The United Kingdom is planning to increase its inventory of government-owned subsidized homes, so it can help more people keep a roof over their head.

The expansion of the government's property portfolio will be funded, in part, by an increase in rents charged on properties it already owns, unnamed government sources told the Financial Times newspaper.

They said the country's finance minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves, who took over when the Labour Party came to power after the general election on July 4, will raise social housing rents by 1 percent more than inflation in each of the coming 10 years.

She is expected to introduce the plan in her annual budget in October.

The move will ensure not-for-profit housing associations and local governments have the confidence to build more affordable homes, the paper said.

Gavin Smart, chief executive of professional housing body the Chartered Institute of Housing, told the paper the affordable housing sector craves certainty.

"It is clear that ministers and officials understand that a rent settlement needs to be one that landlords and investors can rely on for a long period," he said.

Around 4 million UK households live in subsidized accommodation but 109,000 other families are in temporary accommodation because there are not enough homes to meet demand.

The Daily Mail newspaper said Reeves will likely also need to increase government income through tax hikes — likely inheritance tax and capital gains tax — in her Oct 30 budget, because of the 22-billion-pound ($28.7-billion) "black hole" in public finances she says her government inherited from the previous Conservative Party administration.

Additionally, the government has been accruing more debt, with the Office for National Statistics saying on Wednesday public-sector net borrowing had risen to 3.1 billion pounds in July, from 1.8 billion pounds during the same period last year.

The desired expansion of the UK's subsidized housing portfolio against the backdrop of shrinking government coffers comes as the nation's private-sector rental market has left many people in a so-called "price trap".

Online property portal Zoopla says 17 people are currently chasing every available rental home, and that rents are rising faster than average earnings, which means many people cannot afford to move.

Zoopla said rents rose by 5.7 percent in the private-sector market in the year ending June 2024, which was an improvement on the situation in the previous year, when rents went up by 12.3 percent. In the year before that, when 30 to 35 prospective tenants chased every available property, rents rose by 20 percent.

Richard Donnell, Zoopla's executive director, told the BBC: "We have moved from a red-hot market over the last couple of years, to one which is still hot, but cooling."