For-profit investors now control the majority of England’s supported-housing sector—including care homes for the elderly and children in care—and collect roughly £8 billion per year in state subsidies. This matters because supported housing sits at the intersection of two crises: housing unaffordability and rising demand for social care. Historically run by non-profits, the sector has been rapidly bought up by large institutional investors. Critics warn that these investors charge monopoly rents for inadequate care, or use debt-laden models that funnel public money into offshore tax havens. Yet the scale, geography, and ownership structure of this shift remain poorly understood. The Rentierization of Supported-Housing project will map every publicly reported supported-housing unit in England, tracing where state subsidies ultimately end up. It will also examine why this “rentierization” happened—through interviews with national and local actors—and scrutinise how for-profit strategies reshape power relations between investors, the state, and non-profits. If successful, the research could inform tighter regulation of supported-housing markets, helping ensure that public money delivers decent care rather than shareholder returns. Policymakers and charities will gain an interactive ownership map and a final report, both designed to make the hidden financial architecture of this critical social infrastructure visible.
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Societies are grappling with housing unaffordability as well as a growing demand for social care. At the intersection of these problems lies the provision of supported-housing: state-subsidised housing provided alongside some degree of care. Currently accommodating over half a million people in England – ranging from people with disabilities to children in care – the sector has historically been owned and managed by non-for-profit entities. However, over recent decades for-profit investors, and especially large-scale institutional-investors, have acquired a growing proportion of the sector and its associated £8 billion per-annum state-subsidies. This trend is most advanced in elderly and children’s care homes - where at least four out of every five bedspaces are provided by for-profit investors - but is increasingly prevalent in other aspects of supported-housing including specialist supported-housing and temporary/exempt accommodation. Whilst certain forms of private investment (e.g. social impact investing) likely bring social-benefits, this overall trend has prompted a range of concerns that for-profit investors are charging monopoly rents for inadequate levels of care, or adopting unsustainable debt-laden business models that transfer state subsidies to off-shore tax-havens. The Rentierization of Supported-Housing (RoSH) research project, based in the Bartlett School of Planning at UCL (BSP/UCL), will interrogate this trend, situating it as part of the broader “rentierization” of the UK political-economy whereby, having privatised socially-critical and scarce assets subject to limited competition, the state (and citizens) increasingly rents them back from the private-sector (Christophers, 2020). The project has three main aims. First, through linking datasets and tracing flows of money between different corporate entities, RoSH will granularly map and detail the location, operator and owner of every publicly-reported supported-housing unit in England, thus helping identify in whose hands the associated state subsidies ultimately end up. Second, the project will examine the causes of this rentierization process. Drawing on document analysis and key-informant interviews with state, market and non-profit actors at the national-scale, it will examine the role of different factors (ideological, material, institutional) in bringing this new asset class into existence. Further, because supported housing is ultimately provided and overseen by local authorities, the project will use a local case study to explore how "markets" for supported housing are constructed and regulated on the ground. Third, the project will scrutinise the social and political-economic implications of this rentierization process. Specifically, it will examine the investment and management strategies adopted by different for-profit investors for different types of supported-housing and decrypt how the resources and strategies of for-profit investors interact with those of the state and non-profit actors, to shape power relations between them, ultimately affecting the long-term sustainability of the sector. Reflecting its policy-relevance, the project will be delivered in partnership with several organisations: Crisis homelessness charity, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Chartered Institute of Housing, and the ESRC-funded UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence. All have a strong social interest in supported-housing and extensive networks with relevant policymakers and practitioners which the project will draw upon. In addition to academic publications, the project will deliver a range of publicly-available outputs targeted at policymakers and citizens, including an online, interactive map of supported-housing ownership, and a final project report that will be presented and discussed at a series of policy-roundtables. Together, these outputs will illuminate the growing role of for-profit investors in delivering and controlling this increasingly critical social infrastructure.
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