A merger too far
Posted: October 22, 2025 Filed under: Cornwall, Housing associations Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
It may not be quite merger mania but the steady flow of housing association amalgamations continues.
So too do the questions. Where will this end? When does big become too big? Should business logic always trump local connection?
The mooted merger between Bromford Flagship and LiveWest made me think again about all those questions precisely because of that local factor.
When I first moved to west Cornwall in the 1990s, the council housing stock had just gone through a stock transfer, one of many carried out by small district councils following approval by tenants in a ballot.
In 2007 Penwith Housing Association became part of Devon and Cornwall Housing. DCH in turn merged with Knightstone to form LiveWest in 2018.
The tenants’ landlord became larger and larger and also more remote – with headquarters more than 100 miles away in Devon – and there was no further ballot but at least those organisations made some kind of regional sense.
Now, 30 years on from that original stock transfer, we potentially have merger number three, with LiveWest in talks to become part of Bromford Flagship (itself the product of a merger that only happened in February).
The merged landlord will become one of the largest in the country, owning or managing more than 120,000 homes stretching from Land’s End to Norfolk via the Midlands, with a headquarters 230 miles away in Tewkesbury.
There will of course be nothing to stop what would become Bromford Flagship LiveWest developing structures for local accountability and tenants may see little immediate change, maybe not even the logo on the side of repairs vans.
The arguments in favour of merger are well-rehearsed: a bigger landlord with a stronger balance sheet should be able to build more new homes (50,000 over the next 15 years is the stated aim) and invest more in its existing stock.
And mergers are by no means confined to housing: the council that did that transfer in the 1990s has since amalgamated with six others to form one big Cornwall Council; multiple local schools are part of the same academy trust; the local further education college was taken over by one further east.
Perhaps too all of this has become more possible in a digital world where we contact landlords via apps and websites and hybrid working has become the norm.
But if we go back to the birth of stock transfer I don’t think anyone imagined landlords of this size, not the tenants who voted for it and certainly not the Conservative ministers who saw the very existence of similarly sized local authority landlords like Birmingham as the argument for change.
None of this is to say that giant landlords like Places for People, Clarion, L&Q, Sanctuary and in the future Bromford Flagship LiveWest cannot do good work.
If some of them have got caught up in scandals over conditions for their tenants, so too have local authorities and smaller housing associations.
And what is the realistic alternative in a world that constantly demands that they do more with less and where they own an ageing social housing stock that requires major investment to make it safe and energy efficient?
But follow that argument to its logical conclusion and we will be left with a handful of huge national housing associations. The only limit on their expansion may be whether lenders will see them as too big and therefore too much of a risk.
The question is what is being lost in the process.
Tenants will be getting a bigger, more remote landlord but also one with more money to repair and improve their homes (though the assumption that mergers will deliver greater value for money is still just an assumption).
In this case, their landlord will still be LiveWest and they may be unaware that it will be part of a larger group structure, but are they really being consulted or are boards just deciding on their behalf?
Local authorities will inevitably have less influence over a housing association operating across the country than one that only operates in their area. They should know all about local housing need but may feel forced to take what they can get.
But what about would-be tenants, the people with that housing need?
The result of all these mergers is huge housing associations that combine smaller organisations once inspired by philanthropy, municipalism, religious mission or 1960s idealism. They will now all be driven by 21st century commercial imperatives.
Bromford Flagship was the third biggest builder of affordable homes in 2024/25 and LiveWest the 13thbiggest. The combined organisation would have been first, ahead of L&Q and Places for People.
But mergers exist within an eco-system that has become more and more commercial and pro-cyclical, dependent on cross-subsidy and developer contributions to make up for rising but still inadequate grant funding. They are part of the same business logic.
Would-be tenants in west Cornwall face one of the biggest gaps in the country between incomes and house prices and rents and things are getting worse thanks to the rise of short-term lets.
That makes homes for social rent the overwhelming local housing need. And those are what the current system is not delivering – just 18 per cent of starts and 25 per cent of completions in 2024/25 were for social rent.
This is a general problem, not one specific to Bromford Flagship and LiveWest (which as it happens would also have been top for social rent completions).
True, those proportions will increase under the new Social and Affordable Housing Programme and, true, large housing associations are infinitely preferable to large developers and large private landlords.
But something else is needed alongside them: an alternative of locally accountable organisations focussed on local housing need, with the power and the resources to act on it.
If only we had a name for it.
Jules Birch 