A single letter published in the Guardian this week has crystallised one of the most persistent failures in British housing policy. Written by Marco Scalvini and published on 24 August 2026, it makes a deceptively simple demand: that social housing be monitored the way any other piece of public infrastructure would be. Roads get inspected. Hospitals publish waiting lists. Social housing, by contrast, is counted once - on the day planning permission is granted - and then largely forgotten.
Counted Once, Never Checked Again
The core problem Scalvini identifies is structural. A home is classified as affordable at the planning stage and, as he puts it, "is rarely examined again, through completion, tenure change and the service charges that can make it unaffordable within months of occupation." That is a remarkable admission about a housing system the government has pledged to overhaul. The label sticks; the reality drifts.
This is not a niche concern. Shared ownership schemes are drastically failing to deliver an affordable route to homeownership for too many people, subjecting buyers to rising rents, uncapped service charges, and a disproportionate exposure to repair and maintenance costs, according to a cross-party parliamentary committee. The lived experience behind that finding is stark. One shared owner in Kings Cross found her annual service charge bill rise by 274 per cent, from £4,200 to almost £16,000, on top of her mortgage and rent. A home that passed every affordability test on the day of planning permission had become, in practice, unaffordable within a few years of occupation.
Rapidly rising service charges can undermine affordability, push staircasing out of reach by making it harder for people to save, and make homes harder to sell. And yet, as Scalvini argues, there is no public, dated record that would allow anyone - resident, councillor, journalist - to track that deterioration systematically. The data exists in fragments. The picture never assembles.
The Elephant in the Room
The letter's most sobering example is Elephant and Castle in Southwark. Scalvini describes how residents spent three years fighting through freedom of information requests to extract the viability evidence behind an affordable housing commitment that ultimately delivered just 82 social rented homes in place of more than a thousand. By the time that information emerged, the estate was gone. A record that arrives after demolition, as he rightly observes, can only count the losses.
The history of that site is well documented in planning records. When a major developer proposed demolishing the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre and building a mixed residential development of nearly a thousand homes, the scheme promised 35 per cent affordable housing, but only 33 social rent equivalent homes, because viability, it was claimed, would not allow for more. The viability process was opaque, contested and - crucially - not subject to any ongoing public register of what was promised against what was built.
Scalvini is careful to note that Southwark is not uniquely culpable. The borough, like almost every local authority, publishes every pound of the financial contributions developers pay, yet offers no scheme-level account of whether the promised social rented homes were actually built. The transparency is financial; the accountability for delivery is absent.
Old Kent Road: The Record That Could Still Be Written
The letter pivots to a more hopeful case. Southwark's Old Kent Road Area Action Plan outlines a major redevelopment blueprint aiming to construct 20,000 new homes, create a revitalised high street, and double existing local employment over two decades. Only a fraction of those homes are yet built or under way. The record, Scalvini argues, could still be kept in time to shape what is actually delivered.
The future of the Old Kent Road remains deeply uncertain, with the council's sweeping regeneration strategy facing intense community pushback, and the controversial Area Action Plan having moved before a government Planning Inspector following a wave of formal objections from residents, business owners and housing advocates. Whether the social rented element of those 20,000 homes survives that process - and at what rents, and for how long - is precisely the kind of question a public, scheme-level record would be able to answer.
The most recent figures from a JLL Partners survey found that in the first three months of 2026 only 7 per cent of housing starts were achieved in London, leaving an enormous gap between ambition and delivery. Against that backdrop, the absence of a systematic delivery record is not merely a transparency failure. It is a policy failure.
The NHS Comparison
Scalvini invokes Nye Bevan's idea of housing as an essential service comparable to the NHS, and the comparison is instructive rather than rhetorical. The NHS publishes waiting lists, inspection results and performance data, and is held to them. Housing has no equivalent, whatever the tenure or whoever the landlord. In July 2025, the government published its five-step plan to deliver what it described as the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation, alongside a transformational and lasting change in the safety and quality of social housing. Grand ambition; modest machinery for measuring whether it is met.
A parliamentary amendment currently before the Lords would require local housing authorities to maintain and publish annual registers recording dwellings sold under the right to buy against new social housing provided, enabling public scrutiny of whether authorities are failing to replenish their stock. That is a start. But Scalvini's call goes further: he wants dated, public records of what was promised at planning stage, what arrived on completion, and what it actually costs to live in those homes across the years they are supposed to remain affordable. The register that has been proposed would track losses through right to buy. His proposal would track promises through the entire delivery chain.
What This Means Beyond London
It would be tempting to read this as a London story. The examples are London examples, the viability battles are London battles, and the 20,000-home schemes are London schemes. But the accountability gap is national.
In Tonbridge and the wider Kent market, the same planning machinery applies. Developer contributions flow through section 106 agreements. Affordable housing percentages are negotiated, recorded at the point of planning consent and then, in the absence of any statutory scheme-level reporting, rarely revisited. The average sale price across the twelve areas we track locally sits at £719,483 - a figure that underlines just how wide the gap between market housing and genuine affordability has grown in this part of the South East, and therefore how much is at stake when the affordable component of any given development quietly shrinks between consent and completion.
The London Assembly Housing Committee has asked whether rising service charges could lead to affordable shared ownership homes becoming unaffordable. That question applies in Tonbridge as readily as it does in Southwark. Shared ownership homes granted planning permission in Kent carry the same classification risk as those in London: labelled affordable at consent, potentially not affordable in practice a decade later, with no public mechanism to flag the divergence.
A Straightforward Fix With a Political Price Tag
The remedy Scalvini proposes is not technically complicated. It is a public register: scheme-level, dated, covering what was promised, what was built and what it costs to live in. The data to populate it already exists in local authority planning departments, housing association accounts and section 106 monitoring reports. The obstacle is not capacity; it is will.
The government has committed to delivering the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation, alongside a transformational and lasting change in the safety and quality of social housing. If that commitment is to mean anything in practice, it needs a yardstick. Right now, there isn't one. The homes counted as affordable on the day of planning permission remain counted as affordable long after the service charges, tenure changes and viability revisions have quietly made them something else entirely.
The letter from Scalvini is short. The problem it describes is not. And for buyers, renters and communities across the country - including those in towns like Tonbridge where the margin between affordable and unaffordable is already razor-thin - the case for a proper public record has rarely been more urgent.