Various, Mixed and Shared
A stock of community housing is not a care leavers’ hostel or an extra-care facility, nor is it a refuge move-on building. It is a stock of buildings that can absorb a new care leaver this month, a second-stage domestic abuse family next month, a ninety-year-old whose home has become impossible to manage, a family burned out of their house, and an older worker between jobs and tenancies. The unit type (small private space, generous shared facilities) is designed to support that flexibility. A mix of residents can a social good in itself: the loneliness that older people in single-occupancy housing experience and the isolation that care leavers experience are problems that mixed living arrangements partially alleviate.
The Downstream Costs
Three things are happening simultaneously and visibly in 2026. Beds are blocked at one in eight hospitals by people who are medically fit to leave but have with nowhere to go, costing the NHS around £2 billion a year in direct costs and far more in cancelled procedures and emergency department backlogs. Local authority spending on temporary accommodation has more than doubled in five years to reach £2.84 billion a year, with seven London boroughs already on Exceptional Financial Support and Birmingham among others reducing core services to fund homelessness duty. One-quarter of the adult prison population have been in care; the same proportion of homeless adults is also made up of care leavers. The over-65 population will have grown to 22% of the country by 2030 and the over-85 population will have doubled by 2045. Yet the housing stock to support them does not exist.
These are not separate problems. They are manifestations of the same problem: a country that has stopped building shelter for the people whose lives don’t fit the market’s product range. The cost shows up in the NHS budget, the local authority budget, the criminal justice budget, the children’s social care budget, and the inadequate temporary accommodation people end up living in. Community Housing is the policy that puts shelter in the right place at the start. It does not claim a specific scale of saving against those downstream costs, but a permanent capital line dedicated to building the housing those populations need will, over time, dent those costs substantially.
The Casey Moment
The Independent Commission on Adult Social Care has called for a “creation moment” for social care, equivalent to the founding of the NHS. Whatever recommendations the Commission makes in 2026 and 2028, the housing dimension of social care reform is unavoidable. Care delivered in the home requires homes that can support it; care delivered in a community setting requires the community setting to exist. Community Housing is the physical layer of social care reform. It is funded, designed, and built to be that.
Part of a System
The system effect is what matters. The same councils that receive age-weighted Universal Care Service funding to deliver care to older people, apply to build the homes in which that care can actually happen. The new Local Service Hubs and Community Food Centres provide the connective tissue: a place to eat, a place to be known, a route into the local services people might otherwise miss. Community Housing is therefore not a housing supply policy with a social-care bonus. It is the capital programme for the care infrastructure that Baroness Casey’s “creation moment” requires, financed by removing the speculative gain that has driven a wedge through the housing market over the last 40 years.
