“They are moving more national, that is a big problem”: third sector mergers and acquisitions in English social housing

Despite a growing body of research concerned with the geographies of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in the global economy, limited knowledge exists around their role in reshaping the third sector. Following decades of financialization, neoliberalism and austerity, England’s social housing sector presents an important opportunity to address this gap through a recent rise in M&A activity among housing associations, the country’s main form of social housing provision. While research acknowledges concentration is occurring among housing associations, little empirical evidence exists in terms of how this process has unfolded and the uneven transformations it has unleashed. Adopting a mixed methodology based on quantitative and qualitative data analysis, we reveal how concentration has rescaled the ownership of England’s housing associations. Advancing debates on ‘third sector financialization’ ( Wainwright and Manville, 2016 ), we put forward a novel conceptualization of ‘third sector M&A’. By revealing the de-localization effects of mergers on the services of housing associations, we expose an inherent financial-geographical tension at the heart of third sector M&A. Homing in on the increasingly contradictory relationship between housing associations’ place-based ecologies of third sector support, we demonstrate how spatial expansion further complicates their putatively local, embedded and community-based characteristics ( McKee, 2015 ). We therefore show the value of extending the emergent M&A literature beyond its current focus on the private sector.