Good try Luke. I am happy to leave it at that.

A Housing association can take the rent it will get in the future for buildings it owns today and use that as collateral to get very cheap loans to build more buildings today, and further increase its stream of rental income in the future, from which it can then borrow more to invest more. A debt today merely indicates they are using loans to ‘time travel’n or smooth future incomes treans to allow spending today where they see fit, rather than a stop start approach of budgeting and saving up for something tommorow like a individual might. the fact an HA has 4,500 units rather than just say 45 (one tower block say), means the value of each tower block and street, and the rent paid by tenants therein, can be shifted around all 4,500 where and when it is most needed/ (or most mismanaged), so for instance allowing a roof to be fixed not when the 25 people below it have paid for it, but whenever the 5000 people collectively can afford it (ie today, rather than months later, with tenants living with a leaking roof, but still paying full rent for squalid conditions)

HAs have also borrowed to improve the buildings they own, double glazing and external wall insulating being expensive but very beneficial examples, they do so, dramatically improving the lives of tenants, who are both warmer and benefit from cheaper energy bills, but at year end only put up the rent by a % or two, despite housing being much nicer places to live, with less chest infections etc. Tenants are more able to pay, and arrears may decrease, but One time rent increases might not justify massive one time improvements, even if fitting double glazing all at once, rather than bit by bit is cheaper overall. Debt is used here to make it possible to ever improve whole buildings/estates all at once.

Finally somewhere in the system subsidy and cross subsidy exists in order to house those on no incomes, those who have been born since a HA stock was built, those with no right to work, and negate the impact of those in rental arrears who in the end never pay. Central government funding new money for new buildings, or for non payments stopped decades ago, allowing future government revenues to be hocked off to money lenders partly filled the gap.

Government funding changes during the year, and loans may have been to top up this difference. Again income smoothing using debt to bring money forward and push losses backward.All in all £60 billion pound is probably eminently affordable and responsible, but it does sound like a huge figure.