A councillor wants SNG summoned over social homes sold on the open market while 4,500 households wait on the register. The committee decides on 16 September.

A borough councillor has asked the council’s scrutiny committee to summon one of England’s largest housing associations and make it account for selling social homes in Basingstoke and Deane on the open market.

The request is from Cllr Chloe Ashfield, who represents Whitchurch, Overton and Laverstoke for the Basingstoke and Deane Independent Group. It is published in full on the agenda for the Resident Services Committee on Wednesday 16 September, which decides whether to take the item on. (Work programme suggestion form, Resident Services Committee, 16 September 2026)

Her ward is the rural west of the borough. Overton lies about eight miles west of Basingstoke town centre and Whitchurch about 11, though she says the sales are happening across the borough as well as in her own patch.

What the councillor says is happening

In the form, Cllr Ashfield writes that SNG “has been disposing of significant numbers of homes within my ward (and further across the borough) for private sale”. She says those homes were transferred under a stock transfer agreement in 1995 and so were acquired at negligible cost, and are now being sold at full open market values that families on the council’s housing register could never afford.

She puts the housing register at 4,500 households and calls the disposals “deplorable” at a time when the council is struggling to meet its affordable housing delivery targets.

Those figures and that account are hers. We have not been able to verify the number of disposals, the housing register total or the 1995 transfer terms from an independent record today, and the report she is asking for is precisely the document that would settle them.

What she wants the committee to do

She asks officers to bring a report to the committee’s next meeting setting out:

  • what powers the council has, or has ever had, to stop a housing association disposing of stock, including the national regulatory position
  • what the council has already done to try to stop or limit these disposals

She then asks that SNG be invited to the following meeting to answer the findings directly. The questions she wants put to it are:

  • how many disposals have happened in the borough, broken down by property type and location
  • how they can be justified given the level of housing need and homelessness
  • how SNG will replace the lost homes, particularly in rural areas
  • why SNG is selling when another partner landlord, VIVID, is not
Timeline of Basingstoke and Deane Resident Services Committee dates: 16 September 2026, the committee decides whether to take on the social housing disposals item; 18 November 2026, the next scheduled meeting, where the councillor asks for the officer report; 13 January 2027, Anti-Poverty Strategy Action Plan; February 2027, refreshed Housing and Homelessness Strategy recommended to Full Council.
The committee's published forward programme. Source: Resident Services Committee work programme and Housing and Homelessness Strategy report, 16 September 2026. Graphic by Basingstoke Online.
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The timing matters. The committee’s published work programme currently has nothing scheduled before 18 November, which is the next meeting she is pointing at. (Resident Services work programme)

Why the council cannot simply stop it

Basingstoke and Deane owns no council housing. It transferred its stock years ago and now describes itself in its own papers as a non-stockholding authority: a separate report on the same 16 September agenda notes it became “just the fifth non-stockholding local authority” to win Domestic Abuse Housing Alliance accreditation. (Housing and Homelessness Strategy, 16 September 2026)

That is the heart of the problem Cllr Ashfield is putting to the committee. The council sets the allocations policy and runs the register, but the homes belong to housing associations, and whether a council has any lever over a disposal is exactly what she wants officers to spell out.

SNG, Sovereign Network Group, has its registered office in Basingstoke and says it provides 86,000 homes across London, the South East, South West and the East of England. (About us, SNG)

What SNG has been publishing

SNG has not published anything about selling homes in the borough that we could find, and it has not commented on the scrutiny request. What it has published this year is the other side of the ledger.

On 19 August it announced it had taken handover of the final 84 affordable homes at Hounsome Fields from the developer Vistry, bringing that phase to 95 homes in total, split 62 for social rent and 33 for shared ownership. (SNG press release, 19 August 2026)

Sovereign is also the council’s named partner on the regeneration of Buckskin and South Ham, the scheme Cabinet was asked to set rules for earlier this month. Neither of those things answers the question Cllr Ashfield is asking, which is about existing social homes leaving the sector, not new ones arriving.

What it means for you

If you are on the housing register, nothing changes on 16 September. The committee is deciding whether to look into this, not deciding anything about allocations.

If you want to follow it:

  • the meeting is at 6.30pm on Wednesday 16 September, in Committee Rooms 1 and 2 of the Deanes building at the council offices on London Road, and it is open to the public
  • the papers, including the suggestion form in full, are on the council’s agenda page
  • if the committee agrees, the officer report would be due at the 18 November meeting and SNG would be invited after that

If a social home in your street has been sold, the council is not the landlord and cannot reverse it. The route for a complaint about a housing association is the landlord’s own complaints process first, then the Housing Ombudsman.

The same meeting takes the council’s Housing and Homelessness Strategy and a report on rat control across the borough.

Sources