That the Bill be now read a second time.

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to open this Second Reading on the Social Housing Bill. I look forward to listening carefully to noble Lords’ contributions from across the House. I am particularly conscious that many in this Chamber bring deep experience of housing, local government, safeguarding and the realities facing communities. I therefore would like to begin by recognising the value that this experience brings to our debate and thanking noble Lords for giving the Bill the attention that it warrants.

Before I turn to the detail, I hope the House will allow me a brief personal reflection, because this Bill is really personal for me. This legislation is not abstract; I grew up in Stevenage in social housing. In those days, before everyone carried a phone in their pocket, before the internet shaped the world—I should add that not even every house had a phone; I am that old—and before cars were widely affordable, community was the bedrock of our lives. Part of the unwritten contract for my parents when they accepted the offer of a job and a home in Britain’s first post-war new town, which is 80 years old this year, was that their parents would be welcome when they retired and that their children could, if they wished, be housed as children of tenants.

One of the great strengths of living in Stevenage was the sense of continuity and belonging that it offered. Families put down roots, your parents could live nearby and, in time, you could imagine your own children building their lives in the same area with the possibility, if they needed it, of a secure, affordable home in the community they knew. That sense of security—that social housing could be there not only for you but for the next generation—is part of what social housing at its best can provide: stability, dignity and the foundation on which people can build a life.

Amidst the complexities of modern life and the cost of living crisis, retaining that sense of community is more important than ever. Yet for too many people, it is no longer something they can rely on. In Stevenage, the housing stock has fallen from around 32,000 homes in the 1980s to around 8,000 today, and many former council homes are now let to those on universal credit, costing the public purse more than double when compared with a council home and leaving over 2,000 families stranded on waiting lists. This is a picture that we see around the country.

Over time, social and affordable homes have become scarce. In many places, homes sold have not been replaced. The result is that families who could once have lived side by side, in the same town and neighbourhood, are now too often separated by necessity and forced to move far from the support networks they depend on. That is one of the reasons I care so deeply about this Bill. It is about restoring a sense of security and fairness for tenants today and for communities tomorrow. Everyone deserves to live somewhere decent, safe, secure and affordable, in a community where they feel at home.

That is why the social housing sector plays such a critical role in our system, providing a home to around 16% of all households in England and supporting many of the most vulnerable, including those on the lowest incomes and those living with long-term illness or disability. Yet, for many, that security is out of reach. Today, more than 1.3 million households are on local authority waiting lists for social housing and over 175,000 children are growing up without a stable home. Families are left with little prospect of secure housing in their community. They are forced instead into the increasingly expensive and insecure private rented sector or into temporary accommodation at significant personal cost and growing expense to the public purse.

This country has not built enough social and affordable housing for decades. While nearly one in three new homes in recent years has been social or affordable, overall delivery remains far below the historic highs of the 1950s and 1960s, when housing was delivered at a far greater scale. This decline reflects a combination of factors over recent years. including lower levels of public investment, constraints on providers’ ability to borrow and invest, and wider economic pressures, such as inflation, which have increased the cost of building and maintaining homes. At the same time, the steady and significant loss of social housing stock, particularly where homes sold under right to buy have not been replaced, has further undermined the ability and confidence of providers to invest in building the new homes that communities so urgently need.

The Government therefore placed social and affordable housing at the heart of our manifesto. We have been clear that addressing these long-standing challenges requires not just incremental change but a sustained programme of renewal, bringing together investment, reform and delivery across the sector. The priority of this Government remains to deliver the biggest increase in social and affordable housing in a generation, alongside a transformational and lasting change in the safety and quality of social homes. The delivery of these commitments is well under way.

In 2025, we set out a clear five-step plan to deliver a decade of renewal for social and affordable housing. First, we are delivering the biggest boost to grant funding in a generation through the £39 billion 10-year social and affordable homes programme to support social housebuilding at scale. Secondly, we are rebuilding the sector’s capacity to borrow and invest, supported by a stable 10-year rent settlement. Thirdly, we have established a more effective and stable regulatory regime by updating the decent homes standard, implementing new minimum energy-efficiency standards, and the passing of Awaab’s law to drive up the safety and quality of homes for tenants. Fourthly, we are reinvigorating council housebuilding, which this Bill directly supports, recognising the central role of councils in social housing delivery. Fifthly and finally, we are strengthening our partnership with providers and investors to unlock capacity and accelerate delivery, and with tenants themselves to guide our reforms—including addressing the social housing stigma that tenants highlight as a key priority.

This Bill forms one targeted part of this wider programme of renewal, making the necessary legislative changes to underpin our reforms. We have already given social housing providers the long-term certainty and stability they need to dial up their housebuilding ambitions, through grant funding, long-term certainty about their incomes, clear and final quality standards, and specialised support for councils. We now need to deliver the parts of our decade of renewal plan which require primary legislation. The Bill will protect the number of social homes available to those in need and, in doing so, incentivise the building of more social rented homes. It will create a fairer system, with stronger protections for tenants who are victims of domestic abuse. It will reduce unnecessary bureaucracy and clarify the statute book so that providers can invest in new social and affordable homes with confidence.

Taking each of these objectives in turn, I turn first to protecting homes and enabling new supply. Right to buy has long provided an important route into home ownership, helping many social housing tenants achieve greater security and a tangible stake in their community. Since its introduction, it has supported more than 2 million households to buy their homes and realise the benefits of home ownership. But—and this a very big “but”—too often the homes sold have not been replaced. This has led to a steady loss of social housing stock, reduced the availability of genuinely affordable homes, and weakened councils’ confidence and capacity to invest in new supply, particularly where homes are sold and do not return to the sector.

It cannot make sense for a council to invest in building a new home and then for a qualifying right-to-buy tenant to move in and purchase that home for significantly less than it cost to build. The Bill therefore builds on the existing tranche of reforms that the Government have already made to the right-to-buy scheme. The measures will continue the mission to deliver a fairer and more sustainable scheme, one that continues to support long-standing tenants to buy while ensuring that councils can replace what is sold and better protect existing social homes to meet future housing need. We will increase the eligibility period from three years of tenancy to 10 years, which better reflects current practice and ensures that the scheme is targeted at those with a long-standing connection to their home. We will also better align discounts with cash caps and introduce a 35-year exemption for new-build homes, protecting new supply and giving councils the confidence to invest in homes for the long term.

Alongside this, the Bill introduces a new requirement for private providers of social housing to notify their local authority and other potential buyers before selling a home. This will maximise opportunities to retain homes within the social housing sector. Taken together, these reforms will shift the trajectory of the system from one where stock has been gradually depleted to one where it is protected and can begin to grow again. These measures are not about undermining aspiration but about ensuring that it is delivered in a way that is fair, balanced and sustainable, so that future generations have the same opportunities as those before them. They are designed to ensure that the sector is larger in the future, not smaller, and more capable of meeting need, not less.

Secondly, on the protection of tenants who are victims of domestic abuse, all tenants deserve safety and stability but those experiencing abuse face acute risks and, too often, must choose between staying in their home and continuing to suffer that abuse, or leaving and risking homelessness. The Bill strengthens protections to help victims remain safely in their homes where possible or move to suitable alternative accommodation where necessary. These measures form part of the Government’s wider commitment to tackle violence against women and girls, ensuring that the housing system supports rather than frustrates a victim’s route to safety and recovery. This sits alongside wider government action to improve quality standards, strengthen tenant voice and ensure that the sector works in the interests of those it serves.

Thirdly, the Bill reduces unnecessary bureaucracy and clarifies the statute book, enabling councils and providers to invest with confidence. It repeals unimplemented and unworkable provisions from previous housing legislation, including requirements to sell high-value homes, impose fixed-term tenancies by default and charge higher rents to higher-income tenants. It also streamlines the outdated consents process so that councils can make more decisions about the management of their social homes without having to get approval first. These changes bring clarity and reduce barriers to delivery, setting up the social housing system for the ambitious future we are working towards.

Social housing is an essential part of a functioning housing system. It provides security for families, supports communities, reduces homelessness pressures and, when done well, represents good value for the taxpayer over the long term. This Bill is a vital part of our reforms, but legislation alone cannot deliver the decade of renewal we want to see across the quality and supply of social housing. As I have said, this Bill is one targeted part of a comprehensive and ambitious plan that the Government are already delivering through record investment into new social housing; through new modern and robust standards to improve housing quality and safety and to strengthen tenant engagement and landlord accountability; and through working with the regulator and the sector to ensure that the system is stable and investible. Ultimately, the Bill is grounded in the everyday reality of families who need secure homes, in the practical requirements of councils and providers that need certainty to build so that future tenants can access social homes, and in the principle that the state has a responsibility to ensure that safe, secure and affordable housing is available to those who need it.

In the course of this debate, I know that noble Lords will rightly scrutinise the detail—how reforms are implemented, how we safeguard fairness and how we ensure that the sector can deliver—and I welcome that scrutiny. But I hope that the House will also recognise the central purpose of this Bill: to strengthen tenant protections for victims of domestic abuse, to clear away barriers that prevent investment and delivery, and to protect and grow the social housing available across the country. I commend the Bill to the House.

My Lords, I declare my interest as vice-president of the Local Government Association and of the National Association for Local Councils.

The Social Housing Bill attempts to address an important issue across many local authorities: namely, that we are not building enough social housing. Yet this Bill goes about this issue in completely the wrong way. There are, of course, some measures that we welcome. In particular, we welcome the Government’s efforts to give landlords and the courts more powers to protect tenants who are victims of domestic abuse. It is absolutely crucial that victims do not fall through the cracks of the system, and we will support efforts to strengthen the Bill in this regard.

However, for the most part, this Bill’s focus is not on the development of new social housing; it merely moves the goalposts on the existing housing stock. This Government came to power on specific promises in their manifesto to

“prioritise the building of new social rented homes and better protect our existing stock by reviewing the increased right to buy discounts introduced in 2012 and increasing protections on newly-built social housing”.

The first part of that pledge promises to prioritise the building of new socially rented homes, yet this is not what is prioritised in the Bill before us. Instead, the Bill goes into tweaking overdrive on the right-to-buy scheme. While we recognise the Government’s promise to review the discounts introduced in 2012, other provisions in the Bill represent an all-out attack on the right-to-buy scheme: a key Conservative legacy that has helped so many own their own home and has transformed social mobility across this country. Indeed, I heard the Minister describe the right-to-buy scheme as a “leaky bucket”. For a council that fails to build enough social housing, this may indeed be its point of view, but that is not whose side we are on. We on these Benches are not on the side of failing councils; we are on the side of hard-working families who do not want to be dependent on the state forever.

To be clear, we do not dispute that we need more social housing. Our population has grown rapidly, and development has not kept up with that demand. Under this Government, more landlords are exiting the market; unemployment is on the rise, especially for young people; and more and more people may be forced to look for social housing. But what do they find? They find the First Lady of Sierra Leone, who otherwise occupies a presidential palace. They find that social housing is being taken up by non-UK nationals, as was highlighted in the “Alternative King’s Speech”. Approximately 33,000 new social tenancies each year are going to households where the lead tenant is a non-UK national. At the same time, the Government invest around £4 billion annually to deliver roughly 30,000 new social homes. That is neither sustainable nor fair for British citizens.

According to the 2021 census for England and Wales, 72% of those who identified as Somalis live in social housing in the UK. That is an example of a dependency culture right before our eyes. This is not why the British taxpayer pays tax. This is not a functioning safety net, nor is it a welfare state working for its own citizens. Moreover, it is evidently not the right-to-buy scheme that is the problem here. We Conservatives know the solution. We need to build more new social homes for local people, not restrict their opportunities for home ownership.

We need the opportunity of right to buy, but at least one new home must be built with the money from the right-to-buy sale. If you do this, it is a win-win outcome. We need an honest and mature conversation about whom social housing is for and what the state can afford. We need to recognise that it is a finite resource and should be reserved for those who truly need it, without needlessly trapping people into welfare indefinitely and with no way out. We also believe that councils should have the powers to decide who to prioritise, such as those with existing connections to their local area, or veterans who have done so much for our country.

Reacting to the King’s Speech at the start of this Session, one Labour MP summed it up perfectly: “This is incrementalism”. That is exactly what we are seeing with this Bill before us now: tweaking with a successful scheme in order to weaken a proud Conservative legacy, rather than solving the problems the country faces today. This is red meat to appease Labour Back-Benchers in the other place, who—let us be honest—would rather see the right-to-buy scheme abolished altogether.

This is not serious policy direction, let alone a vision. This House and the British people deserve better. I repeat that there are measures in this Bill that we welcome, particularly to protect victims, and there are certain measures that we, of course, recognise as manifesto commitments. But we have serious concerns about significant aspects of this Bill: its implementation and commencement, the powers being handed over to the Secretary of State and all that is currently absent from the Bill to properly and adequately address the problems we face.

Where are the measures to keep larger social housing providers accountable to their local communities, for example? How can we make shared ownership schemes more workable in practice? How can we enable councils to have more choice over what works best for their residents? I look forward to hearing the contributions and insights of other noble Lords across this House on how we can make this a better Bill for the other place, and I look forward to engaging constructively with the Minister throughout the passage of the Bill.

Well, my Lords, that has started the debate on this important Bill in a rather polarised way. I have to say that I was a bit disappointed in the response from the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook, who used some of the rhetoric of pointing fingers of blame at minorities, when we should be talking about people in need of decent housing. I hope that we can do the reverse and think about people who need social housing rather than who they might be.

I have both a practical and a direct interest in this Bill, as a councillor serving on Kirklees council, dare I say? I concur with much of what the Minister said in her introduction to this Second Reading; I too spent all my childhood benefiting from the dignity, stability and quality of a council home.

Liberal Democrats largely welcome this Bill. It is an important step in the right direction. That is not to give it a complete stamp of approval but rather to acknowledge that fundamental reform of the provision of housing—at social rents, I emphasise—is long overdue. The provision of good-quality housing at a rent that is affordable—not affordable rents—is a basic human right that has been sorely neglected over the past 40 years. There is a direct link between quality of housing, educational outcomes and long-term health needs. It is in the interests of society as well as of individual families to provide good-quality housing that is available at a cost that everyone can afford.

The Liberal Democrats’ solution is the building of 150,000 homes for social rent every year to meet the needs of the 1.34 million households in England on local housing registers. That is likely to equate to over 4 million adults and children hoping and wishing to be allocated a property at a social rent.

The Government’s estimate is that, for larger family homes of four bedrooms, the wait to be rehoused can be as much as 18 years and that 28% of new lets are for families who are statutorily homeless. In my council, there are 19,000 households on the housing register and the number of new lets each year is around 1,700. Some 2.4 million council houses have been sold under right to buy. In Kirklees, there were 46,000 council houses in 1980; now, there are fewer than 22,000, with 19,000 households on the housing register. That alone puts into stark relief the acute problem of social housing provision. The fundamental failure of right to buy was that it was never accompanied by a right to build using the income from sales. The result is the scandalous lack of genuinely affordable housing for so many families.

The Bill begins to address the lack of supply of social housing. First, it introduces a 35-year exemption for new builds, which provides certainty that a council investing in building new homes is financially sustainable, as the capital borrowed to build can be paid back from rental income over that period. Increasing the qualifying period for the right to buy to 10 years will further protect the much-reduced stock that remains. Those are positive changes in our view, but what the Bill fails to do is substantially increase the supply of social housing.

The Government will point to the £39 billion allocated for the construction of houses in the social rent and mixed tenure sector. However, the aim is for just 180,000 new homes for social rent in a decade, when the need is so great. Measured against the scale of the challenge, that is a paltry response. Increasing the supply of housing at social rents benefits families who are in receipt of housing benefit. Their low income can then be spent on essentials for their family. The lack of social housing has resulted in many families entering the private rented sector, where rents are not equivalent to housing benefit. For example, in my own town a two-bedroom back-to-back house for rent in a Victorian terrace will cost around £750 a month—I know noble Lords who live in London think that that is peanuts, but where I live it is a lot of money—whereas the local housing allowance for claimants for a two-bed property is under £650 a month. There is a gap of £100 a month for a family claiming benefits, which makes a huge impact on their being able to afford basics.

There is also an impact on the cost to government, which the Minister pointed to. This year, spending on support for housing will reach £37 billion. The provision of housing at a social rent would reduce that revenue demand on government. It makes good sense to invest in more provision of social housing.

The other good thing in the Bill is the indefinite right of first refusal to purchase a former council house, in Clause 6, which provides a new route to increasing the supply of social housing. An additional benefit of this clause will be to provide greater stability in some council housing estates where private landlords have taken over houses that were formerly for social rent, having been bought under the right to buy and then sold on to private landlords. Often, these private landlords are distant—with some living in South Africa, in my experience—and in these situations do not provide the same support and management as that provided by council housing providers and registered social landlords.

There are other important changes in the Bill—for instance, on responding to domestic violence, as well as the proposal to streamline housing consents. There is therefore much to support. However, the gaping hole in the Bill is a more ambitious plan to meet the need for genuinely affordable housing at a social rent—not affordable housing, which is very different and often not affordable. Doing so would transform the immediate lives and future prospects of so many of our fellow citizens. Against the magnitude of the need, the Bill provides important first steps but falls mightily short of the real challenge, which is a greater supply of social housing.

My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt but, as we embark on the Back-Bench speeches, I invite noble Lords to note the advisory speaking time of seven minutes. If we can stick to that, all speakers will get a fair crack of the whip, especially the later ones, and we can achieve a reasonable finish time. I would be grateful for your Lordships’ co-operation.

My Lords, it is a delight to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock. I declare my housing interests as in the register.

I commend the Bill, which introduces a number of legislative changes to enhance the quantity and quality of desperately needed affordable and social housing. I particularly welcome its provisions for constraining the right to buy, for the repeal of the awful and never-enacted measures to enforce sales of the best social housing, for the next steps in the endless story of the Grenfell tragedy, and for greater security for domestic abuse victims. Together, this whole package of measures will make an important difference.

In Committee, I will be bringing forward some modest but important amendments on points of detail, but for this Second Reading debate perhaps I could set the Social Housing Bill in its wider context. The Government have been taking significant steps to increase the output of councils and housing associations. The social housing sector’s subsidy settlement via Homes England, at £39 billion for the next 10 years, is the best since 2010. The national housing bank looks promising, and the agreement for rents to be increased by CPI plus 1% annually for a decade should ensure ongoing management and maintenance costs are properly funded. Other government measures aim to streamline planning consents and get the reluctant housebuilders to allocate a proper proportion of their new homes for social housing. That is all good stuff which will, I hope, produce around 50,000 new affordable homes per annum, more than half at social rents.

However, it is worth remembering that total investment in the social sector is a fraction of its level in times past. The proportion of the nation’s homes represented by council and housing association accommodation has fallen from its peak of 32% to just 17% today, partly due to the more than 2 million sales under the right to buy. The Bill seeks to address this problem of running the bath with the plug out, which should encourage councils to build once again.

Nevertheless, there is one serious omission in the Government’s support for the social housing sector: there is virtually no funding or strategy for the upgrading of hopelessly outdated current housing stock. That includes the leftover 1960s and 1970s prefabricated estates and tower blocks that now need renewing or replacing; the flats over shops in half-abandoned high streets; and the unfit privately rented pre-1919 properties that are long past their sell-by dates. While the Government’s emphasis on adding 1.5 million extra homes over the life of this Parliament is to be greatly applauded—particularly with the emphasis on social housing—it is a serious hole in the Government’s strategy that existing outdated housing is largely ignored. While I welcome the special help for particularly deprived neighbourhoods in the form of the Government’s Pride in Place initiative, this new funding does not stretch to improving existing accommodation. Sadly, the current absolute priority for new building is leaving tens of thousands of tenants in the sort of conditions that led to the untimely death from cold and mould of little Awaab Ishak in Rochdale.

Investment in housing-led regeneration has its own paybacks, with beneficial side-effects that are not always so apparent from the building of new homes: the most hard-hit local economies get a boost; much-needed opportunities emerge for training and apprenticeships for the growing number of NEETs; communities can see and engage with the renewal of their local environments; health and well-being can improve for populations with the worst health records; and hope and aspiration, after years of neglect, can be restored. The Renew project, representing the social housing providers in the northern regions, shows what can be done using devolved powers and funding for pilot schemes. In Greater Manchester, mayoral development corporations—MDCs—with wide powers are busy with major regeneration projects.

In relation to private sector properties in urgent need of upgrading, Blackpool Council, for example, is putting pressure on the worst landlords and taking direct action of its own through a local housing company. Elsewhere, community-based housing organisations are acquiring and modernising the poorest-quality private rented housing. So much more could be done to improve neglected estates and neighbourhoods if regeneration were mainstreamed once again. Maybe the Government’s overdue long-term housing strategy will address this omission. Perhaps the shift in powers to the mayors and combined authorities will lead to greater priority for regeneration activity. It would be helpful to hear from the Minister when the promised national housing strategy can now be expected.

Finally, I will comment on the state of the housing association sector. Mergers and takeovers have led to fewer and much larger organisations, which has brought some downsides. This trend has obvious financial advantages—lower borrowing costs and economies of scale in procurement and employment—but it has meant that some housing associations are geographically widely dispersed and decision-making is distant from those affected. Some of the sector’s broader, housing-related, place-shaping activity—local employment schemes, partnerships with local homelessness charities, civic engagement of staff in local affairs, et cetera—has unfortunately been lost. In return for the help that the Government are now providing and the extra support from this Bill, I hope more of the housing associations will behave like the best in class and increase their sensitivity to their tenants and communities at the local level, regaining the trust and confidence that this sector needs and deserves.

My Lords, it is always daunting to follow the noble Lord, Lord Best, on a matter to do with housing. I begin by declaring my interest: I am the chair of the Church Housing Association, a recently formed, not-for-profit social housing provider that we are seeking to build, literally and metaphorically, on the five core values that were set out in the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury’s commission on housing, Coming Home, which was debated in your Lordships’ House a few years ago. Those values—that social housing should be safe, secure, sustainable, sociable and satisfying—provide a set of tests against which any proposed legislation could be measured, hence I warmly welcome the Bill. It will make social housing better.

Housing is a fundamental human right. It is a foundation for other core rights, including things such as health, dignity, sanitation and sometimes the right to life itself. The Bill rightly addresses the concern that there is not enough stock in this country to house those in need.

We have heard some facts—I will offer one or two more. In June 2025, more than 172,000 children in England alone were living in temporary accommodation. For the last six years, temporary accommodation has been a contributing factor to the deaths of at least 74 children. Those are all government figures.

Lack of secure housing, moreover, is damaging our children’s ability to learn. I speak to secondary school heads in Manchester who are having to make special provision for study for children who have no permanent home, who sometimes arrive at school in the morning not knowing where a taxi will take them home to in the evening. We cannot allow this to continue.

Protecting and increasing our housing stock is an essential step to reduce the waiting list. That is why I welcome the Bill’s commitment to exempt newly built homes from the right-to-buy scheme and to streamline processes that will incentivise local councils to build more homes. Indeed, I applaud what is already happening, such as the increased investment in building housing for social rent that Manchester City Council has made in the last couple of years, supported by the Manchester Social Housing Commission, which it has been my privilege to chair. Yet, while building new homes and reducing leakage from the social housing sector are important, it is clear that the condition of our existing housing—as has already been mentioned—poses a very real threat to the health, well-being and lives of many social housing tenants. Here I turn, as others have, to concerns not adequately addressed by the Bill.

The measures introduced in Awaab’s law, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, referred to, were a direct response to the death of a young child in my diocese. These measures hold social housing providers to account for addressing the root causes of damp and mould, not just blaming them on the lifestyle of the tenants. Among those living in these conditions, the proportion with an occupant suffering from a health condition has now increased to 47%. Almost half of those living in those conditions have a health condition.

Alongside mould and damp, we are approaching a decade on from the Grenfell tragedy, yet too many people are still living in homes that do not provide adequate protection against fire. Some 44% of buildings with unsafe cladding have not yet even begun remediation works. These are official figures. I echo the noble Lord, Lord Best, by inviting the Minister to set out for us how the Government intend to prioritise the safety and condition of existing homes alongside the delivery of new housing.

I turn from stock condition to poverty. We are all created equal. We should all be afforded equal opportunities. For children growing up in poverty, their aspirations for the future are overshadowed by the constant burden their families face in making ends meet, confronting food insecurity or being unable to afford to heat the home properly. I have had to address this House too many times on the growth of food banks. If the Government do not prioritise making social homes more affordable—genuinely affordable does not mean 80% of market rent, and when we define it like that we are not only insulting Britain’s households; we are abusing the Oxford English Dictionary—and if we do not address this problem, the cycle of poor life outcomes for today’s children, tomorrow’s adults, will only continue.

Poverty is a problem not only for social renters but for those in the private sector. Currently, more than 45% of private renters are living in unaffordable housing, according to IPPR research. Might the Government consider introducing double-lock rent caps in private sector housing, not only to slow the growing number of private renters who are falling into poverty but to free up social housing stock by making this sector more accessible to low-income families?

Sometimes, over time, the unintended side-effects of what was a well-intended piece of legislation—it might have done some good in its time—can come to outweigh the merits of the policy behind it. Some 40% of properties acquired through right to buy appear in the private rented sector within 10 years. As the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, reminded us, they do so at much higher rents and often much poorer standards, both of physical maintenance and support for the tenants in them. That was not the intention of right to buy but that has been the outcome.

At the same time, it is now beyond any remaining doubt that subsidies to enable first-time buyers to get on to the housing market have done little more than further inflate property values. That is all they have done; there was a report on it in just the last week or so. The real beneficiaries have been the volume builders and those with significant capital already in property. Money that could and should have been spent building more social housing or keeping rents lower has been wasted on pointless political posturing. Can we be assured that that era is now over?

This housing crisis is not just a question of supply but of dignity, health and justice. The Church of which I am proud to be a part is committed to its long-standing role in building communities and supporting social cohesion. But families cannot participate in community life when their most basic needs are not being met. This Bill will be judged not only by the number of homes it delivers but by whether those homes enable renters to feel safe and secure, plan for their futures and nurture their communities.

Back in 1990, as a young parish priest, inspired by the noble Lord, Lord Best—he was not a Lord then but he was a great campaigner for housing—I wrote to my then bishop. I warned him that the crisis of unemployment that had plagued the 1980s was about to be superseded by a crisis in social housing. Some 25 years on, that crisis is still with us. This Bill can be a big step towards addressing it. I look forward to its progress.

My Lords, it is an honour to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, who has consistently championed the social housing sector.

Social housing is a vital national asset built to provide families on low incomes with a safe, secure, affordable place to live. After decades of marginalisation and underfunding, the tragic reality is that thousands of families still lack a safe and affordable home. Over 170,000 children currently live in temporary accommodation. I am proud that after a regrettable period of decline and marginalisation under successive Conservative Governments, this Government are once again asserting the value and importance of social housing. The Social Housing Bill is an important pillar of this work.

My noble friend has emphasised the targeted aims of the Bill. I welcome its narrow drafting. It is clear and precise. It aims to achieve three clear and laudable objectives: protect existing social housing stock, protect victims of domestic abuse living in social housing, and clarify the statute book.

With 1.3 million households on social housing wait lists, all social housing sold off under the right to buy should have been replaced, like for like. That has just not happened under the present system. In its current form, right to buy has unsustainably depleted the stock of social homes and restricted confidence to build and invest, depriving so many families of a vital resource.

Of course, social housing residents’ ability to buy their own home has an important role to play, but this must be done sustainably, protecting social housing stock where necessary and with clear safeguards against misuse. Measures in the Bill to increase the qualifying period to 10 years, reform discounts, and introduce a 35-year exemption for newly built social housing will help to ensure that the policy is more sustainable and offers better value for taxpayers’ money.

These reforms will also give councils greater confidence to invest in new supply, which is essential if we are to begin reversing decades of lost stock. This is particularly important in rural areas, where pressures are especially acute. Research from English Rural found that while 17% of the population live in rural communities, they receive just 7% of new affordable homes. Over 306,000 people are currently on rural waiting lists, and at current building rates it would take nearly 90 years to clear that backlog.

Rural development is always more challenging due to the availability of land, amenities and resources, but low replacement rates against right-to-buy sales have exacerbated these challenges further. I therefore strongly support the provisions in Clause 7 to disapply right to buy in national parks, areas of outstanding natural beauty and designated rural areas. These changes will help safeguard vital social homes and better reflect the realities of constrained rural housing markets.

Among the most important protections are those contained in Part 2 of and Schedule 1 to the Bill, which confer new protections on victims of domestic abuse who live in social housing. We know that housing plays an important role in cases of domestic abuse, where housing uncertainty can be used by perpetrators to exert control. A lack of safe, secure, high-quality housing can put people who are experiencing domestic abuse at risk of homelessness and therefore make them hesitant to speak out. Social landlords are well placed to identify domestic abuse and prevent escalation through offering support and guidance to survivors of domestic abuse, but the present legal framework does not always allow them to respond effectively, particularly in cases involving joint tenancies.

That is why the National Housing Federation has said that it strongly supports measures in this legislation which allow survivors to apply to remove a perpetrator from a tenancy, giving the survivors greater housing security and the ability to remain safely in their homes where appropriate. This is a significant and welcome step forward. It is, however, a highly complex and sensitive area in practice. It will be critical to work closely with social housing providers on the implementation of these changes. We need to ensure that staff are fully equipped to protect victims and support them in rebuilding their lives. Can my noble friend the Minister say a bit more about the Government’s plans to support the implementation of these changes?

Finally, I turn to the topic of social homes being sold—referred to as “disposals” in the sector. We know that England has some of the oldest housing stock in Europe. Many properties are ageing, require significant investment or no longer meet modern standards or regulatory requirements. It is understandable that there are concerns about any social homes being sold in this context. However, it is important to note that disposals act as a standard part of responsible asset management. Crucially, proceeds from these sales are reinvested to build new, higher-quality homes and improve housing stock. In some cases, a single sale can fund the building of more than one home, supporting the Government’s ambition to deliver 1.5 million homes this Parliament.

The number of social homes owned by housing associations has consistently grown in recent years, increasing by over 26,000 per year for the last three years. The sale of housing association homes out of the social rented sector has therefore not resulted in any net loss of social homes. For some properties, regeneration could be a desirable alternative to disposals. The noble Lord, Lord Best, emphasised this point very effectively. I suggest that the Government could support housing associations and councils in increasing the rate of regeneration by introducing greater flexibility on net additionality rules in the social and affordable homes programme and providing other forms of assistance.

The Government’s plan to put in place the foundations for a decade of renewal in social and affordable housing can deliver lasting change and finally turn the tide on the housing crisis. The package of long-term investment announced at the spending review last year was the first step towards doing so. This legislation is another. I echo the National Housing Federation in saying that this legislation

“demonstrates the government’s commitment to protecting the supply of social housing for future generations”.

I hope that the social housing sector continues to work in partnership with government to deliver a decade of renewal for social housing and ultimately to build the homes that our country so desperately needs.

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick. I will develop part of the argument she adduced—that there is sometimes a case for disposing of social housing.

I want to address the ongoing controversy whereby the right-to-buy policy led directly to the shortage of social housing. I voted for the 1980 Housing Act; more relevant is that I was a junior Minister under Michael Heseltine and was responsible for implementing it and then defending it. That brought me into conflict with the late Baroness Hollis—then Councillor Hollis and chairman of the housing committee in Norwich—who refused to implement the policy. I had to put in the commissioners and suspend her. We met again 30 years later, when I joined your Lordships’ House. She was emollient, if unrepentant, and we became good friends.

I understand the argument that all the receipts should have been reinvested in social housing. But suppose I had gone to Geoffrey Howe, the Chancellor at that time, and put that argument to him. He would have said, “George, that is not how it works. When we privatise Heathrow and Gatwick, we don’t build more airports. When we privatise the docks, we don’t build more docks. What happens is that the money goes into a pot, along with North Sea oil, income tax and everything else, and there is then a collective decision about how to spend it. You, George, have inherited from the outgoing Labour Government very generous provision for social housing and you’re telling me you want to keep the billions from right-to-buy receipts all to yourself, not just for this year but for every subsequent year. That would be wholly unfair to the Secretary of State for Health, who cannot sell the hospitals and add to his baseline, and to the Secretary of State for Defence, who cannot sell the nuclear deterrent”. I would have come up against the policy that dare not speak its name in the Treasury—namely, hypothecation.

Under hypothecation, all the fuel duty and vehicle excise duty would go to transport and be spent on potholes, and health would have to survive on parking charges and prescription charges. So there are very good reasons why all the capital receipts did not automatically go back to the department that generated them. I see a former Permanent Secretary at the Treasury, the noble Lord, Lord Macpherson, smiling—if not nodding.

Even if I had won that argument and all the receipts had been kept by my department, it would have made no sense in housing policy terms to allow each local authority to spend 100% of the receipts on housing. In the 1980s, all the receipts stacked up in the shire districts, where there were houses with gardens and the housing pressure was much less, and there were relatively few receipts in the inner cities, where the predominant stock was flats. The policy of requiring the local authority to reduce its debt by 80% of the receipts enabled the department to recycle the receipts. We would say to South Bucks, for example, “You’ve got to use all the receipts to reduce your debt”, and to Islington or Tower Hamlets or Southwark, “You can increase your debt by the corresponding amount in order to invest in housing”. It was a progressive policy, which annoyed a lot of Conservative councillors, but which should be supported by the other side.

Right to buy brought additional benefits in addition to being popular—so popular that no one has ever repealed it. All the evidence that I saw at the time showed that those households that exercised their right to buy looked after their property better than the cash-strapped local authority they had bought it from—they had a real incentive to do that as home owners—so the nation’s housing stock benefited. Also, the newly enfranchised residents on the estates joined forces with existing tenants’ associations, or in some cases set up new ones, to campaign for improved conditions on the estates, and everyone benefited from that.

I would also argue that there were wider social benefits in that the predominantly single-tenure estates became pepper-potted with owner-occupiers, leading to more diverse and less polarised communities. On some estates there are now third-generation owner-occupiers—a continuity that the Minister herself commended in her opening speech.

However, I have to concede that there was one consequence of the policy that we did not foresee and which has done much to discredit it. Once the properties had changed from tenancy to owner-occupation, we assumed that the owners would stay there. The whole thrust of Conservative policy was to promote owner-occupation. We did not envisage, nor did I personally want, properties then to be bought by landlords charging market rents, often underpinned by housing benefit. For the first decade or so, that was not actually an issue; it became an issue after 1996, when buy-to-let mortgages were introduced.

This is not the right time to argue whether it makes sense for the nation’s savings to be spent buying existing assets—pushing up the price—or to be invested in government stock and then in infrastructure, or in stocks and shares and then in industry, providing wealth and jobs. That imbalance is now being slowly put right by making ISAs more attractive than buy to let and encouraging institutional investment in new build.

In conclusion, what basically happened is that the right-to-buy receipts went into the pot. No homes were lost; the tenure simply changed. The pot was then spent on schools, hospitals, aircraft carriers and the rest, from which everyone benefited. The decision not to spend enough on social housing after 1980 was a collective decision by successive Governments after considering all the other demands on the public purse, as the Minister said in opening. I end where I started. The right-to-buy policy was not inevitably going to lead to the loss of social housing. The consequence of enfranchising millions of tenants has been a bonus. The lack of social housing, as I said, is a reflection on successive priorities by successive Governments.

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, and although I may not agree with all his points, I certainly respect his experience and views. I start by declaring that I work for the Local Government Association. I support the Bill, not only as a Member of this House but as someone who has spent years working at the coalface of housing need as a councillor who led on regeneration and planning for eight years, becoming one of London’s largest housebuilders. I welcome the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, and the noble Lord, Lord Best, on the importance and value of regeneration.

I welcome the Bill and other measures that the Government have implemented to speed up housebuilding to address the housing crisis, including the £39 billion for social housing. Social housing is a foundation on which people build lives. It is where children grow up and go to school; it is where families such as mine put down roots and where communities are built. When we allow social housing stock to erode, we are not simply making a balance sheet error, we are narrowing life chances. As mentioned by my noble friend the Minister, the numbers are stark. It is a source of shame that more than 175,000 children are in temporary accommodation. More than 1.3 million households across England are currently on waiting lists for a social home. We simply do not have enough homes.

The temporary accommodation bill alone should give us pause for concern. Government figures show that council spending on temporary accommodation reached £2.8 billion in 2024-25. This is not just a housing argument; it is a fiscal one. Research by the National Housing Federation and Shelter found that the government funding needed to build the social homes we require would be fully paid back within 11 years through savings on housing benefit, NHS costs and homelessness expenditure, and additional tax receipts from construction employment.

If the case is so clear, why have we not built? I know from direct experience why councils find this so difficult. Barriers such as the state of the housing revenue account, the cost of public borrowing and workforce shortages have all been challenges to councils which want to build, and I welcome the steps the Government have taken to start to address these. Then there is right to buy, which the Bill rightly addresses. Right to buy was introduced in 1980, and today there are more than 131,000 fewer affordable homes than there were at the start, driven largely by the failure to replace homes under that scheme. The measures in the Bill to extend eligibility to 10 years, exempt newly built stock for 35 years, and provide a perpetual right for first refusal on resale are genuine improvements and I welcome them wholeheartedly.

There is, of course, a rich irony in the fact that those on the opposite Benches who argue most loudly for the right for every family to own their own home have, at the local level, spent years frustrating the very development that would give families somewhere to live in the first place. We have all watched the pattern: support for housing in principle but objection to housing in practice—a planning application in a leafy ward that somehow never quite gets backed. The former Government removed mandatory housing targets and saw new approvals collapse accordingly in precisely those areas where housing need was greatest.

We on this side of the House believe that you cannot claim to support housebuilding while blocking homes at every planning meeting. This Bill is for those who are willing to follow this through. Addressing supply must meet demand. I offer two suggestions. The first concerns a replacement ratio. Parliamentary scrutiny has previously found that the system should ensure that any home sold via right to buy is replaced like for like, with local authorities retaining all receipts to enable them to do so. A one-for-one replacement principle could be built into the framework, even implemented flexibly over a defined period, to give councils and communities the assurance that every sale is matched by a new beginning.

The second concerns the flexibility of right-to-buy receipts. I raise this as someone who has seen at first hand how the current rules interact with the real complexity of delivering housing at scale. A major regeneration scheme—the kind that generally transforms a community, delivering hundreds of homes alongside schools, green spaces and new streets—may take five, seven or even 10 years from conception to completion. Planning processes can be lengthy and viability assessments contested. Development timelines are not solely within a council’s control. Restrictions on the use of right-to-buy receipts have been identified as a key barrier to council housebuilding and, although temporary flexibilities have been introduced at various points, they have not provided the certainty or permanence that councils need to plan with confidence.

When receipts must be spent within fixed timelines or face clawback, councils are pushed to smaller, faster projects that may not represent the best long-term value, rather than larger, more complex schemes that transform communities. Allowing councils permanent flexibility to combine right-to-buy receipts with other government grants and to spend receipts at a timescale that reflects local development realities, particularly when councils can demonstrate that receipts are committed to a named scheme, could be a way forward.

This is a good Bill. It is overdue and it is needed. But good housing policy is not made in this Chamber alone; it is made when legislation is matched by resources, by long-term partnership between central and local government, and by a shared willingness at every level—local, national, urban, suburban and rural—to say yes to the homes that our country needs. The National Housing Federation and Shelter estimate that 90,000 homes a year are needed to meet demand. This Bill is another step which this Government are taking. Every measure that we take in this House to bring those homes a little closer is a measure worth taking. I look forward to engaging with this Bill and I commend it to the House.

My Lords, I am no expert in housing, as many people in the Chamber are; if some of my questions and comments appear naive, it is because I am reflecting what many of the general public think and understand about social housing.

It is 30 years since I was on the board of a housing association, which was in inner east London. I joined because of my realisation of the importance of housing to the general health of the population, which was more my direct concern. I have never forgotten the enthusiasm and commitment of my colleagues on the housing association board, and I have never doubted that we will always need some kind of social subsidised housing. I am going to keep saying “subsidised”, because it is most important we remember that the taxpayer is funding the majority of this social housing. The population at large do not understand the terms “social housing” and “affordable housing”. It is really confusing to get to grips with what they mean these days. Who is paying? Who is responsible? Do the general public know what they are?

I should declare that I was a beneficiary when the right to buy was introduced. We were renting a flat in the Barbican tower block—indeed, I still live there. In those days, the City of London Corporation rented them out at economic market rents. We were council tenants, of course, and we benefited phenomenally from this extraordinary policy. If the private rented sector had been able to use the receipts, or if receipts had been collected from right to buy and then spent on other social housing or on private rental markets that would produce better quality housing, all would have been fine, but that never happened, because of the very reasonable political reasons given by the noble Lord, Lord Young—and I understand the hypothecation problem. We have lost so much housing stock, which has been pretty catastrophic. It has left an extraordinary number of people without any hope of being able to afford a home of their own, either rented or purchased.

I welcome the narrow focus of this Bill and shall certainly support it, although I wonder whether the years of eligibility as a criteria for purchase should be even longer than is being suggested. I am also concerned about the quality of new homes, both private and social rented, but I was reassured when the Minister waved her somewhat daunting spreadsheet of quality improvement work at us Cross-Benchers at a meeting. I shall say no more about that at the moment but to wish her luck in getting all those brown ticks done.

We can debate the other provisions of the Bill in greater detail in Committee, but a huge number of rental properties remain empty. What are the Government doing about that when they are proposing that we should have a lot more social homes and are thinking about where they should be built? We have already heard about the somewhat catastrophic loss in rural areas, where people have had to move away. I wonder whether we have the balance right, and I am particularly concerned about empty homes.

Like many people, I wonder whether the Government should examine more closely why such a high proportion of our population lives in social rented housing compared to the rest of Europe. The Netherlands is higher still, at 20% of housing provision, and we are, as we heard, running at about 16%. Are the Government giving any thought to this issue? I understand that the reasons are historical and, sadly, ideological, but I question whether it is necessary or desirable. It seems to me that people staying in social rented accommodation long after they can afford to move out is an imposition on other taxpayers. I remember that the Cameron Government tried to introduce legislation to change this, and it failed for practical reasons and because of disincentives in the system. But when you are struggling to finance a steep mortgage, it comes as a bit of a shock to discover that the relatively well-off neighbours have such a public benefit. Security of tenure is one thing—giving people security to know where they are going to live is good—but retention of the financial benefits for many years over those which are necessary is quite another.

If the Government want to ensure that social housing policy is fair for all people, they must surely tackle homes left empty and question who is occupying those that are available. I repeat that I shall support this narrow Bill, so let us get it done.

My Lords, I declare an interest as chair of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum, as an adviser to development forums in Norfolk, Suffolk, Cheshire and the Thames Valley, and as a member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Households in Temporary Accommodation.

I am glad to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, because she made a number of interesting points, one of which I want to add to, if I may. I was pleased to follow my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham, who said many things that will help to inform our debate and get us beyond what might otherwise be an unhelpful polarisation between those of us who believe from experience that the right to buy is a successful policy that should be continued and those who for other, perhaps ideological, reasons want to restrict the right to buy.

There is a practical point about how right to buy should be managed. For example, if the Government wanted to reduce the discount and chose to do so, there would be an unwelcome practical implication for those who had legitimate expectations that they would be able, after a number of years, to exercise the right to buy. I think they should, at the very least, be able to continue to exercise the right to buy on the understanding that they would continue to occupy the house for a long period, and that if they cannot commit to that, or to the right of repurchase by the local authority, they should not be able to exercise the right to buy. There are ways in which we should be able to support right to buy, rather than simply restrict it.

The point I want to come back to, which the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, helpfully made, is the distinction between affordable and social housing. I hope that where we are at the moment in the debate on this Bill and associated issues is looking at increasing the supply of homes for social rent. I am afraid we are very far from where we need to be. From my work in development forums, I know that many developers are unable to secure purchases by housing associations and registered providers of contracts for the supply of affordable housing. That is impinging on the number of homes that are available for social rent. Roughly one-quarter of what they are providing is for social rent, so that is probably 30,000 affordable homes coming through the Section 106 route, of which probably no more than 7,000 are homes for social rent.

Homes England is, correctly, pursuing an increased social and affordable housing programme, but, even if that achieves the 60% social rent composition that Homes England is aiming for, that would mean a maximum of 18,000 homes for social rent a year, and I will be very surprised if it manages to reach that figure. We are probably looking at no more than about 25,000 homes for social rent in total, but the noble Baroness, Lady Shah, who is not presently in her place, was talking about housing federations and the like looking for up to 90,000 additional homes for social rent. I do not know how we can possibly reach that figure.

However, I say to the Minister that if it is not even necessarily part of the scope of this Bill, it is important for us to look at additional ways in which we can generate capital to support investment in additional, affordable and, in particular, social housing. I suggest that she has a look at the Legal & General report, published in April this year, which looked at the possibility of, as it were, energising the latent value in the social housing stock for the purposes of reinvestment into new social housing. That is what many noble Lords on all sides of the House are looking for. The report essentially proposes that housing associations—and the same principle could be applied to council housing stock, where it exists—take the latent value and say, “Let’s transfer this as a large-scale transfer into a partnership provider”, where the partnership is with institutional investors who are looking for long-term investments with an index-linked source of income, which, of course, is what we now have by virtue of the CPI plus-1% increase in rents.

So there is the possibility of generating additional capital that can then be reinvested back, directly through the housing associations, into additional affordable housing. Legal & General’s estimate is that, if this were done for about one-third of the total housing stock in housing associations, it could lead to as many as 8,000 additional social homes per year, representing roughly one-third of the total of affordable homes that could be funded as a consequence of such a major project. Time does not permit me to talk more about this but I hope that Ministers will look actively at it. I would be pleased if they were able, with officials, to engage with this report and its possibilities, and with the housing associations and the local authority sector, to see whether we can create a new programme that would deliver that degree of value, because at the moment we have housing revenue accounts that are cash constrained and housing registered providers who are cash constrained with all the costs of maintenance, building and so on. We have to find ways in which we can realise their asset value in order to overcome their present cash constraints.

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak at the Second Reading of the Social Housing Bill and to follow the noble Lord, Lord Lansley. Even if we may not agree on everything, there was much in his remarks that I agree with.

I strongly support this Bill, both its broad intention and its specific provisions. Like my noble friend the Minister and the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, my support is rooted in my own experience and that of many of the people I served as a local councillor. When I was growing up and my family needed social housing, we were able to move into a decent-quality flat in south London near to where we had lived before, shortly before I took my GCSEs. Frankly, I dread to think what it would have meant for me and my studies, for my parents and their work and for my brother and his medical care if we had had to move much further afield to poor-quality housing. In my time as a local councillor, I met many families living in conditions that clearly were not suitable for them. They were desperate for an opportunity, like I had in the late 1990s, to get into decent social housing where they could thrive.

I begin with that because I think it is important, in discussing social housing, to put people at the centre and to keep in mind health and the wider implications of where you live. As other noble Lords have touched on, the home is one of the most important determinants of the health of people of all ages. We know that, for children in particular, staying in low-quality temporary accommodation can mean disrupted access to primary care, delays in accessing developmental support, poorer mental health outcomes and reduced educational attainment, as the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, also mentioned—and that is before we get to elevated risks of respiratory illnesses and other conditions. The breadth of the health impacts that we see in families living in inappropriate accommodation is substantial and accumulates, and it deserves to be named here. I ask noble Lords to keep those health impacts in mind throughout this debate.

I recognise that increasing the supply of social homes is not the only route to addressing those harms—many noble Lords have mentioned the conditions of housing—but the context we are in gives us good reason to do what we can with this Bill to increase and protect the supply of social homes.

Before I discuss the Bill itself, I acknowledge, as others have highlighted, that it is properly understood as part of a much wider programme. The 10-year rent resettlement, the £39 billion Social and Affordable Homes Programme and the mechanisms to lower borrowing costs for social housing providers, both private and public, are serious measures, and I gladly welcome them.

Turning to the Bill itself, the reforms to right to buy are comprehensive and strike the right balance. The increase in the eligibility threshold from three to 10 years, the reforms to discounts, extending the right of first refusal on the onward sale of formal right to buy properties, and the exemption of newly built social homes from right to buy for 35 years represent proportionate steps that address some of the aspects of right to buy that have proved most damaging to maintaining levels of social housing stock, while maintaining what I agree is a valued route to home ownership for long-standing tenants.

I welcome the provisions protecting social housing tenants who are victims of domestic abuse. During my time as a local councillor, I saw the profound dilemma that current laws can put victims in, forced to choose between living in danger or losing their home. I am really encouraged that the Bill stands to help to address those problems, and I know it has been welcomed across your Lordships’ House.

Taking these and other provisions of the Bill together, I share the hopes of my noble friend the Minister that they will ultimately increase the supply of much-needed social housing across the country. However, I want to speak to an issue that several noble Lords have mentioned. Shelter’s 2024 report on the need for social housing, Brick by Brick, drawing on data from MHCLG, estimates that 260 social homes were lost over the decade prior. In that context, the Government’s wider programme currently indicates an ambition to support the building of at least 180,000 social rent homes over the next decade, but it seems that these plans would not even take us back to where we were. I recognise that the Government’s programme is ambitious, particularly by recent standards, but the scale of need raises the question of what the Government’s success measures are for the Bill and whether their plans are sufficient to give us the social housing we need, according to the Government’s own estimates.

I turn to more of the detail of the Bill, although I note that this is not the time to do too much of that. I welcome the requirement for private registered providers to notify local authorities and other known social housing providers in the area before they dispose of social housing. This may be a misunderstanding on my part, but could my noble friend the Minister explain why the Bill does not seek to introduce a right of pre-emption here, as exists with formal right to buy homes? The same supply impact on our social housing stock applies in both circumstances, and a four-week notice window seems quite tight for giving social housing providers enough time to decide and then act on the opportunity to secure a social home.

In conclusion, I look forward to seeing the Bill return in Committee and to better understanding the success measures against which it will be judged. Most importantly, I look forward to seeing the necessary steps being taken to achieve marked improvements in the supply of decent social housing in this country, and to the health benefits that will follow from that for individuals and families who are so desperately in need of it.

My Lords, I empathise totally with the Minister because I too grew up in a council home. It was in Moulsecoomb, Brighton, and was part of the “Homes for Heroes” development in 1925. My parents moved into it probably 25 years later. The welcome feeling of stability, security and community—of having shops close by and a garden—and being able to plan for the future was amazing. I still remember it incredibly fondly, so I welcome the Bill because any measure that strengthens social housing, protects tenants and begins to repair decades of neglect is a step in the right direction. For example, the reforms to right to buy are long overdue, while stronger protections for survivors of domestic abuse are important and necessary. I also welcome the Government’s continued recognition that social housing must be part of the solution to the housing crisis we are in, but, while I welcome the Bill, it does not match the scale of the problem.

I am going to repeat figures that have already been mentioned, but they bear repeating because they are so shocking. We are facing a housing emergency—not in the future, but an emergency happening now that is already devastating lives across the country. More than 1.3 million households sit on social housing waiting lists. Councils are spending billions of pounds every year on temporary accommodation. Families are raising children in cramped rooms with no security or stability, and young people are of course finding themselves locked out of affordable housing altogether. One in 50 Londoners is homeless and living in temporary accommodation. Among children, it is one in 21. How have we got to those figures when we live in one of the wealthiest countries—and wealthiest cities—in the world?

The Government describe this Bill as the next step in the housing renewal programme but the steps are simply too small. The private sector has never built enough houses, and Thatcher’s right to buy has cost the taxpayer millions. The Government’s housing benefit bill has gone up and as social housebuilding has collapsed to historically low levels, instead of the taxpayer building and owning, the taxpayer now provides a subsidy for private landlords.

We need to build council housing that people can be proud to call a home and that is warm in winter, cool in summer, free of damp and at a reasonable rent. In an age of billionaires, it is big corporations and investors which have driven up the price of homes that they call assets. The housing market is broken and the corporate investors have broken it. We cannot solve the housing crisis by slowly reducing the rate at which we lose social housing stock. We have to start providing homes at scale again, both through new homes in the right places and by supporting councils to bring back what is already available. Obviously, history shows us that this can be done. After the Second World War, more than 150,000 social homes were built every year. Councils were supported to build them, finance was provided and housing was treated as the essential national infrastructure that it should be. We need that same ambition now.

The Government’s reforms to right to buy are welcome but should have happened years ago. I also welcome the Bill’s provisions relating to survivors of domestic abuse: the principle that victims should not be forced to lose their home because of someone else’s abuse is absolutely right. However, I am concerned that some of these measures might not work in practice. They rely heavily on outcomes in a criminal justice system that too often fails victims of domestic abuse. Many survivors never see a conviction; many never even see a prosecution. We need to hear from the Government what alternative forms of evidence and protection can be used so that survivors are not excluded.

Then there is the question of affordability. A survivor may obtain sole tenancy rights, but what happens if they cannot actually meet the rent on a single income? We must also remember that removing a perpetrator from a property does not automatically make a survivor safe. Post-separation abuse is a reality experienced by thousands of women, so they will probably need some support for these tenancy changes. Young people experiencing homelessness, leaving care or escaping unsafe homes also need access to social housing, yet the stock available to them continues to shrink. The reforms in this Bill alone will not change that reality.

The Bill contains worthwhile measures and I will support its progress, obviously while offering helpful advice and ideas at the same time, but we should not pretend that it meets the scale of the problem in the housing emergency that faces this country. What frustrates me most is that the Government have seen that there is a problem but are not doing enough to actually fix it. This should have been the Bill that launched a new generation of council housing by committing to new build and the refurbishment of older housing stock at a rate we need. Instead, it feels like an opportunity only half taken.

The housing emergency demands urgency and ambition. Millions of people cannot afford for us to settle for anything less. I hope that as the Bill proceeds through Parliament, the Government will listen carefully and find ways to strengthen it, because the country needs more than baby steps to reform a broken system. It needs a social housing revolution, and this Government must be braver.

My Lords, there is a lot to welcome in this Bill but I must admit that after Clauses 1 to 4 and Clause 6, I then start to find it concerning. I say that because I am all for trying to make sure that when people buy a home for which they have been paying rent, there are good reasons for that to happen. I cannot explain it any better than my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham did earlier, but there is no doubt that being freed from whatever rules and restrictions the council or housing provider have—and being able to do what you want in your own home—was a big liberation for people. As a consequence, I am concerned about the changes that are being brought in.

I start with Clause 5 and the discount being reduced to 5%, but going up to a maximum of 15%. It is my understanding that when the discount was introduced—I think it was under the Conservatives—it was 32%. It was a Labour Government in 2004 who put it up to 35% and then there were consequential increases. I really wonder why it feels as if the Government are doing everything possible in the Bill, apart from removing the right to buy, to make it difficult for people to do that. This will backfire on them, or perhaps a future Government who are not a Labour Government, when they start to realise what will happen if people are still in that social housing once they are no longer earning and have become pensioners: a lot more money will need to be paid out in housing benefit to allow people to stay in that home.

One of the reasons why it seems as if young people have given up on being able to buy a home is when they know they are paying more in rent than a mortgage would cost them. It is about getting that deposit, and the whole point of getting on to the ladder from social housing is that you have, in effect, already been helped to get on that first rung.

When I was in government in DWP, I did some work with MHCLG on a particular policy. MHCLG was never very enthusiastic about it, but it was about how we can turn what gets paid in housing benefit into, effectively, mortgage payments. It is a question of what we can do when we are already helping people to live in a particular house or flat. How can we genuinely make sure that, in effect, it becomes something that has to be done for only 30 years instead of, potentially, 60 to 70? That is why there is a real economic challenge in aspects of this Bill.

On other missing aspects, I am concerned about the blocking of rural areas. It would be useful to understand whether the Government have considered what somewhere that is not an AONB today, but is in the future, would mean to existing rights. That has happened, as we have seen an expansion of AONBs in recent years and more national parks are intended. There is also nothing to restrict the housing association or council from selling the house in question. This happened in the constituency I used to represent in Suffolk—in Orford and Aldeburgh—and the money was not being used to rebuild homes locally. It was being used to build homes up to 100 miles away. Meanwhile in local communities, no social housing was going to be left for the children of those in that housing and who wanted to stay in the area, because it was being sold off.

I recall that one of the houses was quite large and had a large garden. That is no surprise, as post World War II a lot of social houses were built with large gardens so that people would be encouraged to grow their own food. But now this particular site could easily become the site of at least two, if not three, new houses under modern designs. The only answer was, “We are putting it up for auction”. That housing association provider—I am not a big fan of Flagship and New Tide—arranged it that so that you could buy a very nice housing plot in this particular rural area, which was an AONB, if you had enough cash; the way they did the auction was that it was only available to those who could pay cash, not those who could get access to a mortgage.

If the Government are intent on stopping the right to buy on rural houses for tenants, I do not think they are going quite so far as to require councils or other housing providers to replace them—I think they are enabling it, but they have always been able to do that. But I do not think it is right, in effect, to take that out of the housing market to address the needs of people in rural areas.

Another issue here, which the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, picked up on, is the number of empty homes. I believe that there is an annual requirement, but it is not very specific about where the empty homes are. I came across this when the new homes bonus was in place. The bonus was given to councils which built homes, but it was offset by the number of empty homes. We discovered that, in that bit of Suffolk at the time, there were over 100 empty housing association homes. It is absolutely paramount that we have more transparency on this and that, frankly, housing associations and councils are held to account. They actually decided to demolish about 30 homes so they did not count anymore. I am pleased that they did rebuild some homes there, which were well-adapted, but these are the sorts of things happening locally.

What is missing is that, if a housing association sells a house, the first dibs should go to the council, another housing provider or indeed the tenant. It should also be required that the housing association or provider replaces it locally, which means within 10 miles—we are not talking about 100 miles, as is happening with some of the housing associations and providers today.

While there are aspects I welcome, there is a lot that I do not welcome and which I think that the Government will come to regret in the future. It is no surprise that the social housing list is so high; having a subsidised rent is always very attractive, and the unfortunate break-up of families has also had an effect, as indeed have aspects of immigration. I am sure this Bill will get the careful scrutiny it needs. I will not be here for day 2 of Committee, but I reserve the right potentially to bring amendments for the first time on Report.

My Lords, I declare my registered interests in property and as a past chair of three housing associations. I am fully supportive of this Bill. It is very rare that you find a Bill that you are so enthusiastic about, but I am because it supports my current thinking.

I certainly appreciated the intellectual arguments from the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, that the right to buy is not itself responsible for the diminution of our public housing stock; I accept that. But the fact is that it has led to a huge decline in public housing stock as politicians did not use the money that should have been used, and now we see the big social need for more social and public housing. It has also had unintended consequences. I think the noble Lord, Lord Young, did hint at those. There is a housing estate in Winchester, in Hampshire, where I live, which is now dominated by student rented accommodation, because 40% of the stock is now back in the private rented sector. That actually makes it more difficult to keep the appearance and the pride of the estate as they should be. So, it has had unintended consequences.

I also support the extra protection for victims of abuse in this Bill; that is long overdue.

One has to see this Bill in the context of the Government’s Delivering a Decade of Renewal for Social and Affordable Housing document. The first thing that is of benefit in that is the recognition that it is a 10-year plan. Five-year plans barely get off the ground before the five years are over. I think that is important, although it puts into question whether the Government are going to achieve 1.5 million homes in five years—I do not believe they will. A 10-year plan is much more sensible. Secondly, securing a firm, stable rental income increase policy to encourage investment is very important. I supported the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, on that. It provides the opportunity for alternative capital sources. Thirdly, the Government’s boost to housing numbers is not enough yet but, given the financial constraints, it is a start. The other important thing in the Government’s policy is the recognition that, to get housing numbers up, you need a big contribution from the public sector and from housing associations.

In the limited time I have, I want to concentrate on three issues, which I think are important in social housing and what is needed now in the social housing sector. The first thing is to recognise that the housing market is in the doldrums, and the Government’s policy depends on half the social houses coming through the work of developers. But there is the current state of the market; in London in the last financial year, only 6,325 homes were completed. They need over 80,000. Everywhere there are unviable housing schemes because of the big increase in housing costs, the uncertainty in the market and the dominance of the six major developers, whose business models still depend on house prices rising. It is not surprising the housing market is in the doldrums.

Are the Government looking at a contingency plan if the doldrums continue? Will they be prepared to step in and buy houses from the private sector if any of the private sector builders go into administration? Would they be prepared to accelerate investment? This does not necessarily mean the total spending over 10 years but, to get the housing market moving, they may need to accelerate the investment in social housing in the short term.

I share the concern of the noble Lord, Lord Best, who cautioned against concentrating solely on new build; improving stock is just as important. We have to remember that the tenants are actually helping to fund investment in the associations and through the council housing revenue accounts through their rents. They need to see some benefit in the stock they are living in, and we need to make sure that resources are going into this. What plans do the Government have for keeping housing providers up to the mark in improving their stock?

One final issue I would like to comment on, which is a concern to me, is the well-being of tenants and the sense of pride of community. Anyone who has been canvassing in social housing stock in recent years knows that they are also part of the alienated electorate. That is the strongest feeling you get when you go around social housing. Why is that? It is not surprising that a lot of these people are struggling to make ends meet. They are the most vulnerable in the jobs market and they are cynical of the management they experience. I have spent time in housing associations countering the view “It’s good enough for them”; it is not. They have to have the best quality of repair work and the best environment on their estates, which private estates could look up to. They also need some help and service: encouragement, through housing associations, with job training and training on IT and the use of facilities. That would actually help their housing management as well.

There is a danger in our social housing that alienation leads to non-participation and to people wanting to vote Reform. Regeneration is absolutely critical in some of these estates. So investment in improving estates must be made to show that the housing managers care. This can be done through improving landscaping, sorting out parking and reinstating support services, all of which we have accepted in the private sector but are not in public housing.

Can I invite the noble Lord to finish?

I am just finishing. What plans will the Government bring forward to improve sink estates generally and restore the confidence, commitment and involvement of social tenants?

My Lords, it is an honour to speak on the Second Reading of the Social Housing Bill. I will share a story about Carla and Chloe. Some time ago, Carla became homeless following a relationship breakdown. The traumatic aftermath of this personal tragedy is hard for many of us to imagine. Two decades of homelessness ensued, with Carla searching night after night for a safe spot to sleep on London streets. She would often pick a place near to a restaurant with outdoor heaters, in a desperate attempt to find some kind of warmth in an otherwise cold world. We need this Bill for Carla and many like her.

We have rightly heard from noble colleagues about the scale of our housing crisis: 4.2 million citizens in need of social housing; 1.3 million stuck on waiting lists; and, more worrying still, 175,000 children who will go to bed again tonight in temporary accommodation. Jon Kuhrt from Hope into Action says that it is surely right to say that

“housing injustice is perhaps the greatest social policy challenge we face”.

There are communities across this country where a lack of adequate social housing is the prime reason that families are trapped in poverty and communities are struggling to thrive. By increasing the qualifying period for right to buy and introducing a 35-year exemption for newly built social homes, the Government are protecting housing stock and giving confidence to councils to build more social housing.

Also to be welcomed, as many noble Lords have mentioned, are the strengthened protections for those suffering domestic abuse. This will finally prevent victims from being forced to choose between their personal safety and the place they call home. In all this, the Bill offers a timely response to a deeply human problem.

However, there is another lesson to be learned from Carla’s story, and that is where Chloe enters. Carla’s problems went beyond matters of bricks and mortar. Although housing is an essential part of the solution that she is looking for, the most decisive need for her was pastoral care and practical support. At this point, Chloe comes in. As a caseworker for the Connection at St Martin-in-the-Fields, just down the road, Chloe built a relationship with Clara. She earned her trust, helped her to access a wide range of support and services, and ultimately helped her to secure a room in a women-only hostel. The combination of a safe place to stay, if only temporarily, and someone she could depend upon has been life-changing for Carla.

In the words of Bonnie Williams, the CEO of Housing Justice,

“a home is sustained not only through tenancy law, but through relationship, trust, community and belonging”.

Complex human problems require deeply relational solutions. Alongside the Connection, the charity that helped Carla, St Martin-in-the-Fields runs the Frontline Network—the UK’s largest network of professionals and volunteers working with the vulnerably housed. The Frontline Network is generously supported by public donations to the BBC Radio 4 Christmas appeal, the world’s oldest fundraising media campaign. A recent survey of those working with people who are homeless showed that 80% of them believe that homelessness is getting worse, 50% say that they themselves are at risk of burnout, 51% say that the immense challenge they have in supporting clients is having a negative impact on their well-being, and 34% are struggling to pay their bills due to the salaries they receive not covering their cost of living.

To maximise the social and economic return on the investment outlined in this Bill, it is vital that His Majesty’s Government increase funding to those in housing associations, local authorities, charities and faith communities who provide the essential human infrastructure that will enable this legislation to change lives. It is not only flats and houses that we need. The Government should not wholly rely on charitable giving and the good will of charities to provide the decisive human interventions for those in the greatest need. Committing just a fraction of the overall budget to the human support that brilliant caseworkers such as Chloe provide would radically increase the number of sustainable tenancies while radically reducing the number of individuals and families who find housing only later to find themselves homeless all over again. This tragic back and forth comes at a crippling cost to the state and does untold damage to the lives of individuals and families. Miriam Morris of the Church Homeless Charity points out that, by investing in innovative local interventions and human-to-human support for people, we deliver much better outcomes and radically reduce our costs, both economically and socially.

Carla needs this legislation to pass. For now, Chloe is continuing to support Carla in temporary accommodation and hopes shortly to help her move into a safe and warm home of her own. She will then no doubt continue to support Carla as she sustains that tenancy. Few of us in your Lordships’ House have shared Carla’s experiences, but all of us know what it is to go through difficult times in our lives and to find someone we can truly rely upon.

I am wholly supportive of the Government’s attempts to deal with the social housing crisis through the legislation put before this House. In doing so, I look forward to hearing how we will help people like Carla by backing workers like Chloe. Alongside bricks and mortar, how will we invest in those wonderful front-line workers who provide a beautifully relational solution to a deeply human problem? If we can do that, this legislation will change many lives. What is more, we will join heroes like Chloe and play our part in helping Carla and many others both to find a house and to turn that house into a home.

My Lords, I certainly support this Bill, which will help with the operation of the right-to-buy scheme. I was doubtful about right to buy when it first came in, but I do not now support its abolition in any sense, although I recognise that in Wales and Scotland they have found it necessary to do so. But it needs to be subject to some additional measures.

I support the provisions in this Bill. I have long thought that the qualification of the length of time that a person has to be a tenant of the council before they have the right to buy has been too short, and we are addressing that. I recognise that the Bill provides that new build is not subject to the immediate right to buy for 35 years. I strongly support the provisions in this Bill relating to people suffering domestic abuse. I also recognise what others have said: it is a question not simply of giving the tenancy to the abused spouse or partner but of making sure that she—it is normally she but sometimes he—does not suffer additional abuse by finding an alternative safer location for them. These measures are important for making right to buy operate more easily and to protect existing tenants.

However, I cannot help but feel a little disappointment that the Social Housing Bill that I saw in the initial list of provision for this Session of Parliament is so limited. We have a situation in which the market in every form of tenure of housing in this country is in total crisis, and particularly the social housing element is in crisis. Thousands of people cannot ever envisage being given any social housing. We have councils that do not provide any social housing and we have numbers of people who are stuck in property that requires new input to bring it up to the safe standards that are required. We see the health of our children being endangered by the dampness and unhealthy conditions in some of our social housing. All those things need addressing, but they all need money.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, said at the beginning, we need to have a guarantee that money goes back into the social housing sector. I understand the clear exposition from the noble Lord, Lord Young, as to why the need to recycle the money was not followed by successive Governments, whether it was in the hands of the Treasury or the local authorities, and we deplore that. But from now on should we not, by some mechanism or another—the Treasury, after all, has mechanisms for ensuring that departments and local authorities spend money in many different directions—establish the principle that the money received for the disposal of right-to-buy homes goes back to create greater and more improved social housing? If that is not done, we will again go through the process that the noble Lord, Lord Young, described, and end up with the fact that social housing for those who really need it is not available.

I hope that, if we require a broader housing Bill, which I hope the Minister will be able to produce in the coming months, or at least in the next Session of Parliament, there is a new approach to social housing. I do mean social housing, not the broad definition of affordable housing; the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, was absolutely right to say that that confuses the issue. We mean social housing, and we need to ensure that resources are directed to people who can deliver social housing. That requires a lot of things to happen: it requires changes in planning laws, and changes to ensure that the construction industry itself is capable of doing this, which probably requires tackling the oligopoly of big housebuilders and developers, which tend to dominate and persuade local authorities that social housing is actually not a good idea because they cannot make enough money out of it. We need to make an approach on lots of different fronts to get the new social housing delivered, but we should start from the premise that what goes out of the social housing sector should go back in. There must be an obligation on local authorities and the department to produce a new form of legislation and new mechanisms to ensure that happens.

I hope my noble friend the Minister can give me the assurance that at some time in the foreseeable future we will see another Bill to ensure that the level of social housing is kept up and that therefore we see an end to the terrible situation whereby the lack of social housing at present creates misery. A failure in housing policy for many years needs to be addressed by this Government, and I hope that the Minister can give us an assurance that that will indeed happen.

My Lords, I remind noble Lords of my registered interests, that I was a previous leader and councillor for the London Borough of Bexley and vice-president of London Councils, and that I have had involvement in the Local Government Association.

I must admit that when I heard the title of this Bill, I was really quite intrigued, as in my opinion there are so many avenues it could have gone down. But for a Government who say that they want to solve the housing crisis, I was so disappointed when I read that the main focus seemed to be about the right to buy. To put that into context, I grew up on a council estate in Lewisham, in the very early days of the right-to-buy scheme. I recall the aspirational conversations of my parents and their peers that this was their opportunity to own their own homes. That discussion was not about making profits; they fully intended to remain in those homes in which they were raising their families. None of them was high earning, but they were prepared for mortgages and taking responsibility for their home and improving it.

I am sure that many from that time will recall that the first thing the majority of those people did was to change the front door—and did we not all recognise that when canvassing, years later? But it was not just the front doors, as they also had a sense of pride in their surroundings and put many hours into helping with the maintenance of the area, as my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham referenced earlier. The other thing it did was to give them independence, as my noble friend Lady Coffey referenced, so that as they got older and circumstances changed, there were options and the possibility of moving to more appropriate accommodation to ensure that they could continue to live independent lives. That probably saved a lot in social care support that we will never recognise.

Noble Lords will not be surprised to know that I am a supporter of the right-to-buy policy. For every story you will hear of people making profits and being greedy, we should not forget the reality of the majority of people who remained in the property, and intended to continue to do so. However, given that the Bill is supposed to be about delivering on the Government’s manifesto to prioritise the building of new social rented houses and to better protect existing stock, there seem to be a number of important aspects missing, as my noble friend Lady Scott referenced earlier.

The first one, from my perspective, is about making sure that social housing is being used by those for whom it was intended. I vividly recall a conversation with a local housing association when we were embarking on a large regeneration scheme in Bexley, when I asked how it could be sure that the people living in the properties were who they thought they were. I am afraid that digital communications and electronic banking have ended the days of the rent man calling regularly and seeing the tenants, which has meant that the system is open to abuse; the “key job”, where social housing can be sublet, is a very real risk. The man from the local housing association looked at me as if I had two heads at the time, but once the work started in earnest to establish decant need, he admitted that I was right and he was amazed at what they found.

The second aspect is the council waiting list, which has been referenced here many times this afternoon. It appears that the size of waiting lists is sometimes championed in the same way as “My dad is bigger than your dad”. However, if those lists are not regularly revisited, they will not only continue to grow but become inaccurate and lead people into a false sense of security. A regularly refreshed list means that the right priorities are used when nominations are being considered. More accurate information could also ensure that the right people are getting the nominations. Probably most importantly of all, it would mean that those on the list will have a more accurate view of the possibility of housing becoming available.

The next issue is whether tenancy of social housing should be assumed to be lifelong. The Bill seeks to repeal addressing the lifetime tenancy that was introduced in the Housing and Planning Act 2016. Is it right that high-income earners remain in subsidised housing that the less fortunate cannot access due to unavailability? While the Government suggest that addressing high-income tenants could bring about disincentives, do they really believe that? The viability of increasing the supply of new social housing, whether through new build or regeneration, needs a mature conversation, and we should recognise that regeneration means decanting, which actually makes it even more costly.

Yes, right-to-buy receipts as well as Section 106 and CIL moneys can be used, but is it sufficient? If it is not viable, does there need to be a conversation about the cost of building or the cost of not building? That needs to be a grown-up conversation. If social housing is to be created, why not seek to ensure that good tenants can be rewarded and backfill with new nominations, which could often mean downsizing, thereby freeing up valuable family homes?

The cost of creating supported accommodation is not viable, either for the elderly or for others who may need support. That is short-sighted and needs addressing, again because that could free up family accommodation but also because it means pushing costs into other areas such as social care.

The proposal in the Bill that concerns me is around domestic violence. Although I agree that there is a need to address tenancy issues, the suggestion is that the perpetrator has to be convicted, which could take some time to come about, so that needs to be considered, as does whether the person who has been abused needs to move from the area. These are two things that I am sure will come out through the Bill’s passage.

Another issue is the disposal of social housing through sale. I very much agree with this proposal, as we found out that one of our local housing associations was selling ex-council properties as a consequence of seeing them pop up on auction sites. Bearing in mind that Bexley’s social housing stock is held by registered providers—

Can the noble Baroness wind up, please? She is over time.

That means that that is actually taxpayers’ money. There are many other things that the Bill could go into. It seems a shame that the Bill presents an opportunity to address some of those issues that really impact people, but I am sure that the Minister will be open to conversations throughout its passage.

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak after the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill of Bexley. I fondly recall the times in London Councils meetings when we would sit around the table and agree on virtually everything—sadly, this will probably not be so today, but it is still a pleasure to speak after her. I am pleased to speak in support of the Social Housing Bill and in particular the restrictions which the Bill introduces on the exercise of the right to buy. In doing so, I declare my interests as non-executive chair of H4Life, in Quoin Partners and as a member of the advisory board of LHG.

There are some policies pursued by Governments which are very much of their time. Perhaps regrettably, we do not review those policies sufficiently regularly and they become enshrined in our body politic, but they were the answer to the question of a different era. Right to buy is one such policy. That does not mean that Conservatives cannot be proud of that policy, but nor does it mean that it is the right policy for today.

Let us look at the differences between then and now. In 1980, London was a city whose population was declining, down to 6.8 million from 7.5 million the previous decade. Councils had vacant council housing stock and—can noble Lords believe?—hard-to-let properties. The average property price in London was about £22,500; that is £75,000 in today’s money. For this city, the policy of right to buy met a number of challenges—the realistic aspiration which many people had of owning their own home, at a time when property prices were relatively low, and there was surplus housing stock across the capital.

Today the figures are starkly different. London’s population is 9.1 million, having risen from 8.2 million 10 years ago. That is an increase of a third from 1981. Councils have ever-increasing waiting lists for council housing, and they face the massive financial and social challenge of dealing with the need for and cost of temporary accommodation.

There is no spare housing, let alone properties which are hard to let; there is a housing shortage. The average property price is £542,000—more than seven times, in real terms, the cost of a home in 1980. Sadly, the aspiration of owning your own home is something which many young people regard as being a wholly unrealistic prospect. Renting their own home, rather than a room, is their property ambition.

It is in this context that we consider the Bill. It is plainly right that local authorities should be allowed to protect their existing stock when it is such a scarce and valuable commodity. I welcome the extension of the qualifying period from three to 10 years—it is clearly right. I was also struck by the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, that maybe we should be looking for a longer qualifying period.

I particularly welcome the indefinite right of first refusal, which will be given to local authorities which have had to sell property under the right to buy. Bringing former social housing stock back into use as general needs housing is often a speedy and cost-effective way to increase council housing stock. If it can be used as a way to help regenerate estates and provide more housing for future needs, that must be a good thing.

I am pleased to see the protections given to newly built stock in Clause 18. When I was leader in Southwark and we embarked upon our council housebuilding programme, which was, and remains, the largest programme in the country—a commitment to build 11,000 new homes—we were concerned that we would be building stock which we might lose relatively swiftly to right to buy. The proposed protection of that stock for 35 years will give some reassurance not only to Southwark but to those local authorities across the country which are building new stock, and it will convince them that they are right to build. I think that there is an argument for considering a longer period because quite often the cost of the build has not been repaid after those 35 years; let us look at the real-terms period when those costs will be repaid.

Many problems remain with our ability as a country to deliver the new social housing which we need—not just social housing but housing as a whole. The money spent by local authorities on building new homes is undermined by the amount which we seem content to spend on temporary accommodation and homelessness. But, importantly, with that restriction on right to buy, the Bill protects what we do have, and for that reason it should be hugely welcomed.

My Lords, I declare an interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and the part owner of rented property in West Yorkshire. In my contribution to the King’s Speech debate last month, I referenced how disappointing it was that the Government would bring forward legislation to further curtail property ownership through a diminishing right-to-buy policy. The Social Housing Bill is a narrow-minded piece of legislation which misses huge opportunities to rectify many of the ongoing issues in the social housing sector—issues that this side of the House will seek to rectify in Committee and on Report.

Property ownership is not a bad thing. It gives families a sense of security in life and a stake in society. You cannot make a modern-day case for capitalism if the individual does not own capital. I refer noble Lords to the paper commissioned by the London School of Economics in December 2024, Human Capital from Childhood Exposure to Homeownership: Evidence from Right-to-Buy. There are some notable points to consider. The right-to-buy scheme has generated detectable, sizeable school performance gains. The policy gave rise to improved educational outcomes via improvements in the local community. The right-to-buy policy had positive effects on educational and downstream labour market outcomes. The right-to-buy experiment shows that increasing home ownership generates greater human capital accumulation.

To curtail the ability of residents in social housing to purchase property through right to buy is immoral and goes against every fabric this Government were elected to uphold. Those opposite may be surprised to know that the decision to allow local authorities to retain 100% of right-to-buy receipts was made by the previous Conservative Government, and it is right. The days when local authorities were forced into pooling right-to-buy receipts on to national schemes undermined the principle of the scheme; namely, that a right-to-buy receipt be used to build new social housing to replace stock that had been purchased privately. I hope this Government will consider using this Bill to put into legislation that the 100% retention of right-to-buy receipts be made permanent.

On a similar point, the Government announced that right-to-buy receipts would need to be spent by local authorities within a 10-year period. Could this legislation include an ability for local authorities to seek an exemption from the Secretary of State where they may have right-to-buy receipts linked to future regeneration schemes coming down the line? As I am sure the Minister will understand, given supply chain constraints in the construction sector, this is having a knock-on impact on local authorities.

Following my contribution in the King’s Speech debate, I reiterate my interest in the upcoming Law Commission consultation on escheat land, which is transferred to the Crown Estate. I understand the commission will look at the feasibility of transferring escheat land to public bodies other than the Crown Estate. I would welcome confirmation in the Minister’s summing up on whether her department will push for housing revenue accounts to be included in this on the basis that local authorities agreed to use such land for building social housing where practical.

Finally, Clause 9 is of concern to me, and I seek clarification on its necessity. It will give the Secretary of State the power to direct local authorities to contribute right-to-buy receipts towards national pooling schemes. Given that the Government have said they would like to keep 100% of right-to-buy receipts for local authorities, I would welcome clarification on why Clause 9 is therefore needed, unless the Government plan to reallocate localised right-to-buy receipts to national pooling schemes.

This Bill is wrong and undermines the principles of home ownership. Significant work will need to take place in Committee and on Report to bring it to a satisfactory condition.

My Lords, it is a privilege to take part in this debate. There have been some thoughtful and knowledgeable contributions from all sides. I particularly enjoyed the passionate defence and argument made by the noble Lord, Lord Best, for regeneration to take priority. I hope the Minister heard those comments and will respond. I will confine my remarks to welcoming provisions in the Bill relating to survivors of domestic abuse and to raising two areas that would help the Government meet their ambition of tackling housing insecurity by supporting people to remain in their tenancies and communities, as the Minister spoke about at the outset.

First, I support the provisions in the Bill for survivors of domestic abuse. The barriers people face when trying to leave an abusive household, whether navigating tenancy arrangements, securing alternative accommodation or avoiding financial penalties, can keep them trapped in dangerous situations for a very long period. Provisions to tackle that are hugely welcome. It would be good to hear more about how the Government foresee these measures working for people in practice in a timely way. I imagine that will be part of our discussions in Committee.

I will focus on two areas that I think would help the Government achieve their ambitions of supporting greater housing security. They recognise that some people need lifetime secure tenancies and are repealing mandatory fixed terms created by the 2016 Act. However, a tenancy agreement alone does not limit people’s ability to stay in their home and community. We need systemic thinking about the kinds of homes we are building—whether they are appropriate for people’s needs as they age and as our climate changes, and how we support people to maintain health and well-being throughout their life. There is nothing in the Bill about that.

When I was an MP in Brent, around half of my constituency casework was about housing. The most desperate situations almost always involved families whose needs had changed because of disability. Families had to wait years for housing that met their needs. Without it, children were dependent on others to shower, get to the toilet and even get out of their property and get to school, when they should have been exploring their independence. For adults, it limited their ability to go to work, and it limited others in their household too.

I also have some personal experience of these struggles. My husband is a wheelchair user. When we could no longer make our flat work, after a series of mishaps, including being stuck inside for a week after the lift broke and nights sleeping on the sofa after the internal stairlift went on the blink again, we were, thankfully, financially secure enough to make the move elsewhere and pay for our own adaptations. But I have other relatives whose experience has been different. One who became a wheelchair user after a serious accident got stuck in hospital for months after he was ready for discharge because no accessible social housing was available. He was discharged several times to a Travelodge, without care, as it was the only available accommodation with level entry and a wet room. Both chaotic discharges resulted in fairly rapid further emergency hospital readmissions, with all the misery and NHS cost involved.

In my role as a board member of two NHS trusts, Barts and EPUT, both listed in my register of interests, I am conscious of the pressures on NHS trusts to discharge patients and of how, too often, lack of suitable housing is the main barrier. The Equality and Human Rights Commission states that one in five disabled people living in social housing is in accommodation that is unsuitable for their needs. The Centre for Ageing Better says that only 13% of homes in England in 2005 met the four most basic accessibility criteria for someone to visit or live independently in a property with dignity. Almost 13 million people may now be living in homes that do not meet their accessibility needs, with lack of accessible private accommodation only adding to the pressure on social housing lists. The Government’s recent healthy homes guidance recognises this, recommending that all new homes should meet accessible and adaptable standards under Part M4(2) of the building regs, yet the Bill contains no serious attempt to drive that transition at scale.

I will say something briefly about green space, because this too is an issue of inequality that too often disappears from housing debates. Social housing policy cannot concern itself simply with the existence of housing units in isolation from the environment around them. Where people live affects physical health, mental well-being, childhood development and community cohesion. Access to green space must not be an optional extra or the preserve of affluent neighbourhoods; it should be part of healthy social infrastructure.

The inequalities on this are stark. Research consistently shows that poorer communities and communities with higher proportions of social housing have significantly worse access to quality green space. Nearly 3 million people in England live more than a 10-minute walk from a public park, while those in deprived urban areas experience some of the worst environmental inequalities in the country. This matters because the evidence on health outcomes is overwhelming. Studies published in the BMJ have linked increased access to green space with significantly lower levels of preventable illness and premature mortality in deprived communities; in other words, access to nature is not an aesthetic nice to have, it is a core part of preventive public health policy.

There is much in the Bill that I support, but I am concerned that it lacks the scale and urgency that the situation demands and misses areas that would support the Government to meet their ambitions to tackle housing security. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this debate, and I welcome the opportunity to follow the noble Baroness’s additional points, which need to be taken on board. I will provide a general welcome to the Bill, particularly the changes it makes to the right to buy, but I will also use this opportunity to highlight the relationship between housing tenure and the quest to provide all pensioners with an adequate income.

On the sale of social housing, I am sorry that my noble friend the Minister is not present, because I was going to say some nice things about her introductory speech. It was a powerful and effective speech which came from the heart, but with clear policy content. I almost felt like, as they do in the Commons, leaping to my feet and waving the Order Paper. It was exactly the sort of thing I want to hear from the Front Bench, and I thank her very much indeed for the way she presented the Bill. I also agree with much of what else has been said by my noble friends.

I am a long-term opponent of the right to buy. I respect my noble friends who take a broader view of the issue, and I accept that this is a fight where we have to accept what is being proposed on the mechanics of right to buy. I was impressed by the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, and his exposition of the justification for the right-to-buy process. The important point that he missed from his exposition, the one that does not get mentioned, is that this is fundamentally a political project on the part of the Conservative Party. It was an attempt to social engineer in the belief that it would have an adverse effect on support for the Labour Party. This is clearly a fact. In Westminster, they were caught out—and they paid the price. I was around as a local councillor at the time, with a large quantity of council housing in my estate, so I was aware of the debates that took place. It is undeniable: the political pressure for this policy was about social engineering to try to disadvantage the Labour Party. Noble Lords should not try to deny it.

It not only failed to obey the law in that particular case, but it also had a destructive effect on social housing. It also had a destructive effect on the finances of local government—the net effect on its finances was adverse. Most importantly, it had an adverse effect on the social housing stock. The end result has not been more owner-occupation; the proportion of houses owned by owner-occupiers is in long-term decline now. Instead, we are seeing this shift to expensive, low-quality private rented accommodation, much of which is ex-council stock and should be available to social renters. So let us be honest about the nature of right to buy.

I want to put this into the context of the specific issues affecting pensioners. Two weeks ago, the first report of the Second Pensions Commission was published. Much in there is about the nature of people’s tenure and the effect it has on their incomes. There are certain items in the report that are worth highlighting. It finds that

“two key groups with a higher risk of poverty are those without private pension income”—

no surprise there—

“and renters (particularly in the private sector)”.

It also goes on to tell us that

“the number of non-homeowning pensioners is expected to grow: by 2050”,

the end of its period of remit,

“half of pensioners in poverty are projected to be renters”.

The problem is particularly acute in the private rented sector, so the development and expansion of social housing is a crucial element in developing decent, adequate incomes in retirement for pensioners.

I very much hope that the ministerial team will take this on board. It will be worth them and the officials reading what the report says about social housing and the long-term impact it will have on the standard of living of pensioners. The more we are able to develop social housing and offer it at social rents, the lower the level of poverty will be among pensioners. I hope that is an objective we can all support.

My Lords, it is a pleasure to contribute to this debate that so many people have made important points in. I declare my interests as chair of Look Ahead, a social housing provider that works with homeless people and those with mental health problems, and as a previous non-executive director of Aster and Southern housing associations.

The Bill is designed to protect existing social housing stock and to respond to long-standing challenges in the number of homes available by reducing the number of social homes sold through the right-to-buy scheme and removing significant disincentives for councils to build new supply with receipts received from such sales. The Bill is also designed as a route to home ownership for eligible long-standing tenants.

All social housing stock, as other noble Lords have said, should provide safe, secure homes for individuals and families in which to live. As so well described by the noble Baroness, Lady Teather, evidence demonstrates that there is a significant relationship between people’s physical and mental health and the security of a well-maintained flat or house in which to live.

The new consumer standard for social housing is resulting in greater investment in many of our current homes, but that actually means that many housing associations are building fewer newer homes because of the investment in current stock.

As many other noble Lords have said, there have been opportunities for people to buy their social homes at a substantial discount. Though in principle an extremely good concept, we know that it has been open to abuse through individuals exercising the right to buy, then subletting and ultimately using the increase in property value to benefit other family members; or through some tenants even borrowing money from unscrupulous lenders to purchase their homes, then being held to ransom, in effect, and forced to sell their homes at less than market value to repay the debt to those lenders. This effectively makes the so-called purchasers homeless, or results in them having to move to a less suitable property, with any remaining funds they have available after such a transaction.

The new Bill will increase the minimum qualifying period for exercising the right to buy for secure tenants from the current three-year period to a 10-year tenancy. That may result in individuals who can do so saving a deposit and choosing to leave their social homes and buying independently or through a shared ownership arrangement, thus releasing social housing provision for those on the waiting list.

However, the proposed Act makes little mention of tenants dwelling under a shared ownership arrangement, except regarding disposals notification requirements. Can the Minister indicate whether His Majesty’s Government could consider an amendment to the Bill for people who have bought a percentage of their property through shared ownership and paid rent on the other element of their home for 10 years also to be granted a discount reduction of 5% on the remaining property value after the 10-year qualifying period?

Many shared ownership tenants, particularly single people, have gone down this route due to their inability to access rented social housing. A change to enable shared owners to be part of a discount scheme would include many essential workers, such as paramedics or teachers, who could then take advantage of the proposed scheme. Indeed, the optimist in me thinks that it may encourage young people in essential occupations to stay in expensive areas that are hard to recruit to, when they have purchased a shared ownership property, as they feel they could get a discount at a later date. Depending on the Minister’s response to this issue, I hope to work with others in this House on an amendment to reflect parity of discounts for shared ownership residents. I welcome the content of the Bill and passionately believe that it will result in fewer families in more expensive private rental accommodation or, in worst case scenarios, living in bed and breakfasts due to a lack of availability of social housing stock in the area in which they live.

Finally, can the Bill make provision for councils to consider purchasing additional social housing stock that is currently vacant? The latest data, to which I was so kindly referred by the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage—I received her note only this afternoon—states:

“The overall number of unsold units increased”,

by December of last year, “by 11%” from the previous quarter,

“to 7,313, with the number of units unsold for over six months … increasing … to 3,016 units, the highest number since December 2023”,

indicating the points that other noble Lords have made about the difficulty of selling stock at the moment. Is it not time that we bought this stock and put it into social ownership for rent? Further investigations could be done across England to understand the detail more fully. How can we allow such properties to remain vacant for prolonged periods after completion while families with children live in temporary accommodation? The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester identified this challenge.

The Bill is welcomed, but let us swiftly try to improve its intentions, so that we genuinely increase the social housing stock at pace and make life happier and healthier for many of our population.

My Lords, I support my noble friend on the Front Bench: it is quite right to debate the effective allocation of scarce public resources. That needs to be said.

The Government have brought forward the Bill ostensibly with the desire to protect social housing and facilitate the building of new supply. This is an admirable goal. We need more houses. The UK is building only 200 homes a year per 10,000 people added to the population over the past 20 years. However, there is an aspect of this discussion which does not receive the attention it deserves and which I will highlight later in my remarks: population and housing tenure.

I welcome in particular Clause 12 and Schedule 1 on victims of domestic abuse. However, the tenor of the Bill is generally hostile to right to buy and seeks, particularly in Part 1, to circumscribe and curtail the rights of those seeking to exercise their rights under the scheme. I know that, for many people in the Labour Party, right to buy is a totemic scheme to which they have been opposed by habit and tradition with tribal hostility. But for many of us, it represented and still represents the greatest and most profound transfer of capital via property rights, in our country’s history, to working people away from state oligopoly and, sometimes, municipal slum landlords. It gave a pathway to prosperity, self-reliance and family stability and success to thousands of British citizens of modest means from 1980 onwards and boosted home ownership to almost 70% by the early 2000s. I accept that it was by no means perfect and that more emphasis should have been placed not merely on paying off local authority debt but on building good-quality homes for working families—not merely substandard properties for those on welfare, which exacerbated multigenerational welfarism.

It is important to dispel the myths about right to buy. Your Lordships’ House will no doubt be aware of research published by the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. Human Capital from Childhood Exposure to Homeownership: Evidence from Right-to-Buy demonstrates strong empirical evidence not just of increased prosperity and financial stability but of real demonstrable improvements in educational attainment. It generated detectable, sizable school performance gains among young people exposed to home ownership, showing an increase in the number of good grades in high-stakes exams as well as a reduction in crime.

Despite all that, I want to leave the ideological debate for Committee. Instead, I ask a fundamental question about housing and particularly social housing: what sort of housing do we want? What sort of homes would best serve the needs of the British people? What do we want our housing to do?

The ONS has argued that, from about now—mid-2026 onwards—deaths in the UK are projected to exceed births. The BBC reported two weeks ago that births have fallen to the lowest level in 50 years. The UK is facing an unprecedented situation that will have a significant impact on the strength and viability of our economy. Between mid-2024 and mid-2034, there are projected to be 450,000 more deaths than births. We all want economic growth, but low birth rates create an ageing population increasingly dependent on the state, leading to a vicious circle of higher government spending and a weaker economy.

How do we address that? Families are the building blocks on which a society is built. A 2026 poll commissioned by the New Statesman found that 81% of men and 82% of women between the ages of 18 and 30 said that they would like to be married or in a civil partnership one day. It also found that 75% of young women and 80% of young men wanted to have children at some point in their life. Analysis of the 2025 UK multifamily housing survey and historic surveys indicated that the perceived ideal family size has mostly stayed similar since 1945. British men and women in the 2025 survey said, on average, that they would be happiest with 2.1 or 2.2 children.

However, one significant issue that is often not factored in is housing tenure. The analysis of the UK multifamily housing survey found that housing was a significant factor in how British people approach having families. Some 81% believe that the cost and availability of family homes is making it harder for people to marry and start families; only 9% disagreed. Some 74% said that the type and size of housing available has a major impact on people’s decisions about having children. Some 65% of the public agreed that too many new homes are small flats, and that they are unsuitable for raising families. More than half personally know young people or couples who are delaying having children because they cannot afford a suitable home.

The public also have views on how to address the problem. A majority wanted new housing developments to include a higher proportion of family-sized homes, and 65% wanted three-bedroom homes to be prioritised in the planning rules for new development, so that families can put down roots and become part of a stable local community. A survey of people’s preferences from the Institute for Family Studies found that those who wanted to have children saw having a two-bedroom property, instead of a one-bedroom property, as having the same impact on their confidence in having children as a £1,900 to £2,600 reduction in their monthly housing costs.

Policy should not and cannot tell people whether they should have children, but it can make it easier for those who want to. In 2023, flats rose to almost 22% of housing stock, while detached homes and bungalows fell to between 25% and 26%. Our policies, under both parties, have focused on the number of houses and not on those that are compatible with the family. As we think about housing, and social stock in particular, including the aesthetics of new housing developments, we should look to support the family. Local plans and housing needs assessments should track and plan for the number of bedrooms and family-sized properties. Local and national policies should plan for the building of family-sized homes. Our planning policy should focus on schemes that are viable and conducive to families.

Finally, as I have exceeded my time, Britain is facing a crisis of the family and significant housing challenges. The policies we discuss in this House should attempt to deal with both those problems. For no other reason, I welcome the Bill and hope it gives rise to opportunities for the Government to begin to solve these pressing, significant societal issues.

My Lords, I declare my housing interests as a landlord, leaseholder, former renter and co-chair of the All-Party Group on Leasehold and Commonhold Reform.

The Social Housing Bill before your Lordships’ House is to be welcomed, particularly changes to the right-to-buy system and provisions intended to protect victims of domestic abuse. The Bill should be read alongside His Majesty’s Government’s plan to build 1.5 million homes in England by the end of this Parliament, including some 300,000 social and affordable homes under the affordable homes programme. Of these, at least 60% are intended for social rent over five years—just less than 40,000 a year. HMG have committed £39 billion over 10 years for the new social and affordable homes programme. So far, so good.

However, when you drill down into what is actually happening in the housing sector, the picture is not so rosy. Shelter estimates that 90,000 social rent homes are needed every year for the next 10 years. The reality is that just about 12,000 social rent homes were completed in 2024-25 in England and, over the same period, around 21,000 social homes were lost—almost double.

The impression is that the Government are tinkering around the edges, when what is needed is a radical improvement in the delivery of affordable homes to buy and rent to tackle the current housing crisis head on. Right to buy should not be restricted but should be banned outright, as a first step. In that, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton.

The housing crisis has not been helped by a clear downturn in housing starts over the previous year. In 2025, starts were still 21% below pre-pandemic levels. The housing market is the worst that I have seen in my lifetime, for sellers, buyers and renters. We are witnessing a catastrophic situation. In London, we have witnessed a near collapse in housing starts. Less than 6,000 homes were started in London in 2025, which is about 94% below the level needed. The impact on the supply of affordable homes and sky-high rents is obvious. At the beginning of last year, 23 of the 33 London boroughs recorded zero starts—the lowest level since 2010. For affordable housing, the picture was even worse, with the second-lowest starts on record.

What does this mean for the overall target of 1.5 million homes? London is supposed to deliver a large share of this target—about a third—but current building implies that a large national shortfall is baked in. Starts today drive completion in the next couple of years. With starts this low, completions will drop sharply later this decade, blowing a hole in government targets, and the housing crisis will get only worse. What is needed is a massive post-war-style building programme of social housing and a regulatory and financial environment which allows this to happen. Housing has to be built and viable. Eventually, relaxing the planning application process, as proposed in London, will not suffice. Delivery, not targets and endless consultations, is required. His Majesty’s Government need to wake up to the scale of this crisis and adopt immediate radical measures to deal with it. At the moment, they are in denial over the scale of the housing crisis and adopting piecemeal policies to deal with it.

Another case in point is the state of the existing rental market, in which long-term rental properties are becoming increasingly rare and landlords are turning to virtually unregulated short-let platforms, such as Airbnb. They are doing that because they are bound by few rules, are more lucrative than long-term lets, avoid costly measures such as EPCs, and can easily avoid tax.

These short-let platforms took off only in the last decade. I think that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government does not understand the scale of the problem and the impact on the long-term rental market. There are over 100,000 Airbnb-style short lets in London alone. In the city of Bath, which I know well, with its population of about 100,000 people, there are up to 1,700 Airbnb-style short lets. That is bad for local hotels and B&Bs, let alone for people looking for a long-term rental home. Barcelona is phasing out all short-term tourist flats by 2028, and there are strict restrictions or bans in Florence, New York, San Francisco, Santa Monica, Las Vegas, Penang and other places. A register, as was proposed by the Government, will merely record the problem and do nothing to ease it.

In one block in London that I know well, it took two years and the threat of flat forfeiture to stop a landlord renting through Airbnb, so causing excessive wear and tear, noise nuisance and anti-social behaviour, with visitors arriving at all hours with their suitcases and sometimes staying just a day or two. I look forward to the Government’s new plans to enforce leases in the absence of forfeiture.

To protect our residents in cities and resorts throughout the UK, His Majesty’s Government should institute an immediate ban on these type of short lets and encourage landlords to return to affordable long-term rentals. Some of these landlord properties will undoubtedly be sold, although anecdotal evidence suggests that many trapped landlords are unable to sell in the current dire market conditions.

Currently, the private sector accounts for one out of five households, but the private rental sector has shrunk by 250,000 in the last 12 months. The Minister may continue to deny that, but Savills estimates that 800,000 to 1 million additional private rented homes will be required by 2031. Even if the PRS does not shrink by then—which I doubt, given population and affordability pressures—where are those extra homes to come from? Unlike Airbnb, the PRS is heavily regulated and taxed, buy-to-let mortgages have gone through the roof and interest is no longer tax-deductible. What are His Majesty’s Government doing to expand the PRS? I suspect nothing.

In conclusion, we need to see radical action from the Government to solve our housing crisis, with no more delay and no more dither, through the delivery of a massive affordable and social housing programme and, yes, a more supportive role for the PRS.

My Lords, I welcome this pragmatic Bill, as it seeks to protect social housing stock and tenants. It is shameful that, due to low wages and profiteering, too many people cannot afford decent housing. Some 330,410 households need homelessness support; 134,760 households are living in temporary accommodation; and an estimated 172,420 children are living in temporary accommodation. Social housing matters, because it enables local authorities and housing associations to address homelessness, provide secure accommodation for families, provide affordable housing to millions of people, provide competition for the private sector and reduce the cost of living crisis. The depletion of social housing stock forces families to enter the private rented sector, which is more expensive.

Some 4.4 million new social homes, or around 126,000 a year, were built in the 35 years following the end of the Second World War. By 1983, in the aftermath of Conservative policies, social housebuilding declined to 44,240 a year, and by the end of Conservative rule, in 2024, it was down to 10,000 a year.

The right to buy for sitting council tenants did not start with the Conservative Party, though it likes to take credit for it. It has existed since the 19th century. The Housing Act 1936 and the House Purchase and Housing Act 1959 affirmed that commitment. The biggest change came in 1980, when the Thatcher Government offered tenants massive discounts, which my noble friend Lord Davies of Brixton might say were actually bribes. By March 2025, 2.8 million homes had been sold to tenants across the UK at an average discount of 44% of market value. The discounted sales generated £62 billion, which local councils could not use to replenish the stock. Some 1.9 million council homes were sold by England’s local authorities for £51 billion. In 2024 the same houses were worth £430 billion. Commenting on this, the think tank Common Wealth said in 2024 that

“£194 billion corresponds to the equity that was effectively given away for free through the discount. Only £236 billion corresponds to the equity that was compensated at market value at the time of sale, for which councils received £51 billion in nominal terms, or £104 billion”

in 2024 money. So this was a massive giveaway by the Conservative Party.

The housing stock has not been replenished. In the 44 years after the Conservative right to buy, councils built a total of 300,000 new homes, severely restricting their capacity to provide affordable accommodation to millions. The total number of social home housing stock has declined from 6.8 million at its peak to 5.4 million. Insufficient social housebuilding plus too many homes being sold or demolished means that there has been a net loss of social housing stock in almost every year since 1981. In some years, more social homes are being sold than actually built. Around 18,500 council homes were planned to be sold off in 2025-26. That is almost eight times more than the numbers built in 2024-25.

The housing crisis has been deepened by the legacy of the Conservative policies. It has pushed more people into poverty and the expensive private sector. Nearly 41% of council homes sold under the right to buy are now being let in the private market, so that has not actually increased home ownership at all.

In 2025, England had a waiting list of 1.34 million households. In 2024-25 alone, England’s councils spent £2,842,091 on temporary and emergency accommodation, which could have been avoided if there was an adequate stock of social housing. This drain on the public purse has more than doubled in five years.

Against the background of the Conservative legacy, I welcome the constraints in the Bill on the sale of social housing and profit-making from it. I welcome the Government’s 2025 announcement to build 300,000 social and affordable homes over a 10-year period, of which some 180,000 are for social rent. In my opinion, that is not enough. Civil society organisations are calling for 150,000 new social homes a year. Can the Minister explain why the Government are not being ambitious and how such a tiny target will address the social housing crisis?

I also urge the Minister to amend the Bill to ensure that the number of social housing units sold in any two-year period does not exceed the numbers actually built during the preceding two years. Otherwise, we will never be able to fully replenish the housing stock. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply.

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to speak at the Second Reading of the Social Housing Bill. Before I come to my main comments, I just want to address what feels to me to be the demonisation of the right to buy.

I come from a very poor community, and I recognise the comments that my noble friend Lady O’Neill made on how our community purchased those houses to live in. They did not purchase those houses to become stockbrokers but to live in them. If we move on to the comments made by my noble friend Lord Jackson, they boosted great social outcomes. They boosted not only the economy of those local economies but the confidence of those families. It was the launching of those families into better exam results for their children and better social outcomes. I wonder how many people who sit in either of these two Houses could point to the fact that their grandparents or parents bought their house and that was the beginning of their journey to these Benches. We do this country a great disservice when we talk about those people as if they were profiteering. They bought their homes to support their families.

I also go to the comments from the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey: what are we going to do with a huge number of people when they become elderly if they are all in social housing? We already spend £37 billion—I believe that was the figure I heard mentioned in this House—on supporting people in their homes, which is great, but that number will grow significantly if we do not help people on to the housing ladder. The main thrust of my speech today will be about young people and getting them on that ladder.

I start by saying that I can support many of the things in the Bill. I believe the Government are genuine when they say they are trying to protect social housing. I grew up in social housing but I also had the misfortune of being homeless for a long time. I sofa-surfed for many years. Anybody from my background would tell you that the older you get, the less cute you are, and the less prepared people are to put you up. Can you imagine coming home and finding me lying on your sofa so you have to sit in your bedroom? That is what many young people are facing in this country today.

It is right to protect newly built social homes from being lost too quickly to the right to buy. It is right that we look again at how homes are sold under the right-to-buy scheme. Where possible, it is right to bring them back into the social housing sector, and it is absolutely right to protect the victims of domestic abuse so that they are not forced to choose between remaining trapped in that situation and giving up their housing.

Those are sensible and humane provisions, but my concern today is that the Bill is too narrow in its outlook to address the scale of the housing crisis we face today. It protects parts of the existing system but does not yet answer the bigger question: how do we build enough genuinely affordable homes for people who need them now and for the generation to follow them? You have only to look at London and the staggering failure of the Mayor of London to produce enough homes. He was given a very generous settlement by the previous Government and an equally generous settlement by this Government but he has utterly refused to do that. Housebuilding in London has collapsed, and young people are at the forefront of bearing that.

Changing the right-to-buy rules may slow the loss of social housing but it will not by itself create the homes we need. The problem this country faces is not simply the loss of homes from the social housing sector; it is a failure to deliver enough homes over decades. But protecting the stock is not the same as expanding the stock. That distinction matters. My first challenge to the Minister is: where are the hard delivery mechanisms in this Bill? Where is the clear link between protection of the social housing stock and the building of new homes at scale? If the Bill is to be credible, it must be accompanied by a serious, long-term plan for delivery: not simply warm words about renewal but actual homes in actual places, with infrastructure to make this actually happen.

While I welcome the Bill’s protection for social housing, I ask the Minister: how will this legislation help a young person who needs social housing today and is not yet on the housing list, and how will that be delivered? If the Bill protects only those already inside the system, it will fail a generation outside the gates. The test of the Bill should be not whether it preserves social housing stock only but whether it improves housing opportunities for those currently locked in the system and those locked out of the system altogether.

The Bill needs to have stronger accountability and clearer outcomes. The House of Lords Library briefing notes that the Government have not published an impact assessment for the Bill. That is a serious omission. We are being asked to support legislation that changes property rights, local authority powers, tenant expectations, provider behaviour and the long-term economics of social housing, yet we do not have a clear assessment of what the Government think the impact of those changes could be.

How many additional homes do the Government believe will remain in the social housing sector because of this Bill? How many homes do they expect local authorities or providers to repurchase through the extended right of first refusal? How will the 35-year exemption for newly built social homes affect council and housing association investment decisions? How will Ministers measure whether young people, care leavers, domestic abuse survivors and homeless households are benefitting from the results of this Bill? These are not technical questions. They go to the heart of whether the Bill will work.

I urge the Government to be careful about adding process without adding capacity. For example, requiring notification before disposals may be sensible but if councils and providers do not have the funding, speed or institutional capacity to act on those notifications, the right to be notified risks becoming the right to watch homes leave the sector anyway.

The crisis that we face now is not just in social housing but in housing generally. Many people, particularly young people, who have great housing need will never get anywhere near a social tenancy. This Bill must affect the whole housing crisis, not just social housing. I am a massive fan of social housing and I am a product of social housing, but I have lived through the nightmare of social housing being inadequately resourced.

My lords, it is a privilege to be part of this debate. As somebody who is still pretty new here, the sheer range of expertise and experience is striking to me. I declare an interest as a non-executive director of the Abri Octavia housing association.

We live in a country where people on a low income simply cannot afford a decent place to live, where 1.3 million people are on council waiting lists for social housing and where well over 350,000 people are homeless in temporary accommodation. Many millions are in poor-quality homes that they cannot truly afford. As I saw many times while I was chief executive of Shelter, the lack of a secure home breaks people’s sense that their country has any investment in their future. It breaks communities, damages trust and destroys people’s sense of belonging. Can noble Lords imagine how this entirely justified sense of unfairness could be weaponised to exacerbate blame, scapegoating and division? We do not have to imagine it; that is exactly what is happening in many of our communities right now. As a country, we cannot afford to let this continue.

For decades, and through successive Governments, we have failed to build the social homes that are the only solution to this emergency. Independent analysis commissioned by Shelter shows that if this failure continues for another decade, the cost to the economy and our public services will exceed £117 billion. This is why I very much welcome the current Government’s much-increased investment in building social housing and, in particular, the way in which they have rebalanced the priority of the so-called affordable homes programme towards the only genuinely affordable form of housing for people on low incomes—social homes. Our communities desperately need even more and they need it soon. I urge the Government to make bolder, faster and more ambitious changes, to get councils building social homes at scale once more.

Turning to the Bill, the reforms that it introduces to right to buy are critical and much to be welcomed. We also need to see the replacement of homes already lost to right to buy, which has meant that, over many years, we have been losing more social homes than we have built.

The Bill’s measures to protect survivors of domestic abuse will transform the prospects of many abuse survivors and their children, and are very welcome. To achieve its aims, the measures in the Bill will require significant co-operation between social landlords, the criminal justice system and local specialist organisations that support survivors. Post-separation abuse makes up 40% of calls to the national domestic abuse helpline, according to the charity Refuge. This could be exacerbated if perpetrators are forced from their home, as I know well from my time as chief executive of Women’s Aid. The measures in the Bill are a major step forward, but they require significant local co-operation and resources to be implemented successfully.

There is a major challenge around survivors’ ability to afford a tenancy on their own, particularly if the abuse has included financial exploitation and saddling the victim with debt, as is very common indeed. I propose that the Bill could be strengthened still further, by ensuring that domestic abuse survivors are exempt from housing-related debt rules, which are currently denying them access to social housing. If added to the Bill, this measure would be a huge step towards ensuring that domestic abuse is no longer a precursor to homelessness, as I have seen throughout my career. I would welcome the opportunity to talk to the Minister about this.

In 2017, when I first joined Shelter, I met a woman who had fled an abusive relationship, losing her job and social housing tenancy in the process, to another city over 100 miles away. She and her three children were living in one room in temporary accommodation, nowhere near friends or school. She was desperately isolated and fearful. Shelter helped her into new temporary accommodation that was somewhat better. Shockingly, however, when I left Shelter last year, nearly eight years later, she and her children were still there. They still had nowhere to call home. The measures in the Bill, particularly with the addition that I have suggested, will, I hope, mean that a woman going through the same experience now would have a different story. That would truly be an achievement.

However, for that family and hundreds of thousands like them, now and in the future, only a new generation of social homes will make the difference that they need and repair people’s sense that their community and country are somewhere where they can put down roots, feel secure and respected, and achieve their potential. This is not about the dream of home ownership. This is about the reality of working hard, paying your rent and getting security in return.

My Lords, for years I fought on the front lines of our housing crises. That is why I support the Bill. It tackles one of the most pressing issues facing our country: the shortage of safe, secure and affordable housing.

Housing should be more than a privilege that is available to a fortunate few. It should be a foundation upon which people can build stable, productive and fulfilling lives. Good housing builds thriving societies by improving health outcomes, educational attainment, employment opportunities and community cohesion. The benefits extend beyond the housing sector itself. Investing in social housing is therefore not simply a housing policy but an investment in the social and economic future of our nation. The noble Baroness, Lady Neate, emphasised this, and I commend her for it.

For too long, demand for social housing has outstripped supply. Families spend years on waiting lists. Councils face mounting costs for temporary accommodation. Young people struggle to find an affordable place to live and vulnerable individuals often lack the housing security that they need to rebuild their lives. The Bill addresses those problems directly. At its core, the legislation recognises a simple truth: we cannot solve the housing crisis if we continue losing social homes faster than we can replace them. Social housing is a finite resource. Every home sold without adequate replacement means one fewer opportunity for a family in need.

The critics lament the restrictions on right to buy, but if every social home sold is one less home available to a family on a waiting list, how exactly does their approach solve the housing crisis that this country is facing? Furthermore, why should taxpayers fund the construction of social housing if those homes are not guaranteed to remain available to future families who need them? That is why the Bill’s reforms to right to buy are so important. By extending the qualifying period before purchase and protecting new-build social homes from immediate sale, the Government are ensuring that public investment remains available to the communities it was intended to serve.

When taxpayers fund the construction of affordable housing, it is only reasonable that those homes continue providing affordable accommodation for future generations rather than disappearing from the social housing stock within a few years. So, I ask the opponents of the proposals: do you accept that the current housing shortage requires us to protect existing social housing stock? If not, what are the alternative solutions? What do they offer? These measures are not about preventing aspiration; they are about balancing individual opportunity with the wider public good. Home ownership remains an important goal, but so too is ensuring that thousands of families have access to affordable housing in the first place.

I welcome that the Bill creates the stability needed for local authorities and housing associations to plan for the future. When housing providers know that newly built homes will remain within the social housing sector, they can invest with greater confidence, develop long-term strategy and borrow to build the additional homes our communities desperately need. I would like someone to explain to me how preserving newly built social housing for future generations is less beneficial than allowing it to leave the social housing sector shortly after construction.

Beyond individual measures, the Bill represents something larger: a commitment to fairness. A fair society in which people have access to stable housing is one in which children can grow up in secure homes, where families can put down roots in their communities and where older residents can live with dignity and peace of mind. What is fairer: to preserve affordable homes for thousands of families over decades or to prioritise the sale of those homes to a smaller number of individuals? If social homes continue to be sold faster than they are replaced, how do the naysayers propose to reduce the waiting list for the thousands of families currently in need of affordable housing?

Importantly, this legislation strengthens protections for some of the most vulnerable members of society. Victims of domestic abuse should never have to choose between their safety and their housing security. By improving protections for tenants facing those circumstances, the Bill provides practical support to those who need it most and helps ensure that housing serves as a source of safety rather than uncertainty.

The Bill offers a practical and sustainable way forward: it protects existing social housing, supports the delivery of new homes, strengthens tenant protections and ensures that the public investment produces long-term benefits. The question before us is not whether we can afford to protect and expand social housing; the real question is whether we can afford not to. I believe the Bill provides a step in the right direction, and I commend it to the House.

My Lords, the degree of political ideology that this Bill has provoked has been quite entertaining this afternoon. I was terribly tempted to wade in, especially when my namesake, the noble Lord, Lord Young, talked about where the money went. But I will resist that temptation—

Oh!

Or I might just cheat, if I have enough space at the end, and put the odd little bit of dagger between the ribs.

The Bill is very welcome. It helps put a knife through the heart of a highly damaging Thatcherite right-to-buy policy that has persisted from the 1980s onwards and seen the total number of social homes in the UK decline from 6.8 million in 1981 to 5.2 million in 2025. Particularly important are the measures in the Bill that disapply the right to buy in protected landscapes and wider rural areas. That is absolutely vital.

The Government have promised a decade of renewal of social housing, so I hope that we see additional action to support local authorities and housing associations to build more social homes as well as the measures in the Bill. But I want to take a different tack and ask the Minister some important questions, not about how many social homes are to be restored or created but about the quality of those homes.

First, I believe that it is the Government’s position that the social housing sector needs to have a minimum energy efficiency standard set, and that this should be at EPC level C or equivalent. I hope the Minister can confirm that that is the Government’s position. Can she also say how this will be implemented and whether it will be something the Government have existing powers to do or whether it will need further legislation? If it is the latter, and further legislation is required, the Bill would seem to me to provide an opportunity to legislate. Although the social housing sector is not the worst sector in terms of energy inefficiency—the private rented sector is notably worse—it is even more important that social homes are efficiently warm and reduce bills for the least well-off residents.

The second important question to the Minister is: alongside the commitment to more social homes, what steps are planned to enable these homes to have their energy provided by smaller-scale renewable energy generators, particularly community-run ones? At the moment, there are crippling financial and bureaucratic obstacles to community energy generators being able to sell their energy direct to local homes. Funding issues, planning permissions, grid access and market access all make it impossible for community energy companies to sell directly to local homes. Yet such local provision would provide cheaper energy bills as well as a healthier environment and energy that would be independent of the Strait of Hormuz.

Local community energy projects were supported in DESNZ’s Local Power Plan, which was published in February. There was a promise of £1 billion of funding, hands-on support and regulatory reform so that community energy could grow at pace and scale. Will the Minister undertake to speak to her DESNZ colleagues to ensure that social housing residents can benefit as soon as possible from the cheaper energy that local community energy can provide?

My third question is, as you might have guessed, about trees. I declare my interest as chair of the Forestry Commission and past chair of the Woodland Trust. Can the Minister give the House some assurances about grasping further opportunities from the commitment to social housing and gaining further public benefits in considering how the social homes will be built? Houses built with timber reduce reliance on high-carbon concrete and steel; they lock up the carbon for the duration of the house’s life, which in many cases is several generations. In addition, wood is a natural insulator, reduces energy needs and lowers energy costs. In Scotland, 92% of all houses are timber framed; in England, only 9% per cent are timber framed. What plans there are to use the push for social housing to make a reality of the proposals in the Government’s Timber in Construction Roadmap 2025, which was published last year?

Will the Minister take account of the work of the Woodland Trust on tree equity? Its tree equity project shows that rich areas have lots of trees and a nice environment, and poor areas have next to no trees and a crap—that is a technical term—environment. The Minister spoke passionately from her direct experience about the benefits of social housing in Stevenage, giving a sense of security and of belonging. Can she give assurances that the disadvantaged areas most in need of social housing will get the concomitant tree planting that is required to improve their environment, reduce heat effects, improve air quality, reduce flood risks, and provide the well-documented health and mental health benefits for those who are most at need? They need social housing but they also need tree equity.

I have got some time, so I might make two last remarks about the political debate. I was brought up in Scotland, quite a long time ago. At that stage, 55% of all housing was social housing. It was not regarded as a last resort for poor and disadvantaged communities. It was regarded as the bedrock of housing provision for people on low wages who were going to continue to be on low wages. The degree of security and stability that that housing provided was immense. I do not think we should forget that. For me, it fits closely with the future role of local authorities returning to the days of being substantial housing providers for a group of people who are not ever going to be in a position to see an uplift in their housing ability because of their persistent low wages.

I have a piece of history to talk about. I ran the health service for Westminster when Dame Shirley Porter was the Conservative leader of Westminster City Council—I keep forgetting that I am supposed to be unaffiliated at the moment. The right to buy was very much pressurised in Westminster City Council. I asked Shirley at one point why she was doing this. She said, “Because I want to get good Conservative voters into the borough”. Before the Whip stops me, I shall just say that I bought, 30 years later, a right-to-buy house in Westminster. I wrote to Shirley in Israel to say, “Shirley, the policy has failed”.

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Young, and I endorse the comments that she has made.

Decent, affordable and secure housing is a basic human right. To start, I thank the Minister for the way that she introduced the Bill, particularly in sharing her personal experience, and for the briefing that has been offered to noble Lords in advance of today’s Second Reading. I declare my own housing interests as set out in the register. On these Benches, we broadly welcome the legislation, but we will scrutinise it carefully. After decades of ever-decreasing social housing stock under right to buy—a scheme which, regardless of its original intentions, has depleted one of our most precious public assets—we welcome that this Government are moving rather decisively to stem that flow.

Extending the minimum eligibility period from three years to 10, reducing maximum discounts and exempting newly built social homes from sale for 35 years after construction are substantive reforms. The Chartered Institute of Housing is right to call them a positive step. Kate Henderson, the chief executive of the National Housing Federation, spoke for many when she said that with 4.2 million people in need of social housing in England, these measures should make right to buy a far more sustainable scheme. I add my voice to that welcome, and welcome the extension in perpetuity of the right of first refusal.

However, what concerns me is not so much what is in the Bill as what is conspicuously absent. Last week, the UK broke the record for the hottest ever day in May, and a week-long heatwave caused the UK Health Security Agency to issue amber heat alerts. Heat is a slow motion and inescapable killer that preys most on those who are financially poor or in ill health. The Guardian reported that, in 2024, the summer heat in the EU claimed roughly three times more lives than car crashes, 16 times more than murders and more than 10,000 times more than terrorists.

The Climate Change Committee has just published A Well-Adapted UK, the fourth assessment of UK climate risk. Its findings for social housing tenants are alarming. We already know that not one of our adaptation pathways is adequate. Our climate is changing faster than our policies. The committee warned that, by 2050, 92% of existing homes are likely to overheat; that is the central assessment of the most rigorous, independent scientific analysis available to Parliament. The UKHSA estimated that, during the summer of 2022, there were 2,803 excess deaths among people aged 65 and over in England. The climate for which our housing stock was designed no longer exists. Labour plans to build 1.5 million new homes, many of them social or affordable. They must be climate-ready to be fit for purpose. Social housing tenants are disproportionately elderly, disabled and/or suffer from chronic illness. They are more likely to live in flats, which overheat faster than homes. They live predominantly in urban areas, where temperatures are higher. They cannot, in the main, afford the cost of air conditioning. We are debating the homes of the people most at risk of dying from extreme heat.

The Government will point to Part O of the building regulations, which already requires new homes to be designed to mitigate overheating risk, and to the technical review. I acknowledge this, but Part O is a building regulation. It sets a design floor, not a statutory duty tied to a social housing programme. It is not specific to social housing, it carries no enhanced standard for vulnerability and it lacks the weight of primary legislation. I do not dismiss what the Government are doing elsewhere either. The warm homes plan is a genuinely ambitious £15 billion programme and the energy independence Bill announced in the King’s Speech is likewise welcome, but neither is sufficient. The warm homes plan acknowledges the overheating problem and commits to incorporate passive cooling measures, but they are an aspiration, not a duty, and it applies primarily to retrofit. I see no evidence that the energy independence Bill will enact the required powers. The Minister will argue that this Bill is deliberately narrow in scope, but a simple provision here would not expand the Bill unduly and its absence would be a missed opportunity.

The Climate Change Committee’s A Well-Adapted UK report recommends approximately £11 billion of annual adaptation investment, with around two-thirds directly to the built environment. This is a recommendation of the statutory adviser to Parliament. I want to see this Government being prepared to translate that advice into a binding duty where it matters the most. In Committee, I intend to pursue a statutory obligation requiring that all new social housing, whether built by local authorities or registered providers, be designed and constructed to reduce the risk of overheating. Building in overheating prevention at the design stage costs a fraction of retrofitting. Every home built today without these standards is a home that will need costly remediation.

The Bill will be judged not only by what it contains but by what it chooses not to. Without additional adaptation, heat-related deaths in the UK could increase sixfold from around 1,600 a year today to 10,000 a year by the 2050s. We have a Social Housing Bill, a major housebuilding programme and the most authoritative climate risk assessment this country has ever produced, published just days ago. The question Parliament must answer is this: knowing all that, are we going to build the same dangerous homes over again? I say we must not.

My Lords, I first declare my interest as a retired member of a farming family who still rent out some domestic property.

I cannot say how much I welcome this Bill. For over 40 years now, I have been struggling against the almost total lack of affordable housing in rural areas and trying to limit the damage done to our rural communities by the right to buy. It has been obvious to me for some time that however much we allow for the building of new homes in the countryside, we will never get to the point where less well-off rural families will be able to buy their own homes. Why should they have to buy? Why can they not rent?

The answer to that, at the moment, is that there are hardly any houses to rent in rural areas. There are some housing association rentals but very few private landlords—usually farmers with spare cottages. As rural house prices soar ever higher than their urban equivalents—research shows that a village house can cost over 50% more than a similar urban dwelling—the sale of these rural rented houses becomes ever more likely and puts them ever more out of reach of local working families.

As I have said many times in this House, the answer lies in the provision by local authorities of affordable housing to rent. Council houses really worked. I stress the very real need for more rural council houses. Currently 17% of the population live in rural areas, but they receive just 7% of any new affordable homes. Rural council houses were among the first to go under the right to buy in the 1980s—who would not want to live in the countryside? There are hardly any such houses left now. There are currently 306,000 families on rural housing waiting lists, and Defra research indicates that council house waiting lists in mainly rural areas increased by 32% in the four years to 2023, while in the same period there was no increase in predominantly urban areas.

The effect of this has been disastrous for rural England. It has led to rapidly ageing communities, a loss of local services, a breakdown of social networks and a complete absence of the necessary vigour that young families give to any community. Lack of housing has also undermined the rural economy, making it harder for businesses to find a good workforce and ultimately making it harder for any remaining workforce to find businesses.

The rural housing crisis—I emphasise that word—is now of epidemic proportions, and this Bill could be like the arrival of the long-awaited first ambulance at a rural motorway pile-up. Note that this is the first ambulance; there is a lot more to be done.

I will briefly run through some of the Bill’s clauses. Extending the qualifying period from three to 10 years is good. I would have gone for 12, but 10 is good. Reducing the discounts available is good. Extending the period from five to 10 years when a discount given to a purchaser can be reclaimed from a subsequent sale is also good.

On Clause 6, I approve of the right of first refusal up to 20 years. While we need more of all types of housing everywhere, it seems right to allow social landlords to retain what was social housing within the sector. Rural England attracts rich retirees buying into the market whenever and wherever they can, so such a right of first refusal will be very useful.

Clause 7, exempting all our national landscapes from the right to buy, is good. I hope that the reference to exempting areas designated as rural by the Secretary of State applies to any community with a population of under 3,000, as in the 1996 Act. I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm that and am happy if she wants to write.

Also in Clause 7, I was surprised that the exemption for new housing is as high as 35 years. That would seem a bit long if you are at all interested in any form of social mobility, but I understood it when I got to Clause 9—if there had been any doubt that the local housing authority would not be in receipt of the sale proceeds from the right to buy in the future, it will need a long time to get some return from its new housing investment. To me, Clause 9 is the weak point of the Bill. I detect the obfuscatory hand of the Treasury all over it.

There was—and is—nothing wrong with the right to buy. There was just no long-term thinking about the way it was introduced. By far the biggest problem with the old right to buy was that all the sale receipts went to the Treasury and the local housing authority never saw the money. It could therefore never reinvest; it could not waste council tax money on building council houses, only for them to be bought out below cost, at a discount, a few years later. Clause 9 is a golden opportunity to definitively put this right.

I am not convinced by the anti-hypothecation arguments of the noble Lord, Lord Young. There is no right to buy in hospitals or nuclear power stations, to use his examples. We will not lose those assets from their use by society as a whole, but we have lost all our council houses from society as a whole. If we are going to replace that loss, we need to change the way that we do things. We do have a housing crisis.

I am assured that all receipts from the right to buy will, in future, go to the local housing authority—so why not just say so? Clause 9 is so hedged about with ifs, what-ifs and what-nots that it appears that the Treasury is keeping open the right, in future, to once again steal money from the local authority housing budgets, as it has done for the past few decades. I know that that is rather simplistically put but, if we are trying to solve a long-term housing problem, please let us think long term. We must state firmly in the Bill that all receipts from the right to buy belong to the local housing authority or the housing provider. They should be ring-fenced for future local housing investment.

To sum up, I approve of the Bill, but only if it leads to widespread investment in rural council houses in the future. I am for ever hopeful.

My Lords, I have previous experience in the delivery of social housing. During the 2010s, when I was leader of South Norfolk Council, we consistently delivered 1% of England’s entire affordable housing every year. My council built more homes to rent than the rest of Norfolk put together. Every home lost to the right to buy was replaced and then some. After my nearly 20 years as council leader, the number of affordable houses in south Norfolk had gone up from 4,188 to more than 7,000.

I can tell the noble Baroness, Lady Gill, that the amount of social housing is not a finite resource; it can be built. We had an ambitious plan that could be delivered through development proceeds from a position of negotiating strength. The Planning and Infrastructure Act and the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act have weakened that power but, when I was leader of the council, I held all the cards. Now those cards are held by developers, on undeliverable housing targets under the five-year land supply, so the Government have made their task harder. The irony is that this Bill has never been needed more, since the private rented sector was decimated by the Renters’ Rights Act, which turbocharged rents to new highs. Who knew?

That said, I welcome the measure for a 35-year lockout for new homes on right to buy. The probability that brand new homes could be acquired under right to buy has chilled new investment and spawned no end of avoidance structures from within local authorities, which is diverting.

In some respects, it is shame that the right to buy will be diluted. It should be stated clearly and loudly that the ability to buy your own home has been one of the most empowering success stories of the last 40 years. Done right—as I did, as leader of the council— a social home that is bought houses two families: the family who bought the house and another one in the new house which replaces it.

This plays to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron: I have concerns that the Bill will prevent receipts in one authority being applied to a neighbouring one, even if they are in the same housing market area. When my neighbour Norwich City Council could not build houses or spend the receipts, it lent the money to us and we built some affordable houses within a mile of the city boundary. My reading of the Bill is that this desirable behaviour would be banned, and that is crazy.

This leads me to the subject of locality. I understand that the Bill is limited in scope, but protecting the stock cannot be just a national numbers game. Housing is more local than that, but that is not envisaged in the Bill, as I read it. There are general freedoms for social providers to recycle funds, not within a specific area but across their entire estate. As part of my ward work, I was surprised last month when a home in Brooke, in the ward where I live, was under the management of Victory Homes but being managed from Gloucester. The freedom to move receipts within the RSL without challenge, from Norfolk to Gloucester, does not help local people at all. Unless we protect the stock in local markets, a large provider may focus on where it is cheaper, not where it is needed. The RSLs are different from the councils.

I was grateful to the Minister for the drop-in before the Recess, when she explained that it is very difficult to define territories. From one ex-council leader to another, she must know that that is incorrect. We both developed local plans based on housing market areas. They are defined; they exist. It is just not the case that area management is not part of the Bill. The principle of locality is established and there are welcome carve-outs for national parks. I just wish that it would go further on national landscapes. In Committee, I will seek to probe how receipts can be recycled locally by default before being snaffled by the centre.

None of this would be necessary had social housing providers not become so large. Scale has not been good for the tenants. It has led to a lack of local accountability. National RSLs populating their boards with the great and the good, acting as pound shop developers on the government dime, has seen tenant reps excised from the landscape. The consequence is that the focus on local matters, such as anti-social behaviour, has been dropped, as I know from my own ward casework. This Bill could have been stronger on anti-social behaviour to demonstrate that the Government are on the side of the law-abiding resident, but it is not.

Candidly, far too great a focus on development has led to a loss by these RSLs of the social purpose of providing social homes. RSLs cannot even sell houses they developed initially for the private market to be used for social use, and that is wrong. Instead, one of the effects of the liberalisation of certain financial powers in this Bill may be to drive financial engineering to new heights. The truth is that as RSLs have become overleveraged, they have been caught out by the increase in build costs, finance and land costs. Quite simply, there is no space for the social purpose of these organisations. That is an omission this Bill should correct but does not.

I am disappointed that the Bill purports to protect the supply of new homes but fails to consider the texture of protecting certain types of adapted homes. I spent about £3 million a year adapting homes for an ageing population. In some cases, it might have been a grab rail or a ramp. In one case, a £75,000 extension was required. When, as so often happens, the tenant passes away and the home is re-advertised, no credit can be given for those adaptations. The new tenant can ask for them to be removed, and they do. It is crazy. It is a waste of money. It reduces the pool of adapted homes. It is bad for everybody, especially the taxpayer, who has to pay twice, once to put the adaptation in and again to take it out. Where are the provisions in the Bill to protect the supply of adapted homes for the ageing population? I have heard it said that this is an allocations issue and we are not going there. I say: why not?

As I warm to my allocations theme, where are the protections for veterans? Where is the assertion that those with local needs should be prioritised? Where is the preference for the indigenous population? Where are protections for local needs, for affordable housing in our villages—small developments in places such as Bergh Apton that local people campaigned for, not against? Where are the stronger fiscal incentives for people to downsize from the family home as they age? This Bill is deficient in that it does not even look at the totality of the supply and certainly fails on the demand side. Partial supply without looking at the demand is no solution at all. The Bill is incomplete. It looks only at the home, not really at the people who live in it. It does half the job, and in Committee we will attempt to make it whole.

My Lords, I am another former council leader. When I was leader of Telford and Wrekin Council in Shropshire, we took a bold and innovative decision to address the growing shortage of good-quality, affordable homes for local people. Rather than simply discussing the housing crisis, we decided to act. We established a wholly owned housing company called Nuplace with a clear and practical purpose to build high-quality homes for rent on council-owned brownfield sites, to regenerate neglected land, to provide homes for local families and at the same time to generate income that would support vital local services. At the time, some questioned whether the council should be involved directly in housing delivery in this way.

However, I am proud to say that the result has more than justified our decision. So far, around 1,000 homes have been built or are in the process of being completed in the near future through this scheme. Tenant demand has remained constantly high, which demonstrates the real need for well-managed, affordable rental homes. Approximately 25 acres of previously underused derelict land has been regenerated, transforming eyesores into thriving communities. Our policy focused on delivering high-standard, energy-efficient properties that local people are proud to live in. I am told that the tenant satisfaction rate remains at around 96%, which is a remarkable achievement by any standard.

The financial benefits have also been substantial—this is some years ago in Telford and Wrekin when I was leader of the council. The scheme has generated more than £8 million in net income for the council, alongside more than £3 million through council tax receipts and new homes bonus funding. At a time when councils across the country were facing severe financial pressures, our innovative housing policy both met social needs and strengthened our council finances. Although I am no longer with Telford and Wrekin Council, I am told that the scheme continues to perform strongly with high demand.

Does my noble friend the Minister agree that councils across the country should seriously examine models such as that of Telford and Wrekin Council? It is not a complete solution to the national housing shortage, but it is certainly a part of the answer. This approach delivers multiple public benefits simultaneously. It increases housing supply, regenerates brownfield land, improves the local environment, creates construction jobs and apprenticeships, supports local economic growth, provides secure homes for working families and generates long-term revenue streams for local authorities. It also demonstrates something very important: that local authorities, when given the freedom and confidence to innovate, can become active partners in solving national problems rather than just waiting for a diktat from central government.

At a time when housing pressure continues to affect so many families, particularly young people and key workers, we should encourage practical, locally driven solutions that combine social purpose with financial sustainability. I hope the Government will continue to support councils that are prepared to take this kind of ambitious and entrepreneurial approach to local housing policies.

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Sahota, and to hear his contribution on the housing problems in his area.

I endorse our Front Bench particularly and the opening speech we heard on some of the problems with this Bill. In passing, I will take up my noble friend’s reference to veterans and the importance of helping them. Some time ago at King’s Cross station, I was sitting on a bench waiting for my train. A man came up and sat beside me, and we got chatting. He was a veteran. He had served in the Royal Marines for more than 11 years, including in Afghanistan, and had been shot in the back. He lived in social housing with his daughter. Shortly afterwards, before we spoke, his daughter had been killed in a taxi accident; the driver was found guilty of reckless driving and sent to prison. The man lost not only his daughter but his home and never knew where he was going to spend the night, at which station, but I have not seen him since at King’s Cross. I feel that this is a very important priority and should be given the same protection in law as the other categories that this Bill addresses.

One of the central premises of the Bill is that there should be more state housing and that the more social housing there is, the better. This is to be promoted by restricting the right to buy and putting more obstacles in the way of tenants trying to buy their own homes. These obstacles include increasing the number of years, as we have heard, from three to 10 and making it expensive, as we have also heard, for tenants to buy by amending the percentage discounts, so cutting the value of the tenant’s stake in the home they may have lived in over decades. They include reducing the stock of right to buy homes as a proportion of overall council housing; for instance, no newly built homes will be available to buy for the first 35 years, so you may, if you are a tenant there, in your working life, never be able to aspire to buy that home if you settle in that area. Another obstacle is creating delay and uncertainty for applicants by increasing the time landlords can take to respond to them, both on eligibility—from four to eight weeks or from eight to 12, depending on the sort of tenancy they have—and on giving information on the price and details: from eight to 12 weeks for freehold or from 12 to 16 for leasehold. In the light of these changes, can the Minister please let us know whether the Government consider that the increase we have seen in right to buy sales will continue or decline as a result of this measure, and what the estimated figures are over the first five years after the Bill becomes law?

The Bill will have further damaging effects. First, in terms of cost, it will increase the stock of housing owned, managed and run by local councils or those registered by them, thus augmenting the power of the state over men, women and their families and augmenting the costs for taxpayers. The DWP estimates that this year, the housing bill will be almost £39 billion, a rise of £913 million on last year—the highest, in today’s prices, since 1970, measured on similar data. By contrast, the taxpayer receives a significant, as things stand, return from social housing sales receipts. We have heard from my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham what is done with these housing receipts, which can alleviate the tax burden on taxpayers, who might have to meet other needs, or perhaps they might even help to lower taxes. In the financial year ending March 2025 alone, local authorities received £798 million from a reported 7,494 eligible sales, an increase of 7% compared to 2023-24. I ask the Minister, on a per annum basis for the first five years of the operation of this Bill, in respect of the decline in sales and the maintenance and overheads that must now be borne by councils and taxpayers, what is the estimated additional cost?

Secondly—this is a very serious problem, and we have heard about it today from noble Lords— the Bill will undermine the incentive for working people to be independent and support themselves and their family, preventing dependency on benefits not only during working life but well into old age and retirement. As we have heard, already in 2026, across England, Wales and Scotland, almost 6 million people—a record 5.95 million people—will receive housing support from the taxpayer this year. That is 1.2 million more than in 2019-20. In Cambridge, where I live, around 65% of tenants receive some form of benefit, with 55% on maximum housing benefit or universal credit.

Thirdly, the Bill will undermine overall economic growth and increase overall the ever-growing burden of taxation. This is an attack on property rights by taxing the earnings of working men and women to subsidise the unproductive public sector and a benefits culture. I therefore do not share the Government’s enthusiasm for increasing the size and power of the state over people’s lives, turning individual men and women into supplicants dependent on the state, potentially for the rest of their lives, without the incentive—

I must ask the noble Baroness to draw her remarks to a close.

—to earn enough to pay a market rent and take responsibility for themselves and their families. State housing, subsidised by the taxpayer and owned and managed by the state, is not home ownership. It is state dependency.

It is either the market or the state; that seems to be the argument.

In 2017, I went to a city that was having problems with a whole bevy of people. What we did was to try to reorientate the way that local charities worked together. One of the things that really interested me was getting charities working with businesses. I am very interested in the idea that you get businesses to trade with charities so that money does not really pass hands, because the businesses have to spend and the charities have the need.

We identified a housing association that wanted to expand its work. It had gardening facilities; it had painting, decorating and repairing and all that. It wanted to expand but was very limited in this very small town. I went to talk to estate agents—the most evil people on God’s earth, according to some—and I said, “Look, what you’re doing is buying services, because you’ve got 150 or 250 buy to rents. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you bought the services from a housing association? You would pay the same rate”. It would also help the housing association to address a problem that nobody talks about. I have not heard anybody say—excuse me, I have put too much glue in my teeth. I am getting them redone in Turkey soon, so that I will not have the problem.

Oh!

Anyway, to address the problem which I have not heard anybody mention: why is it that if you live in social housing—if you are the child of social housing—you have about a 2% chance, as a child, of finishing whatever levels you do to leave school and then getting into university or a highly skilled job? I talked to the noble Lord, Lord Best, about this when I first came into the House. The problem we were trying to address in that little city was that 70% of the people living in social housing were unemployed. We have to face that, and I do not see any provision in this Bill for creating the opportunity.

I believe in social mobility, like the noble Lord, Lord Bailey. What I do not like about what he says—forgive me my trespasses; he is a Conservative, so I cannot agree with him, even though we come from the same neck of the woods, up there in Notting Hill—is that the only way you can get social mobility is through a housing purchase by your family. Why is that? I know it is true, and I know hundreds of people who have done it, but why has social housing changed so much from the days when our Minister was moving to Stevenage?

Why is it that social housing is now nothing like what it was? Having been brought up in the slums of Notting Hill, I was stuck in a Catholic orphanage for a few years and then moved to Fulham, where we were in a block of flats and had a toilet that we shared with no one, whereas when we lived in the slums, we had to queue up if we wanted to do our business. We might have had to wait two days for certain services that you would want in a toilet, but there we had our own beautiful piece of social housing. In that block of flats were trainee police officers, trainee teachers, drivers and all sorts of people, including disabled people and those who were old. It was sociable and socially mixed.

Unfortunately, what has happened to social housing is that it is under threat. It is under threat because the bar has been raised by local authorities and now it takes only the most desperate, largely, whereas in the good old days it was a reflection of the working class, the upper working class and even the lower middle class. Until we address the issue of around 70% of people living in social housing not having a job—they are stuck and their children are stuck—the arguments around it will go on, but we need to address the poverty that is thrown up but not addressed at this moment. It is certainly not addressed in the Bill.

I am a great believer in social mobility. I am a perfect example of it; I am as posh as anything now, though I did not start poshly. But I would love to see a situation where social housing was addressed as a place of great opportunity, great security and great comfort, so that it becomes what virtually everybody here today has described as the beginning of a new future. Unfortunately, for too many people it is not a beginning of a new future. It is a place where you and your family are parked for maybe the next 100 years.

My Lords, it is quite overwhelming to speak after such an expert on housing and homelessness as the noble Lord, Lord Bird. I thank the noble Lord for his speech.

I welcome this Bill and thank my noble friend the Minister for her work on it. I have just finished eight years as a councillor in the London Borough of Islington, and I welcome these moves to retain social housing and encourage the building of it. A lot of my casework over eight years as a local authority councillor was trying to help people on a housing waiting list of 16,000. Even with our borough’s country-leading buy-back scheme, through which we had a grant from the Mayor of London to buy back right-to-buy properties and bring them back under council ownership, we still struggled to get those waiting list numbers down. I am delighted that this Labour Government have included right-to-buy reform in this Bill as part of a suite of policies to tackle the housing crisis.

Before I move to my substantive points about the Bill, I want to say this. When I entered your Lordships’ House, I understood that this was somewhere prized as a place of evidence-based scrutiny, robust evidence and expertise. So I have to take note and challenge when I hear casual tropes being deployed. I lived on the Bemerton Estate, a council housing estate, for over 13 years. In that time, I had the honour of getting to know my neighbours, who became my friends, some of whom were incredible Somali women. Time constrains me from telling noble Lords in detail about Mana, Hana, Safia and others; that is for another day. Suffice to say that Mana is referred to by many as the godmother of the estate and by others as the queen of the Bemerton because of her service to generations of residents and her key role in interfaith initiatives. She is a brilliant woman who instinctively builds community. So I implore noble Lords on all sides of this House to err on the side of thoroughness and evidence when speaking in this place.

To return to my substantive points about this Bill, I am proud of this Labour Government and the work of many, both here and in the other place, who have created a plan to halve violence against women and girls in a decade. Working in prisons repeatedly brought me face to face with women who had suffered the most appalling violence and survived it, mostly at the hands of men. Some 68% of women in prison have suffered domestic abuse. Certainly, almost all the women I worked with in my decade of working in and after prison disclosed sexual or domestic abuse as part of their life stories. This has made me a passionate advocate for the survivors of that abuse.

This Government’s ambitious strategy is rightly a cross-government strategy. It cannot just sit in the Home Office, and it is entirely appropriate that this narrowly drawn Bill includes provisions to protect victims and survivors of domestic abuse and their access to housing. At Islington Council, our primary reason for people becoming homeless was parental alienation. The second most common reason was domestic abuse.

As such, there are parts of the country that have been tackling this in innovative ways for many years and taking a whole housing approach for survivors of domestic abuse. Both Cheshire East and Islington Councils have been platinum accredited by the Domestic Abuse Housing Alliance for their work in this field. This is a plea, in seeking to refine this Bill, to my noble friend the Minister and the team to make sure that they have thoroughly reviewed the best practice that is already available and make sure that this legislation complements and turbo-charges the work already going on in many local authorities.

To achieve that whole housing approach and the accreditation from DAHA, Islington Council put on extensive staff training. Even if it was somebody coming to repair a light, there might be an opportunity to speak to someone who needed help with a domestic abuse scenario. They made sure that any contact someone had with the council might be a pathway to a safer life for that person. The council also had a collaborative daily safeguarding meeting, advocated for strong and inclusive partnership working with the voluntary sector and pursued robust relocation policies. Staff developed a high-risk move policy, so they could quickly rehouse individuals fleeing violence in addition to providing flexible funding to assist those transitions.

The Bill does many things well, but I want to flag to my noble friend the Minister that she should consider reviewing the grounds required for moving somebody from a joint to a single tenancy. The grounds involve waiting for people to breach an order, rather than just having an order—a non-molestation order, for example. When you have those orders, you already must have proved that domestic abuse has taken place. Perhaps having an order may be enough, rather than putting a survivor/victim at further risk by demanding that the perpetrator breach that order before they are able to transfer their tenancy. This is to ensure that everybody that might need this kind of help to move to a single tenancy or to move home is able to do so without putting themselves at further risk.

As I said, this is a welcome and very long overdue suite of measures to address many of the problems of our social housing stock. The measures around domestic abuse are particularly welcome. These are stronger legal mechanisms that remove perpetrators from social housing tenancies and will enable more survivors to stay in their home, if it is safe to do so, or to move to different accommodation as the sole tenant.

I commend this Bill and the brilliant measures therein to the House. They enable autonomy and independence. They enable the dignity of the individual through the dignity of social housing, including for all those—whatever their country of birth—who are fleeing domestic abuse.

My Lords, I thank the Minister particularly for her very clear and personal introduction to the Bill. I feel I will be the first person to stand up and say that I was not brought up in a council house, but I looked with envy upon those who were. When we were evicted from our home in Wales, we came up north to my father’s family in Preston, where we lived in a house in which the sink was on bricks in the kitchen. It still had what I called Bunsen burners—gaslights—on the side, and there was no plumbed-in bath. There was the luxury of one toilet outside, just for us. I made friends with people at my primary school who lived on the Larches estate, which was a real exemplar of brilliant council housing at its peak. If we had had one of those houses, my father would have used the right to buy—I am absolutely convinced of that.

I am grateful to follow all the contributions. I started off making notes of what people were saying, because the seven minutes has given us time to get some detail and some quality. I will not make a list of everybody, but I will quickly go through some thoughts outside the scope of the Bill that are quite interesting. I will kick off by saying that I was quite troubled—I echo what the noble Baroness on the other side said—by some of the comments made in the Chamber, particularly around who the “true” people who need social housing are and about the most vulnerable people in society being “state dependent”. I want to register that that has made me feel really uncomfortable.

However, I was greatly enlivened by the noble Lord, Lord Rook, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, who brought together housing injustice and poverty, and of course most poignantly by the noble Lord, Lord Bird. The connections between health, housing and poverty were ably brought out by my noble friend Lady Teather, the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, and the noble Lord, Lord Babudu. They are inextricably linked, and as people in this world we absolutely know that.

The noble Lord, Lord Best, my noble friend Lord Stoneham and the noble Baroness, Lady Shah, brought out the importance of the regeneration of estates and neighbourhoods, which is totally missing from the Bill. I hope the Minister will tell us where it is because it is important that, when people open their front door, they feel they live in a safe, clean and green neighbourhood. I think we would all aspire to that.

Let us throw in rural issues—raised by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, and others. This keeps coming up all the time, does it not? It is clearly an area that we are neglecting. Of course, on environmental issues, we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Young, and my noble friend Lord Russell. I can see that this Christmas tree will have lots of baubles hung on it. The noble Lord is shaking his head—we will have to see how we go. But there was certainly real quality there.

As several colleagues have said, there are elements here that we on these Benches really welcome, particularly the provisions intended to strengthen protections for tenants experiencing domestic abuse—the final comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Hyde, were really pertinent to that intention—and the steps to slow down the loss of much-needed social housing stock.

However, context is everything. The Bill sits within a wider and, in many respects, ambitious programme. The Government’s decade of renewal is backed by significant investment—the most for a long time—and a commitment to expand supply at scale, alongside reforms to the private rented sector and to housing quality and standards. So, to give credit where it is due, taken together this suggests a Government seeking to grapple seriously with the housing crisis, which has occurred over decades and under Governments of all stripes.

The crisis that we have heard expounded on by many is profound, with over 1 million households waiting for social housing, more than 134,000 in temporary accommodation, and the eye-watering cost of that to society. There have been decades of undersupply, combined with the steady depletion of social housing stock. I think we are very clear on these Benches that this is not a moment for incremental change; it is a moment that demands systemic delivery—that is going to be a word that I use a lot.

When we turn to the Bill itself, however, we encounter something a little bit more limited—some might say tame—and deliberately so, it would seem, from the Minister’s introduction. This at best is a fragment of a much larger cloth. The strategy, however, speaks of scale, delivery and renewal over a decade, and the Bill speaks largely of frameworks, adjustments and protections. These are relevant, but not sufficient to meet the challenge—and this was a theme that was echoed by many noble Lords, not least of all my friend Lady Pinnock, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, to name but a few. I would say that, even judged on its own terms, the Bill could and should be stronger.

We are not going to get a consensus on everything. Let us take right to buy. I was particularly struck by the explanation from the noble Lord, Lord John of Southwark, of right to buy, which really nailed it. The times they have a-changed—and who was it who famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind”? That is absolutely what has happened with policy, and it is what noble Lords have been saying about how council housing has really changed from what it was to what it is—so we have to change our policies.

The reforms here are really sensible. They recognise the long-term damage done from the loss of social housing stock, with millions of homes sold and not replaced. Let us look at last year’s figures: 10,000 homes for social rent built, give or take a few, but a net loss of 4,000 after sales and demolition, against a recognised need of 90,000 a year. The core problem remains unresolved, which the Bill is genuinely trying to address. We have a system that allows homes to leave a sector in acute shortage without any reliable, enforceable guarantee of replacement.

The Local Government Association has said that the Bill could go further, so we want to strengthen this Bill in Committee by giving councils greater flexibility to exempt properties based on local need and with the tightening of the link between homes sold and homes replaced, which has been mentioned by several noble Lords, moving much closer to a truer one-for-one requirement. Protecting stock must mean actually protecting it.

I totally agree on the domestic abuse provisions—time is flying, so I will be quick—and the intent here is welcome. However, as was said, we really need to listen to the people who work in this area, because there are things that we can do to make that even better.

But still, for us, the fundamental issue is that this Bill does not deliver any single home. The wider programme is focused on increasing supply, but this just protects it—it clarifies, it adjusts, but it does not build. That matters, because delivery depends not just on policy intent but on the capacity, capability and the workforce. I am surprised that nobody really went into today the fact that we are facing a serious skills shortage in construction, with tens of thousands of vacancies and a need for hundreds of thousands of additional workers. Without a credible skills pipeline, we simply will never deliver the houses that we have all said today that we need. I will be very interested in the Minister’s answer to that.

I loved the conversation about money, with the noble Lords, Lord Lansley and Lord Young, and the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, having completely different perspectives; I am sure that we will go into that even further. There were recurring themes about the ability to deliver at pace and scale and for certain sections, most forcefully put by the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, in his usual inimitable style.

We do not oppose the Bill; it moves in the right direction and contains sensible provisions. I look forward to us getting into the detail in Committee. As we all know, it is the social housing blockage at that end of the housing crisis that we need to unblock to move people on. We will support the Government as far as possible, but, of course, we will push them to go faster and further, because that is our job.

My Lords, I declare my interest as a councillor in Central Bedfordshire. I thank all noble Lords who have contributed to today’s debate. There seems to be a fair degree of consensus that we have a housing crisis and that something needs to be done about it, though we may differ on what the solutions are. In particular, we welcomed those speeches focused on protecting vulnerable tenants and strengthening safeguards of victims of domestic abuse. Those protections matter and we will continue to engage constructively as this Bill progresses to ensure that they are as robust and as effective as possible. But, as raised by the noble Lord, Lord Rook, and other noble Lords, it is not just about bricks and mortar; it is also about the need for social support.

However, having listened carefully to the debate, we remain concerned that this Bill does not adequately address the fundamental causes of pressures facing social housing. The central challenge is not difficult to identify—we have a housing crisis because this country has not built enough homes that people can afford. We have not built enough homes for ownership, private rent or social housing to meet demand.

Yet instead of focusing relentlessly on increasing supply, this Bill concentrates largely on restricting existing routes into home ownership and expanding ministerial powers. As the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, just raised, the Bill is not about building one extra home. That is why we believe it risks treating some of the symptoms rather than the fundamental cause. The answer to a housing shortage is straightforward: build more homes that people can afford. That requires political will, difficult decisions and a willingness to support development where it is needed.

As an example, my own authority, Central Bedfordshire, has delivered more than 1,000 homes in the last six months alone. The noble Lord, Lord John, raised the increasing costs of housing in London—London has registered fewer than 1,000 homes in the first quarter of this year across the entire capital. That is a buildout rate around a 20th of that of Central Bedfordshire. Is it any surprise that housing is so expensive in London? Central Bedfordshire is not unique. I can name a list of neighbouring authorities, such as Milton Keynes, Bedford, Northamptonshire and South Cambridgeshire, which have all had good buildout rates, and there are many others across the country, though I am not quite as familiar with them.

Too often, we see Labour councils resisting development locally while demanding more powers and more funding nationally. When areas with the greatest housing demand fail to build enough homes, those pressures do not disappear; they are simply transferred to neighbouring authorities and communities which are forced to build, often on green fields. That is not a sustainable approach to solving a national housing crisis.

Much of this Bill is centred on weakening the right-to-buy scheme. We believe that that is a mistake. The right to buy was one of the most significant social mobility policies of recent decades, as mentioned by the noble Lords, Lord Young of Cookham and Lord Bailey of Paddington, and the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill. It gave millions of people, many from working class backgrounds, the opportunity to own a home for the first time, build security for their families and establish a greater stake in their communities. My noble friends Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Lady Eaton raised the research from the London School of Economics, which noted how right to buy enabled an increase in human capital.

When managed properly, with receipts reinvested effectively, it can also lead to an increase in housing supply. Surely it is better to have two homes: one for the existing tenant exercising their right to buy; and a second new home, funded by the proceeds from that right to buy, for a family on the waiting list. That is known as a “buy one, get one free”. Two homes must be better than one. It has the benefit of allowing specialist accommodation, such as disability accommodation and so forth, as the noble Baroness, Lady Teather, raised. If you get those proceeds, you can start doing that. I do not say this in isolation. When I was leader of Central Bedfordshire, we used the proceeds to build more homes than we sold. Is that not a win-win? It can be done, as we did in Central Bedfordshire and as has been done elsewhere.

We have a generation of young people who increasingly feel locked out of ownership altogether. Many are paying substantial rents every month while finding it impossible to save for a deposit or satisfy affordability requirements. In 1980, London renters spent on average 14% of their income on rent. Today, private renters in London are paying close to 50%. Is it surprising that council housing waiting lists continue to grow? The right to buy is not the primary cause of the pressures facing social housing. The deeper problem is that housing stock has too often not been replaced and that overall housing delivery has lagged behind for many years.

We need to have an honest discussion about the management of social housing, as raised by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill of Bexley. Recent figures from the English Housing Survey suggest that around 186,000 social housing households have incomes above £50,000, while approximately 389,000 households are under-occupying social housing. I do not cite these figures to criticise tenants; they simply illustrate the scale of the mismatch that can emerge over time if scarce housing stock is not managed actively and fairly. Social housing is supported by substantial public subsidy. It is entirely reasonable for taxpayers to expect that it is allocated fairly, managed effectively and focused on those in greatest need, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, and the noble Lords, Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Lord Bird, with his focus on the unemployed. At a time when many families remain on waiting lists for years, these are questions that Parliament should not shy away from addressing.

The Bill misses opportunities elsewhere. As the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins of Tavistock, raised, it will do little to tackle the well-known shortcomings of shared ownership, despite the fact that many shared owners continue to face significant costs while enjoying only limited benefits of ownership. As raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, and the noble Lord, Lord Stoneham of Droxford, while there are many excellent housing associations, not only is there insufficient focus on accountability where housing associations or registered providers fail tenants through poor management or declining standards but we need to ensure efficient and effective operation and delivery. As my noble friend Lady Scott of Bybrook said, they need to be accountable.

Alongside new housing delivery, also raised by the noble Lord, Lord Best, we should be thinking much more seriously about regeneration. Across the country, there are communities with enormous potential for renewal, regeneration and improvement, yet this remains largely absent from the Bill.

There is a broader difference of principle at the heart of this debate. We believe that more homes of all tenures are needed. We on these Benches believe that home ownership matters. We believe in aspiration and regeneration. We believe people should have the opportunity to build stability, independence and security for themselves and their families. Of course social housing has a vital role to play; nobody disputes that. It provides an essential safety net for those facing hardship and circumstances beyond their control. However, a successful housing system should do both: provide support for those who need it while helping those who aspire to ownership to achieve it. This Bill does not strike that balance.

As my noble friend Lady Scott said in opening, there are elements of the Bill that we welcome and will support constructively, but there are also significant concerns that this House has a duty to examine carefully. Ultimately, the public want more homes, regeneration, greater affordability, fair access to social housing and, wherever possible, the opportunity to own a home of their own. That is a principle that on these Benches we will continue to defend. I look forward to the further scrutiny of the Bill in Committee.

My Lords, I am most grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to this very thoughtful and constructive debate. As ever, there has been an incredibly wide range of experience and insight brought by this House, and I really welcome the scrutiny given to the Bill today. The debate has covered a varied range of issues, and I will do my best to respond to as many of those issues as I can in the time allowed—but I assure noble Lords that I will check Hansard at the end, and if there is anything I do not get the chance to respond to, I will reply in writing.

I want to give one piece of statistical information in relation to the impact of the Bill. Under the previous pre-reform baseline, the system was projected to deliver a net loss of around 26,000 homes between 2026 and 2036 due to right-to-buy sales. By contrast, following implementation of the measures in the Bill, we expect to see a net gain of around 18,000 homes over the same period. I hope it will be many more than that, but the provisions in the Bill will deliver that.

Before turning to the specific points raised, I will make one general point. I was very keen to stress in my introduction that the Bill is a range of very specific measures in relation to right to buy, domestic abuse, and removing some of the bureaucracy around social housing. It does not cover all of the Government’s programme on social housing, because much of that programme does not need a legislative framework. In fact, we have already started to deliver much of it with a £39 billion investment. The social and affordable housing programme is already under way and will be delivering very soon. Many of the quality issues that were raised in the debate are also already being dealt with; there are extensive programmes to deliver them, and that reform is on its way already.

The Bill attempts to start easing some of the pressure on social housing, which is being caused by the specific issues contained within the Bill. I know the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, will sympathise when I say that if you bring an enormous Bill before this House—we went through the process of the levelling-up Bill together—you get criticised for doing a Christmas tree Bill. However, if you bring a narrow, tightly focused Bill like this one, you are criticised because you have not put everything in it. So as a Minister you are never going to win—but this is the right step to take at this point in time.

A considerable number of noble Lords—the noble Baronesses, Lady Scott, Lady Pinnock, Lady Shah, Lady Murphy, Lady Jones, Lady Neate, Lady Gill, Lady Young and Lady Thornhill, the noble Lords, Lord Best, Lord Lansley, Lord Babudu, Lord Sikka, Lord Bailey and Lord Bird, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester and the noble Earl, Lord Russell—talked about housing supply and the ability to deliver increased social housing supply. The fact that so many noble Lords mentioned this highlights the great importance of that issue. The Bill strengthens our commitment to building more social rented homes and to delivering what we all want: the biggest increase in social and affordable housing in a generation.

The noble Baroness, Lady Scott, spoke about the Conservative legacy, and the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, has just repeated that theme. We would not be where we are now if we had not had 14 years when this problem was pushed under the carpet. In the time that the Labour Government have been in power, we have delivered the Renters’ Rights Act, tackling the problems that private rented sector tenants have in their tenancies. We have passed the Planning and Infrastructure Act, which has swept away some of the planning bureaucracies preventing housing being built. We are now approaching this Social Housing Bill, as well as empowering local councils and strategic authorities to deliver the infrastructure and the homes we need to grow our country. So I will not be taking any lectures from the other side of the House about their legacy, which has caused the housing crisis we are now trying to fix.

Our reforms to right to buy, notably the 35-year exemption for new-build social homes, will directly support our ambition by ensuring that councils have the confidence to deliver. The Bill’s changes will stop homes being sold before councils have recovered the costs of building them. Anyone who has been a council leader will know the pain of building homes and having them sold for less than they cost to build. Crucially, the Bill builds on the funding and regulatory certainty we have already given the sector to boost supply, including the £39 billion of investment—the biggest long-term investment in recent memory. The programme aims to deliver around 300,000 social and affordable homes, including at least 180,000 for social rent.

As other noble Lords have said, I have been somewhat disturbed by some of the comments about allocations to non-UK nationals. Eligibility for social housing is tightly controlled. If a person’s visa status means they cannot access state benefits or local authority housing assistance, they are not eligible for an allocation of social housing. For all social housing, the overwhelming majority—88% of social housing lead tenants—are UK nationals, according to the 2024-25 English Housing Survey. It is not at all helpful to use some of the derogatory and mischaracterising tropes that often accompany discussions around social housing. That is just not helpful, and I hope we can avoid that in future discussions. Fraudulent tenancies are sometimes obtained, and where they are councils have very strong powers to deal with them. I hope that anyone listening to or watching this debate—including anyone in this Chamber—who is concerned about a fraudulent tenancy will do what they need to do: report it to the local authority concerned. I hope we can avoid comments like that during the rest of the discussions on the Bill.

Of course we have to support councils to build more homes. My noble friends Lady Shah, Lord Whitty and Lord Sahota, the noble Baronesses, Lady Jones, Lady Neate, Lady Young and Lady Lawlor, and the noble Lords, Lord Cameron and Lord Fuller, all spoke about that. In 2024-25, councils completed 10,480 homes, the highest number achieved in over 30 years. The Government are committed to reinvigorating council housebuilding, and councils are central to our efforts to deliver the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding. We have already taken decisive action to maximise councils’ engagement with our new social and affordable homes programme. Since April, for the first time, councils can mix right-to-buy receipts with grant funding, helping to improve the financial viability of their bids.

We have also allocated almost £9 million to 44 councils to support bid development through the council housebuilding support fund. This funding forms part of a £63 million four-year programme to support councils to improve their skills and capacity to build housing themselves. In response to the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, I note that a great deal of work is going on with skills and capacity more generally in the construction sector. Finally, we are helping councils to borrow more cheaply to finance housebuilding by extending the preferential lending rate from the Public Works Loan Board for another year until March 2027.

The noble Lords, Lord Fuller and Lord Jamieson, my noble friend Lord Sahota and the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, clearly highlighted the need to provide support. Local authorities need to deliver programmes that are right for their areas. This is about the Government providing that support and funding and then letting local authorities implementing that in the right way for their local community.

We are all concerned about the safety and decency of social housing. There have been a number of mentions of Awaab’s law in our debate today. The noble Lords, Lord Best, Lord Babudu and Lord Stoneham, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester and the noble Baronesses, Lady Murphy and Lady Jones, all highlighted these issues. Reforms are already under way which will deliver transformational and lasting change in the safety and quality of social homes. The newly updated decent homes standard will ensure that all rented homes in England are decent, safe and warm, designed with tenant safety at their core, while remaining proportionate and affordable for providers to deliver.

In addition, the Government have legislated on Awaab’s law, requiring social landlords to investigate and fix damp, mould and emergency hazards within strict timeframes. We have committed to bring forward regulations for further hazards using a test and learn approach. We will announce timings for the implementation of phase 2 in due course.

The Government have published a draft update to the national design planning practice guidance, which consolidates key existing guides and tools into one document. The updated guidance illustrates the Government’s priorities for well-designed places, helping local authorities to make planning decisions and developers and architects to submit planning applications to local planning authorities. It highlights that well-designed, liveable places should have a mix of house types and tenures to suit people of all ages and all stages of life, according to different needs, and integrated with other facilities. We are clear that this guidance should be applied across all housing sectors in this country, including social homes. A consultation seeking views on that guidance closed on 10 March, and we will publish a final version in due course.

The noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, referred to my spreadsheet about the quality of homes. I have just taken on this responsibility. I take it very seriously, and there is a lot of work to do.

The noble Baronesses, Lady Teather and Lady Young, and the noble Earl, Lord Russell, referred to energy efficiency in social housing. We are committed to ensuring that every tenant has a decent, warm and comfortable home. We are implementing new minimum energy-efficiency standards in the social rented sector, requiring all social homes to meet the new energy performance metrics. They will help make energy bills cheaper for millions of social tenants, reduce fuel poverty and make homes warmer, more comfortable and less susceptible to damp and mould.

We have also published the future homes standards, which will come into force in March 2027 for non-high-risk building work. All new homes will have excellent insulation, low-carbon heating systems and, in most cases, solar panels.

To answer my noble friend Lady Young—sorry, I should not call her that now, but she still is—social landlords will be required to meet one of the new energy performance certificate metrics. We have listened to the sector’s concerns about affordability and deliverability, and we have introduced two compliance dates to address these concerns, allowing providers to balance their time and financial capacity across other housing priorities.

The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, raised a key issue around investment in social housing and mentioned additional ways to generate capital to support investment in social housing. We are open to hearing innovative ideas that meet our core principles—delivering more homes for social rent and creating high-quality and sustainable places—so my officials are very happy to follow up with the noble Lord on specific proposals, and I hope he will be happy to discuss those with us.

The noble Lord, Lord Cameron, raised an issue about Clause 9. Clause 9 will not affect the increased flexibilities we introduced in July 2025. Councils will continue to retain 100% of right-to-buy receipts, and those flexibilities will remain in place indefinitely. From 2026-27, councils will also, for the first time, be able to combine receipts with grant funding for affordable housing, helping to accelerate the delivery of new homes. The purpose of Clause 9 is to reduce administrative burdens for councils and central government because currently, whenever the rules on receipts change, the department must reissue retention agreements to every stockholding authority. Clause 9 will streamline this by allowing the Secretary of State to modify the requirements by determination, removing the need to reissue agreements while maintaining oversight. It is a safeguard power rather than something that takes away the important retention of receipts.

The noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Stoneham, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Warwick, Lady Teather, Lady Watkins and Lady Thornhill, mentioned the important issue of estate regeneration. We are clear that increasing supply and improving the quality of existing homes must go hand in hand. Too many tenants are living in homes that fall short of modern expectations, and we are determined to increase the number of social and affordable homes and to drive up standards across the homes that already exist. That is why the reforms that I have already mentioned are under way—to improve the quality and safety of social housing.

We are committed to supporting estate regeneration schemes to transform neighbourhoods and deliver well-designed housing with a better quality of life for tenants. The core strategic objective of the new £39 billion social and affordable homes programme is to maximise supply, but it will also support regeneration schemes that provide a net increase in affordable homes.

The noble Lords, Lord Jackson, Lord Young and Lord Truscott, and the noble Earl, Lord Russell, among other Peers, all spoke on the right to buy. I want to be absolutely clear: the Government are not seeking to abolish the scheme. For many social tenants, it remains a crucial route into home ownership, opening the door to greater security and opportunity. However, as the noble Lord, Lord John, highlighted, we must also confront the reality before us. For too long, homes sold under right to buy have not been replaced at the rate needed, contributing to growing pressures on social housing supply and waiting lists across the country. That is why the Bill takes a balanced and responsible approach, retaining the opportunity for long-standing tenants to buy their homes, while protecting vital stock and ensuring councils can replace homes sold. So these are practical, necessary reforms that are designed to deliver a fairer, more sustainable scheme.

On the issues around home ownership and social mobility, raised by the noble Baronesses, Lady Eaton and Lady Gill, and the noble Lord, Lord Bailey, the right to buy provides a pathway for social housing tenants to own their home. However, as I said, too many homes sold under the scheme have not been replaced. So we are reforming this, as we set out in our manifesto, but we are not shutting the door on home ownership; that pathway will remain for tenants who have lived in and paid rent on their homes for a long time.

On the wider issue of home ownership, there is an extensive programme going on now with the sector to make the buying and selling of homes much less complicated and much easier for first-time buyers, so your Lordships will hear more about that in weeks to come.

The one-for-one replacement of homes was raised by the noble Baronesses, Lady Scott, Lady Warwick, Lady Shah and Lady Neate. We are moving away from the previous one-for-one replacement target for homes because that was introduced when there was no wider expectation placed on councils to build. We know that the right to buy has acted as a strong disincentive to council housebuilding, which our reforms will unleash. We are calling on councils not just to replace homes sold but to go further and play a central role in delivering a generational increase in social and affordable housebuilding. That reflects our wider programme and objective. We will continue to monitor right-to-buy sales and council housing delivery to make sure that this continues to be the case.

I want to speak briefly about the rural exemption, which was raised by the noble Baronesses, Lady Coffey and Lady Thornhill, and the noble Earl, Lord Russell. Excluding rural areas from the right to buy reflects the very real and unique challenges of replacing social and affordable homes in those communities. Constraints on land, planning and supply mean that once homes are lost, they are often extremely difficult to replace. For that reason, we have taken the targeted decision to exempt designated rural areas from the scheme. We are not proposing to exempt any further areas from the scheme.

I have already spoken a bit about allocations, but I know that the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, was very concerned about these issues. The allocations framework is not included in the Bill, but work is going on with the sector to discuss further issues around allocations. The allocations framework gives priority to the groups who are most in need, and local councils have the freedom to manage their own waiting lists so they can develop solutions that make best use of their social housing stock. They are required by law to give priority to certain categories of people—for example, those who are homeless, as I know the noble Baroness will be very well aware—and we committed in our National Plan to End Homelessness to work with partners to update statutory guidance on social housing allocations to make sure that the framework is working effectively, and to support vulnerable households.

I will just briefly mention the mergers of housing associations, which was a common theme that came out during the debate. Housing associations of course play a vital role in delivering good quality homes and services, and landlords sometimes conclude that the best way to do this is through a merger with another housing association. Housing associations are independent organisations that make their own commercial decisions, and we do not direct how they run their business. However, all registered providers of social housing are required to deliver the outcomes of regulatory standards before and after any merger. In addition, under the transparency, influence and accountability standard set by the regulator, where a merger is being considered, tenants must be given the opportunity to influence and be involved in that process. A landlord must also be able to demonstrate to affected tenants how they have taken the outcome of the consultation into account when reaching a decision. I knew I was not going to get to all the points I wanted to make, but I will respond to noble Lords in writing on those I have missed.

Fundamentally, this Bill is key to ensuring that social housing continues to play the role it should in our society, not just for today but into the future. As I reflected at the beginning of this debate, social housing has long provided more than just a roof over people’s heads. It supports stable, connected communities, places where people can put down roots, build their lives and remain close to family and support networks. The Bill is a step towards restoring that stability—what the noble Lord, Lord Bird, called opportunity, security and comfort. Those were good words. It is protecting the homes we have, supporting the building of the homes we need and ensuring that the system works fairly for those who rely on it most. In doing so, it seeks to ensure that future generations can once again enjoy the security, opportunity and sense of belonging that I had growing up in Stevenage and that social housing has provided for so many in the past.

That the bill be committed to a Committee of the Whole House, and that it be an instruction to the Committee of the Whole House that they consider the bill in the following order:

Clauses 1 to 12, Schedule 1, Clause 13, Schedule 2, Clauses 14 and 15, Schedule 3, Clauses 16 to 20, Title.