Richard Tice inflated the pension fund behind Reform UK's promise of 50,000 social homes a year by almost £100bn on the day he launched it, the scheme's own accounts show.
Tice, the party's deputy leader, told a press conference at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors in London on Monday that a Reform government would build "an extra 50,000 affordable social homes every year for a decade", at a cost he put at "about 10 billion pounds a year". The programme, he said, "does not involve taxpayer funding unlike the current government's affordable homes programme".
A third of the money would come from the Local Government Pension Scheme, through what Tice calls a British sovereign wealth fund. "The cumulative value of the LGPS as at March '26 is £500 billion," he told the room, adding that it was likely to approach £600 billion by 2029: "A modest five per cent of that again would yield some £30 billion."
No published figure supports either number. The scheme's advisory board for England and Wales put assets at £402bn at 31 March 2025 in its latest annual report, published in May; £500bn is the Treasury's projection for 2030. Reaching £500bn a year after the board's count would have required growth of about a quarter, against the 3.2 per cent the fund managed in the year last reported. Tice's £600bn for 2029 runs £100bn above the Treasury's forecast and arrives a year sooner.
The mistake is not isolated. Right to Buy receipts would cover about half the share Tice gave them even in a record year, and the regulator of the housing associations he wants to borrow billions says their capacity for new debt "is constrained". Reform has also described how the programme would be paid for in four different ways since April.
Tice also told the room there were 97 pension funds. England and Wales has 86; the larger count takes in Scotland's 11, whose assets would then part-fund a Right to Buy pillar that cannot operate in Scotland.
Zoe Alexander, executive director of policy and advocacy at Pensions UK, said in February, responding to Reform's sovereign wealth fund proposal: "The LGPS exists solely to fund the retirements of close to 7 million local government workers, many of whom are low earners. It does not exist to manage a pool of assets to fund government projects."
Tice said a revived Right to Buy, with discounts of 30 per cent for tenants of five years' standing and 40 per cent after 10, would supply "about a third of the total money involved", with proceeds reinvested in new homes "at a factor of two to one". The Conservatives' failure in the 1980s, he said, was that "they didn't reinvest the proceeds back into building more affordable homes".
A third of £10bn is about £3.3bn a year. English councils received £1.61bn from 14,275 Right to Buy sales in 2025-26, an average of £112,900 a home in a year when sales rose 90 per cent, the housing ministry reported on 6 August. The year before, receipts were £798m.
Two homes for every one sold would mean 28,550 homes on those sales. At £200,000 a home, the rate implied by dividing Reform's £10bn by its 50,000 homes, that is £5.71bn, three and a half times what councils received.
Building cheaper would not close the gap. Figures published by the Resolution Foundation imply grant of about £156,000 for each social rent home, the consultancy Cebr has assumed almost £170,000 across England and Shelter puts a London home at about £180,000. The pledge's own phrase, "affordable social homes", does not say whether Reform means social rent, pegged to local incomes, or affordable rent, which can reach 80 per cent of market rates and needs less subsidy.
What receipts actually build is a fraction of either. Councils started 1,557 new homes and acquired 1,895 existing ones with Right to Buy money in 2025-26, a total of 3,452, down seven per cent on the year, according to the department's live tables. That is roughly one home started for every nine sold.
It happened under the loosest rules councils have ever had. They have faced no cap on the share of a home the money can fund since July 2024, have kept 100 per cent of receipts since the Budget that autumn, and from 2026-27 can combine receipts with grant. The decision that made those freedoms permanent also abolished the one-for-one replacement target, with ministers asking councils instead "to go over and above replacing sold stock". Tice is promising two-for-one at the point the state stopped measuring one-for-one.
Receipts are expected to fall from here, because the 2025-26 surge reflected applications lodged before discounts were cut in November 2024 and eligibility tightens again under changes confirmed in April. Right to Buy was abolished in Scotland in 2016 and ended in Wales in 2019. The receipts are English; the pledge is not.
The borrowing pillar has already been rejected by the people expected to do the borrowing. Andy Hulme, chief executive of Hyde, one of the country's largest housing associations, told the Guardian the proposals "would radically change housing associations' debt levels, which could lead many to violate their banking agreements and likely tip some into default".
Tice said the sector's debt was "very low, just over 20 per cent" of the market value of its homes under tenancy, and that "a modest five or six per cent increase in those debt levels over a decade would generate over £30 billion".
The regulator's audited figures bear Hulme out rather than Tice. Interest cover across the sector fell to 87 per cent in the year to March 2025, the second year running in which core earnings failed to cover interest payments, as interest costs rose eight per cent to £4.8bn. "Increasing costs of borrowing and weaker cash generation means that capacity and appetite to increase debt is constrained," the Regulator of Social Housing concluded in January.
The pressure is greatest among the landlords Tice's plan leans on most. The 19 providers with more than 40,000 homes own 42 per cent of the sector's stock, and their interest cover is 77 per cent, against 97 per cent for the rest.
Tice's 20 per cent figure and the regulator's measure of 52 per cent value the same homes differently, and both can be correct. The constraint the regulator describes is not the ratio but the cash to service new debt, and Tice did not say what power a government would use to make independent landlords borrow. Asked at the press conference by Kiran Stacey, the Guardian's policy editor, about capped rents and the risk of default, he said housing associations "desperately want more financial resource".
The three pillars are also the fourth version of the funding Reform has given since April. Simon Dudley, then its housing spokesperson, told Inside Housing that month the capital would be aggregated "with grant income", which is Exchequer money. He was sacked the next day over remarks about Grenfell in the same interview.
On 23 August the Telegraph reported the party saying the policy "would be cost-neutral because of the cash saved by removing foreign nationals from social housing, meaning no new taxes or borrowing would be needed", while Tice wrote in the same paper that it "does not need more taxpayer funding, just smarter, better use of existing resources and funds to pay for it". The pillars followed the next morning; savings on existing tenancies are revenue rather than capital, and the second pillar is borrowing.
Reform has not published costings for the pledge, and the policy paper handed to reporters at Monday's event has not been released. The party was approached for comment.
Sir James Cleverly, the shadow housing secretary, said: "This is yet another unfunded announcement from Reform and shows they have not done the hard work needed, and, is so often the case, their maths simply doesn't stack up." A Labour spokesman called the plans "unserious and unworkable". Shelter puts the need at 90,000 social rent homes a year, nearly double what Reform is promising.
Whether Right to Buy receipts build what ministers promise has been questioned before. In the 2019-21 Parliament the Commons housing committee found the department held no data on how many social rent homes the receipts had directly funded.
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