, the government has said half will be social rent (homes that are either owned by housing associations or local authorities, available at 50% of market rate and meant for people on low incomes); the money will also fund an additional 250 council homes. These promises come on the back of ministers consistently acknowledging the unabating lack of social homes. This raises the question: why are Labour’s interventions not commensurate with the scale of the problem we are facing, and the opportunity it has to fix it?

Successive governments have exacerbated rather than solved the crisis, with policies solidifying housing as a commodity rather than a right. The housing crisis experienced by people such as Amelia is a direct result of the selloff of social housing. This has been caused, in part, by the failure to end or devolve the right-to-buy scheme, which has seen more than 100,000 social homes lost since 2015, four in 10 of which are now rented out for profit in the private market.

This loss of social homes is also directly contributing to astronomical increases in temporary accommodation costs – a staggering 89% over the past decade. In 2023-2024 alone, councils in England spent £2.3bn on temporary accommodation. In some regions, such as Yorkshire and Humber, councils are paying about three times the rate of private rent on temporary accommodation.

Hard-hit councils are trying entrepreneurial fixes to housing shortages, looking for homes far outside their areas. Last week, the London borough of Enfield began looking for homes around Liverpool. Simultaneously, from 2021 to 2026, councils will have paid £70bn in subsidy to landlords through local housing allowance.

The real solution is providing council housing that protects individuals’ right to shelter and brings in revenue to fund public services. While Labour’s stated aim is to prioritise growth, its inaction means that public and private money is being haemorrhaged on housing costs. If households were not being forced to spend almost half of their incomes on housing, they would have disposable income to spend locally. Shelter has recently shown that investment in 90,000 social homes could bring £51bn into the economy over 30 years.

But so far, the government’s interventions seem to primarily serve the interests of developer-landlords. These perpetual winners continue to reap the financial rewards of building new homes, while wriggling out of section 106 affordable housing commitments, too often on the grounds of depleted profit margins. As research from the University of Sheffield shows, in Manchester between 2012 and 2020 only 151 affordable homes were built – quite a slump from the mandatory 20% affordable housing target of 4,583 homes. This is the extractive development model in practice.

The new planning and infrastructure bill is set to bolster this system, through a focus on “cutting the red tape” to build faster and bigger. Bulldozing the planning system is being celebrated by the developers and the building sector, a tell-tale sign of who is set to win from these changes. It is no coincidence that the build-to-let firms have, in 2025, become the UK’s largest single type of business, increasing more than fourfold from 2016. The developer-led model will never prioritise social and genuinely affordable housing.

With Labour’s current plans, renters will not see their lives improve. Instead, they need the government to shift its focus and take seriously the opportunity that social housing offers – for people’s lives and the economy – complemented by mechanisms to deal with unfettered rent increases. Unless this government takes action on social housing, anyone who rents privately in this country might soon be facing the same crisis as Amelia.

* This name has been changed