Ownership transfer of social housing in the UK: a property rights approach

Retrenchment of the public sector as a direct provider of rented accommodation has been accompanied by a growing reliance on housing associations as alternative providers of below-market rented accommodation in the UK. The most successful vehicle to date (in terms of transferred ownership of units) for growing the not-for-profit sector has been so-called ¿large-scale voluntary transfer¿ of dwellings formerly owned by local authorities. Since the turn of the century this has been accompanied by the rapid expansion of ¿arms-length management organizations¿ in England. Notably though, for a process concerned with the transfer of legal entitlements to property, the literature on stock transfer and social housing reform is marked by a curious absence of any discussion of a property rights dimension of this process and, particularly, how degree and form of ownership is capitalized through the prevailing (and changing) governance structures. The point of departure for this article is an examination of how stock transfer separates ownership over social housing attributes and the relative valuation of property rights. We argue that stock transfer involves the de jure transfer of property to a new legal entity, but that a significant part of de facto property rights remain ¿un-transferred¿, or have been redistributed within the public sector and thus do not necessarily constitute a redrawing of the public domain boundary.