Ten thousand homes a year announced – a celebration of collaboration

At UKREiiF in Leeds, Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook announced the national rollout of the Small Sites Aggregator (SSA) — a programme with the ambition to unlock small, brownfield land in public ownership to build 10,000 social rent homes a year. We want to take a moment to celebrate that. Not because the work is finished – far from it, but because the programme has been developed through a genuine one-team approach — national, regional and local government working together, united by a common purpose to deliver housing that existing development and funding models are not designed for or able to commission. This is what gives us hope and optimism that there will be a way through to see the ambition realised. 

The Temporary Accommodation crisis

One of the central motivations underpinning the SSA is the growing number of households in temporary accommodation (TA) — the poor use of public money this represents and the human cost it creates. In England at the end of December 2025, there were 176,130 children living in TA, with the total cost of TA now standing at £2.8 billion per year (Shelter, 2025). 

Councils have a legal duty to provide accommodation to households that are legally homeless and in priority need. As private rents have continued to rise and social and affordable housing delivery has failed to keep pace with demand, more households are being forced into homelessness and placed in TA funded by the council. Most of that need is met through the private rental sector. 

As demand for TA has increased — and as the average length of stay has lengthened — the private market has become increasingly mobilised to meet that need. However, in too many instances it has done so with a priority to exploit the situation to make excessive profits off these statutory duties and average rents paid to the private sector for TA have risen well ahead of market rents. In reality, the only way to move more households out of longer-term Temporary Accommodation is by accelerating the delivery of social and affordable housing. The delivery of permanent social and affordable housing leads to costs being reduced or removed for both local and national government while providing long-term social assets. 

It is rare that a publicly funded programme can reduce public cost and, at the same time, provide a much-improved outcome for some of the most vulnerable families in our communities. That is the opportunity the SSA is designed for. 

What is the SSA?

The SSA seeks to addresses the root cause of the growing TA crisis directly, by accelerating the delivery of social and affordable housing by unlocking small brownfield sites in public ownership. For many households living in a state of managed homelessness, this is the only solution to their need for secure, stable accommodation. It was designed in partnership with local, regional and national government, who recognised that new delivery models were needed if we are to deliver more homes of the right tenure. 

The concept was initially developed through Lloyds Banking Group’s Social Housing Initiative, which brought together Local Authorities, developers and private finance providers to explore how the barriers to small-site development could be overcome. It was announced as a government programme in May 2025, in partnership with Bristol City Council, the London Borough of Lewisham and Sheffield City Council. The West of England Combined Authority (WECA) was formally announced as the national delivery lead in January 2026. Over the next 18 months, the aim is to successfully establish a programme of social and affordable housing delivery across the three pathfinder locations, across more than 60 sites, with an ambition to deliver up to 1,000 homes — and to test and design, through the pathfinder, a programme that can be rolled out nationally from 2027, with an ambition to grow to deliver 10,000 homes per year (as announced). 

Watch this space

We are not there yet, but the direction of travel is right, the leadership is real, and there is genuine reason to hope.