The council would buy up to 70 homes and fund 95 more. 1,319 households wait on the register; 131 children are in temporary accommodation. Vote 24 September.

Wokingham Borough Council is being asked to approve £24 million to go out and buy houses. The money would be spent over three years, and the council reckons it could add between 127 and 165 homes to the borough’s affordable housing stock.

The plan went to the Community and Corporate Overview and Scrutiny Committee on Monday 7 September. The Executive takes the decision at 7pm on Thursday 24 September, and the programme would start on 1 October 2026.

What the £24m would buy

The programme has two halves, set out in the report to the committee:

  • Direct purchases by the council, delivering roughly 32 to 70 homes. That includes buying back former right to buy properties, buying out shared ownership stakes, ordinary open market purchases, and properties bought to meet a specific specialist need.
  • Up to £5.5 million of affordable housing commuted sums invested through the council’s own Local Housing Company, expected to support about 95 homes.

The Local Housing Company homes would be a mix of social rent, temporary accommodation, shared ownership, and private rented homes with rents capped at the Local Housing Allowance rate.

The spend is profiled at £8 million a year across 2026/27, 2027/28 and 2028/29. The council already has a capital line called Purchase of Council Houses, which would be folded into the new programme, so the genuinely new money is £18.9 million over the three years.

1,319 households are waiting

The business case behind the report gives the housing register in full. There are 1,319 active applications for affordable housing in the borough.

Sorted by priority band:

Band Households
Band 1 (highest need) 32
Band 2 154
Band 3 517
Band 4 504
Band 5 111
Total 1,319

Bands 3 and 4 together account for more than three quarters of the register. Only 186 households sit in the top two bands.

Sorted by the size of home they need, the picture is different again. One, two and three bedroom homes account for about 93% of all the demand.

How many bedrooms Wokingham's housing register needs

131 children in temporary accommodation

The council runs 96 temporary accommodation units inside the borough. At June 2026, 82 of them were occupied.

Those 82 units held 60 households with children, and 131 children in total. The report says family households are now the majority of placements, which is a change on the year before.

The average stay is about six months. Some households stay longer than twelve months, because the council cannot find them a larger family home, an adapted property, or specialist accommodation to move on to.

The report also states that homelessness presentations in the borough have broadly doubled over the last four years.

On cost, the report gives two figures for 2025/26. Gross spending on temporary accommodation was £3,224,631. The net cost to the council was £101,462. The report does not break down the difference between the two.

Where the money comes from

The council is not planning to raise council tax for this. The outline business case assumes:

  • £21.55 million from ringfenced commuted sums the council has already received from developers.
  • £2.45 million from borrowing.

Commuted sums are payments developers make instead of building affordable homes on their own sites. The report notes those figures will firm up as individual purchases are agreed.

The rules on each purchase

No property gets bought without its own business case. The financial model the council would apply assumes:

  • a 40 year investment term
  • a 5% target return, which has to cover financing costs
  • a 3% allowance for empty periods and unpaid rent
  • £650 a year in management costs per home
  • £600 a year in maintenance for the first ten years, then £800
  • £800 a year for major works from year five
  • £20,000 for works on each empty property before it is let

Individual purchases would be signed off by the Director of Children’s, Adults, Housing and Health Services, in consultation with the Director of Resources and Assets and the Leader, Councillor Stephen Conway. They would not come back to a public committee.

Across the programme, the council estimates the homes it buys would bring in between £218,000 and £476,000 a year in rent.

There is also a cost avoidance argument. Adult Social Care says a placement in commissioned accommodation costs £20,000 to £25,000 per bed space a year more than a council home would. Children’s Social Care puts the figure at £450 a week for transitional housing and £650 a week for general housing.

What it means for you

  • If you are on the housing register, nothing changes on 24 September. The programme is an approval to buy, not a list of homes. Purchases would start from 1 October and run for three years as properties come up.
  • If you need a one bedroom home, you are in the largest group on the register, at 586 households. The council says one, two and three bedroom homes are where it would concentrate.
  • If you need a larger family home or an adapted property, the report is blunt that these are the hardest to find, and that this is why some households are stuck in temporary accommodation past a year.
  • If you want to comment, there is no public consultation. The report states plainly that none is proposed, because this is an enabling decision rather than a decision about any particular property. The Executive meeting on 24 September is public, and questions to the Executive close at 10am on 15 September.
  • If you sell a house in the borough over the next three years, the council is now a potential buyer, at market value and subject to its own valuation and survey.

For what is being built rather than bought, see our Wokingham planning news page. For what homes are actually selling for locally, see Wokingham house prices.

Sources