12th June 2025
We welcome the Chancellor, Rt Hon Rachel Reeves’s, landmark announcement of a £39 billion Affordable Homes Programme over the next 10 years. This long overdue commitment to social and affordable housing has the potential to be transformative—if it truly includes those who have so often been left behind: people with a learning disability and autistic people.
At Golden Lane Housing, we see firsthand the critical role that high quality, supported housing plays in these people’s lives—not only as a foundation for independence but as a vital component of health and social care. As the Chancellor rightly highlights the importance of integrated approaches to health and housing, we must seize this moment to address one of the most urgent and unacceptable realities:
51% of people with a learning disability and autistic people still in hospitals remain there due to a lack of suitable housing.
Let us be clear: hospitals are not homes. Many of these individuals do not require hospital treatment but are trapped in a revolving door system due to systemic failures in housing delivery. If this new investment is to succeed, we must ensure that homes for people with a learning disability and autistic people are not an after thought but a cornerstone of delivery.
Over 2,000 additional supported housing tenancies are needed each year to meet the increasing need requiring over £340m per year of government and private finance capital.
Registered Providers like Golden Lane Housing are ready to step up—but we need the right framework and funding to do so.
Every unnecessary day spent in hospital for someone with a learning disability is a failure of the system. Every person who continues to live with increasingly older parents and wants the right of independent living is a failure of the system. The £39 billion commitment must help build the right homes in the right places—homes that enable discharge, homes that prevent admission, homes that avoid crisis situations, homes that give people a life of their choosing.