The Shared Ownership Council has chosen the New Homes Quality Board (NHQB) to operate its Shared Ownership Code (developed and piloted by the Council between December 2024 and March 2025). Full responsibility transfers from the Council to the NHQB on 7 October 2025.
Ann Santry, Chair of the Shared Ownership Council, said: “We’re confident that the Code will be in safe and capable hands with NHQB. Our shared values, combined with their experience, infrastructure, and governance, will ensure effective implementation and better outcomes for current and future shared owners.” Adding: “I look forward to working with NHQB over the next few months to support the transition and to encourage more providers to adopt the Code.”
The Shared Ownership Code: background
In short, the Code aims to: ‘ensure transparency, fairness and improved support for shared owners in marketing, purchasing and management of homes’. It does this, in part, by standardising best practice and consumer protection.
Back in June 2025, Shared Ownership Resources published a response to the new Shared Ownership Code welcoming these aims. However, we also noted some shared owners’ doubts that a voluntary Code could have meaningful impact. Others expressed concerns that, at worst, the Code would simply become a tick-box marketing exercise, tasked with increasing market demand but insufficient to ensure that entrants to the scheme fully understand what they are getting into, or to resolve the pitfalls many shared owners face down the line.
At the time, we concluded that much would depend on who was appointed to operate the Code. Additionally, we drew attention to the potential role of Regulators when it comes to compliance with Code requirements, taking appropriate action and ensuring redress in the event of non-compliance.
Shared Ownership Resources welcomes adoption of the Code by the NHQB
In June 2025, Shared Ownership Resources proposed several different options to give the Code ‘teeth’, including: incorporation of shared ownership into the NHQB Code with oversight by the New Homes Ombudsman Service, or a reciprocal arrangement between the New Homes Ombudsman Service and the Housing Ombudsman.
Consequently, we welcome the choice of the NHQB to operate the Shared Ownership Code. However, taking on the SO Council’s Code is not the same thing as incorporating shared ownership into the existing NHQB Code for new homes. Operations similar to those used for NHQB’s New Homes Quality Code will be applied to the Shared Ownership Code. But both Codes will remain separate, with different criteria, registrations and fees.
This is, perhaps, inevitable at present. New-build shared ownership homes are often subject to more complex ownership and management arrangements than other new-builds. This poses increasingly recognised challenges for control, communication and accountability, which the current NHQB Code is not currently equipped to deal with.
However, it is vital not to end up with a two-tier Code of Practice with entrants to the shared ownership scheme continuing to be disadvantaged by fewer rights and protections than other homebuyers. As Paula Higgins, CEO of the HomeOwners Alliance states: “Success depends on providers stepping up”.
There are some encouraging signs. NHQB plans to create a range of advisory panels for future review of the Code – gathering input from different stakeholder groups, including public sector representatives, consumers, housing providers, and the wider housing sector.
The Code should be a live document seeking not only to share best practice, but also to encourage and support continual improvement.
The Code is an important step in the right direction, but more is needed
The Code can’t resolve problems and pitfalls in isolation, and nor can housing providers. There is, undoubtedly, a need for housing providers to step up in various respects. However, truly meaningful reform remains unlikely unless government, their agencies and Regulators place less emphasis on demand and ‘a foot on the property ladder’, and more emphasis on full life-cycle costs, long-term outcomes and impact.
The Regulator of Social Housing needs to expand the data it collects to improve understanding of the lived experience of shared ownership. Particularly when it comes to satisfaction with ongoing affordability and transition to full home ownership. Transparency and informed decision-making would be well served by a future iteration of the Code requiring all housing providers to publish their shared ownership TSMs on all marketing and promotional materials.
However, the Code is an important step in the right direction. The NHQB has been handed a significant opportunity to narrow the gap between shared owners’ high expectations at the outset and low levels of satisfaction. Shared owners hope the NHQB will rise to the challenge.
Featured image: John Cameron on Unsplash
Additional Resources
NHQB – New Homes Quality Code
Shared Ownership Resources – Shared Ownership Council Code: Explainer
Shared Ownership Resources – Shared Ownership Council Code: Response
Be First to Comment