Social rent council homes fall below 1.5 million

Stats in Brief

Council Housing Statistics 2024/25

December 2025

thelabourcampaignforcouncilhousing.org

Every year councils with council housing stock send in statistical data to the Ministry of Housing. Some of them for 2024/25 have been published. The remaining ones, including Right to Buy sales will be published in the new year. You can check out the data for your local authority here.

Continued decline of Social Rent homes

The decline of Social Rent council housing continued last year, with a loss of 27,936 homes, For the first time ever the number of Social Rent council homes in England fell below 1.5 million.

Despite 9,024 additional council homes built or bought (acquisitions) there was a slight fall of 525 in the number of council homes overall to 1,560,888.

Read on below or download a PDF here

Waiting lists

There were 1,340,435 households on the housing waiting lists, a small increase of 10,000. 644,529 were in “a reasonable preference category”. Of these 306,633 were living in “unsanitary or overcrowded housing, or otherwise living in unsatisfactory housing conditions”. 158,860 need a move “on medical or welfare grounds, including grounds relating to a disability”.

Voids

There was an 11% increase in rent loss from voids (empty properties) from £174,245,715 to £193,716,647, £75 million of it in London.

There was an increase in the average number of days to relet vacant properties from 71 in 2023/24 to 79 in 2024/25. This compares with an average of 32 days in 2016.

Lettings

There were 84,802 council properties let in 2024/25. However, of these, only 52,569 were let to new tenants. The rest were let to existing tenants. That’s a very small number when you consider that more than 1.3 million households are on the waiting list.

Rent arrears

Arrears for existing tenants were marginally down on 2023/24 – £393,672,501 compared to £397,006,149. For former tenants they were £199,131,252, down from £200,524,725. Rent arrears written off increased from £45 to £47 million.

Local Authority Statistical Data Release

	2023/24	2024/25
Dwellings owned by LA	1,561,423	1,560,888
Social Rent	1,519,026	1,491,090
Affordable Rent	40,198	43,683
Demolitions	2,030	1,470
Conversions +	138	105
Conversions –	-43	-43
New Builds	4,379	4,993
Acquisitions	4,434	4,031
Other additions	187	723
Other losses	726	735

For London arrears were £175,151,684 for existing tenants, compared to the previous year’s £179,035,835. For former tenants they were £80,747,993, compared to £88,514840. Rent arrears written off increased from £11 million to £15 million in London.

Housing Revenue Accounts

Of the 196 local authroities in England 162 have Housing Reveue Accounts, 134 do not. 180 own some housing stock outside of an HRA. A serious council house building/acquisitions programme would have to promote the relaunching of HRAs in those 134 local authorities that have sold off their council housing stock.

Evictions

Evictions increased from 2,085 to 2,270