Andrews Charitable Trust  ·  May 2025

Think about two people.

The first is Sarah, a housing officer. This week, she has 47 families on her urgent rehousing list and three properties to offer them. Her morning will be spent on the phone to a retired landlord who owns a couple of terraced houses and has always let them at a fair rate. She needs him to take a family. She needs him not to sell.

The second is Priya, a support worker at a small local charity. She works with the people Sarah cannot place — those whose needs fall outside formal thresholds. Priya knows her tenants. She knows her landlords. She knows who might say yes if she personally vouches for someone.

She is holding part of the system together — through relationships that no policy has funded and no dataset has ever captured.

Sarah and Priya are not unusual. They are doing what thousands of people across this country do every week. And the question we're gathering to answer is: what happens if we lose them?

A sector without a name

Across England, there is a layer of housing provision that sits between social housing, commissioned services, and the mainstream private rented sector. Small landlords, charities, social enterprises, and mission-driven providers letting below market rent — often alongside support — to people the formal system struggles to reach.

Last year, World Habitat gave this a name: the Social Private Rental Sector. It was the right instinct and we thank them for doing this! Because what doesn't have a name can't be recognised. And what isn't recognised can't be supported. And what isn't supported becomes fragile.

At Andrews Charitable Trust, this is not an abstract issue for us. Our Establish project — now in its ninth year — is a Social Purpose PRS model in practice. We provide affordable homes for young people leaving care or at risk of homelessness, alongside mentoring and support. We currently have seven properties and 21 young people in them. We are proud of that. But we have also felt first-hand how difficult it is to sustain and grow at the pace the problem demands. That frustration is part of why we commissioned the research being presented next week, and part of why this question matters to us personally.

The numbers

• 1.3m households on social housing waiting lists in England
• 120,000+ households — including 150,000 children — in temporary accommodation
• 3% of private rentals affordable to people on housing benefit in many areas

The gap between social and private rents is not narrowing — in many areas it has doubled in the last five years. Meanwhile, small landlords, the ones most likely to let at lower rents and respond to local needs, are exiting: more than 200,000 individual landlords left the sector between 2017 and 2023.

Social housing is under such pressure that it is increasingly in triage mode — prioritising statutory duties, turning away people who don't quite meet the threshold. The system is narrowing at exactly the point where need is widening.

And yet people are still being housed. Not because the formal system is working as designed. Because something else is operating underneath it — a network of small landlords, charities, and social enterprises doing something the formal system cannot do alone: taking risks, using trust where the system relies on thresholds, working in ways that are flexible, local, and relational.

For many of the people we are most concerned about, this is not a supplement to the housing system. This is the housing system.

What we're gathering to do

On 13^th May, we're bringing together policy people, funders, practitioners, and researchers — people who understand this sector from the inside, and people who can influence what happens to it from outside. That combination is genuinely unusual. And it is exactly what this problem needs.

The day's work will be organised around three questions:

• Finance and funding — what models and incentives would make the Social Purpose PRS stable and scalable?

• Recognition and infrastructure — how do we bring a dispersed, relationship-based sector into policy without breaking what makes it effective?

• Reach and ownership — who is still falling through the gaps, and where do today's ideas need to land to gain traction?

This sector already exists. It is already working. And it is at risk — not from bad intentions, but from neglect and from reform that does not see it.

We'll be sharing a full write-up of the day's findings and outcomes here once the event has taken place. In the meantime, if you'd like to know more about our work or the Establish project, do get in touch.

Andrews Charitable Trust was founded in 1965. Our unique link to Andrews Property Group exists entirely to fund our charitable mission: tackling housing-related poverty. Find out more at andrewscharitabletrust.org.uk