BSC's Investment Director Marie-Alix Prat on why we are working to improve the provision of white goods and furnishings across our affordable housing portfolio, as published in Living Inside Housing.
For many people moving into social and affordable housing, securing the tenancy is just the first step to a liveable home. A new let often means bare rooms with no cooker, fridge, flooring, or window coverings. This is called furniture poverty - and social renters are four times more likely to experience it than homeowners, according to the charity End Furniture Poverty.
This is no small problem - around 1.2 million people in the UK live without a washing machine or fridge freezer, according to the Association of Charitable Organisations. Yet the everyday essentials that make a home rarely feature in conversations about housing supply. This is mainly down to the fact that the UK has no standard model for furnishing a home or providing the appliances that make it liveable.
Social landlords have few options for providing these basics. The main routes are local authority crisis grants, which are slow to access, or managers dipping into their own discretionary funds. As a result, provision varies by tenure and landlord rather than following any shared expectation of what a liveable home should include - the default is often an unfurnished place without the basics.
For anyone investing for social impact, it is an uncomfortable truth: providing an affordable home does not end at the front door. So, we are naming it, starting with our own portfolio, with the aim of helping build a standard the whole sector can work towards.
The real cost: affordability and wellbeing
Furnishing a home from nothing is expensive – and the less you have, the more it costs. A basic set of essentials costs around £4,000, a sum well out of reach for someone arriving with limited resources (Extent of Furniture Poverty 2026).
The same research found that going without a cooker added around £2,184 a year to a family of four's food bill, as households rely on pricier ready meals and takeaways. And with no savings to buy outright, many fall back on high-cost credit to buy appliances - according to the charity Turn2us, a fridge bought this way can end up costing more than double through a rent-to-own supplier.
The human cost is just as real. Many people move into social or affordable housing straight from crisis - temporary accommodation, an unsafe home, or years on a waiting list - and a bare flat can feel like more of the same instability rather than a fresh start.
More than a quarter of people in furniture poverty report a very or extremely negative impact on their physical health, and almost a third report the same for their mental health - rising to 62% among social renters, with many too embarrassed to have friends or family round.
Yet the evidence shows that when people have the essentials, their health, finances and security improve, and they are far more likely to sustain their tenancy - reducing costly turnover and voids for landlords, and giving tenants the stability to put down roots.
Learnings from our portfolio
Since we started investing in social and affordable housing a decade ago, we've looked at affordability from many angles. The provision of white goods and furnishings came into focus more recently, and we've been working with the funds we invest in to strengthen what they offer. We're not yet where we want to be across the whole portfolio, but this will be part of the criteria for any future investments we make.
Encouragingly, several of the social and affordable housing funds we invest in already go well beyond the minimum of a cooker. Funding Affordable Homes provides cookers, flooring, selected appliances, and curtains or blinds at the point of first letting. Man Community Housing Fund does the same, with cookers, flooring, appliances and curtain fittings in its social and affordable tenures.
CBRE UK Affordable Housing Fund takes a similar approach, building white goods, flooring, turf and window coverings into the base specification of every new rented home, so the cost is covered from the start. At its Wood Wharf scheme, this saves around £7,000 per household in upfront move-in costs.
Elsewhere, L&G Affordable Housing Fund is piloting a White Goods Gifting scheme, offering financial support towards appliances for tenants in need. So far, 56% of tenants have taken up the offer.
These examples show comprehensive provision isn’t out of reach. But it isn't yet the norm - including across our own portfolio, where provision above the minimum is inconsistent. The costs and delivery challenges are real. What's missing is a shared standard for what a liveable home should include - and without one, provision stays a matter of chance.
Towards a shared standard
Part of the problem is that only a minority of funds disclose provision in their impact reports or affordability metrics, and there is no standard way to measure or report it. If provision matters, and the evidence suggests it does, it should be tracked and held to a shared standard like any other impact metric. That starts with agreeing what "good" looks like.
We believe every new social and affordable home should meet a minimum provision standard, including:
- Flooring or carpet throughout
- Adequate bathroom tiling
- Window coverings
- A cooker and extractor hood
- A fridge-freezer (where appropriate)
- A washing machine (where appropriate)
The opportunity to act
The Government's £39 billion Social and Affordable Homes Programme is funding new homes right now - a rare opportunity to build provision in from the start. Where public money is paying to deliver these homes, it can also ensure they are liveable from day one, by making a minimum provision standard a condition of funding.
Our asks for the sector are threefold:
- Providers to treat a clear provision baseline as standard, not a discretionary extra.
- Fellow impact investors and fund managers to build provision into their impact frameworks, so it is measured rather than assumed.
- Grant funders to use programmes like the Social and Affordable Homes Programme to reinforce these standards through their criteria.
For our part, we've begun collecting provision data from the funds we invest in, and it will factor into our future investment decisions. We'd encourage other funders, investors and providers to join us in building a shared standard - so that every home is liveable from the day someone moves in.