House of Lords

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

Thursday 5 December 2024

11:00

Prayers—read by the Lord Bishop of London.

Economic Productivity

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

Question

11:06

Asked by

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have for increasing productivity in the UK economy.

[The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Lord Livermore) (Lab)]

My Lords, in the decade from 2010 the UK economy saw the lowest productivity growth since the Napoleonic Wars, which led to the lowest growth in living standards ever recorded. Reversing that performance is the number one mission of this Government. As part of our growth strategy, we have set out far-reaching plans to increase productivity, including restoring economic stability, reforms to planning, to skills and to the labour market, record levels of investment in R&D, new investment in transport connectivity, a modern industrial strategy and a 10-year infrastructure strategy.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I believe the Government missed an important opportunity by failing to impose productivity conditions alongside their costly public sector pay rises. I do know that productivity is a complicated area. On most metrics, public sector productivity has been significantly lagging that of the private sector. What measures will the Government adopt to ensure that it increases towards private-sector levels?

In particular, the Minister mentioned planning. Does he agree that speeding up and simplifying planning, and reducing the cost of electricity for businesses, rather than doing endless review, should be important components of the plan that he set out?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her Question. To answer her first point, she is incorrect to say that we did not impose any productivity criteria. We have introduced a 2% efficiency and productivity target in the NHS for this year and next year. We have also gone further than the previous Government did by extending that target to all government departments to ensure that we are improving the quality of public services while also improving value for money.

The noble Baroness mentioned planning. A significant programme of planning reform was announced by the Chancellor on her very first day in the Treasury. The previous Government had 14 years to announce those things but never did anything.

[Lord Sahota (Lab)]

My Lords, as a former small businessman, I welcome the Government’s recent announcements to help small businesses, including increasing the threshold for national insurance contributions from £5,000 to £10,500, and cutting business rates for shops, pubs and other leisure properties. Are there any more goodies to come in the future from this new Labour Government for small businessmen?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend for his support for the policies we have announced for small businesses. He is absolutely right that we protected small businesses in the recent Budget. SMEs are, of course, an essential part of a growing economy. We set out clear plans for small businesses in our manifesto and we will deliver on those in the coming months.

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister was right to mention skills being central to bringing productivity up. Both our parties had large chapters on skills in our manifestos and, since coming into office, the Government have announced initiatives, consultations and suchlike. Will the Minister tell your Lordships’ House when the first cadre of employees who have benefited from any of the skills measures that the Government intend to bring in will reach the workplace?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

The noble Lord is correct to say that both parties are absolutely aligned on the importance of skills reform, which is why we have announced Skills England. We will be increasing the number of people in training and they will enter the workforce as soon as they graduate.

[Lord Londesborough (CB)]

My Lords, the Office for National Statistics may have inadvertently thrown some light on our so-called productivity puzzle. The slide in the quality of its workforce data appears to have coincided with the increasing practice of its staff working from home—in many cases five days a week. Indeed, ONS staff have recently threatened industrial action—to go on strike—if forced to work from the office for two days a week. Do the Government have plans to commission a study across the public sector of the impact that working from home has on productivity? It is a crucial issue.

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I know that the noble Lord cares deeply about this issue. He has spoken in debates on this topic before and has made some very important points about productivity. I have also answered a Question in this House on working from home and its impact on public sector productivity. As I said then, the current evidence is mixed. There are clear advantages to working from home for some and there are also clear disadvantages to working from home. Most studies seem to suggest that there are significant benefits to a hybrid model. But there are no such plans to commission the kind of study he mentioned.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

Does my noble friend accept that there are some really perverse outcomes in the current way we assess productivity in the public sector, such as smaller class sizes worsening productivity in the education system, or employing more police officers so crime drops and the ratio therefore worsens? Is it not really important that we get a bit of common sense into this?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I completely agree with my noble friend on that point. Measuring public sector productivity is very difficult and contradictory measures are involved. My noble friend is right that, obviously, our priority is improving those public services and we will continue to do so.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, in the 1970s, we attracted enormous increases in productivity by also attracting vast quantities of Japanese inward investment, which saved our motor industry. Now, unfortunately, our motor industry needs saving again. Could we concentrate on attracting FDI by having the kind of Budget that really makes international investors keen to invest here on a scale much larger than anything that has come before?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

The noble Lord is absolutely correct to say that investment is one of the key drivers in raising productivity. Obviously, it was a matter of regret that, under the previous Government, the UK was the only G7 country with levels of private sector investment below 20% of GDP. We are absolutely determined to raise that: the recent international investment summit saw £64 billion of investment come into the UK, creating some 40,000 jobs. We are determined to continue that trend.

[The Lord Bishop of London]

My Lords, productivity is now often spoken of in relation to the National Health Service, which the Minister mentioned in his Answer to the Question. The Health Foundation looked at NHS productivity and identified maintaining morale and motivating the workforce as key to it. Alongside essential things such as targets, what effort are the Government making to continue softer leadership, including listening to the workforce and fostering good industrial relations?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

The right reverend Prelate is absolutely correct in what she says about the importance of the health service to productivity. A healthier workforce is a more productive workforce. We have a 10-year NHS health plan in the works. It will be published in the spring and will focus on delivering the reforms needed to ensure better value for money for taxpayers and sustainable productivity gains. Of course, good working relations with the workforce are essential to that.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, big business in the United Kingdom is among the most productive in the world. It is small businesses, which as the Minister said are the backbone of our economy, that struggle to grow productivity. How will the Government even communicate with this sector—most of the conversation is about only tax issues—to encourage and support innovation? How will they change financial services, so that businesses that wish to innovate can realistically access finance?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

That is a very good question, which I am not sure I know the answer to. Obviously, the Department for Business and Trade has an ongoing programme of dialogue with small businesses, as the noble Baroness said, in terms of communication, and it will continue to do that. The recent Mansion House reforms outlined by the Chancellor will, I hope, address the noble Baroness’s points.

[Lord Tyrie (Non-Afl)]

Do the Government accept that the fall in business confidence since the Budget will have a depressing effect on the investment needed to secure productivity gains?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

Well, I hope that the recent international investment summit, which saw £64 billion of investment come into the UK, suggests otherwise. The Office for Budget Responsibility, the Bank of England and the OECD have all upgraded their forecasts for the growth of the UK economy over the next three years; that is a very encouraging sign.

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

Does the Minister agree that one way of increasing productivity is by reducing headcount and costs? Could we in this Chamber perhaps give a lead to the country by looking at what we are doing and seeing whether, in six months, we could reduce our headcount by getting rid of those people who come along and claim their expenses but do no work?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

My noble friend makes a very interesting point.

Housebuilding: Regional Mayors

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

Question

11:17

Asked by

[Baroness Quin]

To ask His Majesty’s Government whether they have held or plan to hold discussions with regional mayors in England about the government’s targets for house building.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for her Question and her advocacy of devolution. As the Deputy Prime Minister set out in her letter to metro mayors,

“housing need in England cannot be met without planning for growth on a larger than local scale”.

That means enhancing mayors’ powers over strategic planning to ensure close working in order to deliver the housing and high-quality jobs that underpin local growth. To facilitate that partnership working, we have established the Council of the Nations and Regions, chaired by the Prime Minister, and the Mayoral Council, chaired by the Deputy Prime Minister.

[Baroness Quin (Lab)]

I welcome that reply, particularly given that, in many cases, regional mayors cover wide and distinct economic areas. They may have valuable advice on where affordable housing is particularly needed, as well as on areas where housing is less desirable—such as greenfield sites, where houses are being bought up as second homes to the disadvantage of local communities and the environment. Does my noble friend the Minister agree that, in this and other policy areas, regional mayors can make a valuable contribution to central government decision-making?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I completely agree with my noble friend. It will be necessary to introduce effective new mechanisms for that strategic planning and to put the say in strategic planning back into the hands of people who have skin in the game in local areas. We will strengthen the position in the NPPF on co-operation between authorities; work with the mayors and their constituent authorities to extend their existing powers; and identify groups of other authorities where strategic planning will provide particular benefits.

[The Earl of Courtown (Con)]

My Lords, the National Housing Federation, the Home Builders Federation and Savills have warned that the Government will fall short of their ambition to build 1.5 million homes over this Parliament by nearly 500,000 homes. Can the Minister give the House an unshakeable guarantee that the Government will not water down their housing target?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I am not going to apologise for the housing ambitions of this Government. We were left with a housing crisis, which we have set about tackling. The previous Government failed to do so for 14 years. We want to see young people able to achieve home ownership, to make sure all homes are safe and well maintained, and to create a new generation of social housing and new towns. We believe that everyone deserves a safe, secure, affordable home—do they not?

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister talked of mayors’ strategic planning role, but who actually makes decisions on targets—the local planning authority, the mayor, the department or the Treasury?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, we have done an extensive consultation on the National Planning Policy Framework. We reintroduced government housing targets, because we want to deliver 1.5 million homes over this Parliament. We are going to do that with the aggregate of targets from local plans, so we will consult local mayors as they develop their role in strategic plan making.

[Lord Watts (Lab)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree with me that, to increase the number of houses available, we will need to deal with the way housebuilders keep some of the stock off the record and land-bank? Will we do something about land-banking to make sure that, if developers do not develop land, someone else will?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

We will take measures to deal with land-banking and the situation with long-term empty homes. Sometimes, homes are built but still not occupied. We will increase funding to make those affordable homes and remove tax incentives and informal approaches. If they do not work, local authorities can use enforced sale procedures or empty dwelling management orders to make sure that land and property are used for their intended purposes.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, we welcome the Government’s housing targets, but can the Minister assure us that new houses will be built to very high sustainable levels? We all know the cost to retrofit a building; it is much cheaper to put the right measures in place now.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her question. I am passionate about ensuring that we do not have a new generation of homes that have to be retrofitted. I was with the Future Homes Hub yesterday and, early in the new year, we will publish a consultation on the future homes standard to make sure that we build the homes that we need to drive our carbon emissions targets.

[Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)]

My Lords, I draw the attention of the House to my registered interests. It is quite interesting for me to debate this with the Minister, because we used to spend a lot of time arguing about this in our conversations in local government. The 1.5 million target is brilliant, but people do not live in targets. We can change the planning system, but people do not live in plans. They live in homes, and homes are built by bricklayers. We cannot will the outcome of a big target unless we will the means to deliver it. What are the Government doing to make sure that we have the skills, material and finance to achieve 1.5 million homes?

To give the House some assurance, can the Minister tell us—I am sure it will have to be by letter—how many homes will be completed this year and how many will be started this year? If they are not started this year, they will not be completed next year, so the Government will miss their target for two years out of a five-year term, because there are not enough homes in the pipeline.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord but will resist the temptation to explain why we have not delivered the number of homes we wanted to this year, as I think he knows the answer. On skills, the Government have committed to working with regional mayors and industry to ensure that we have high-quality training opportunities across the country and that we build a diverse workforce, fit for the future. The Minister for Housing and Planning held a round table in November and we welcomed the announcement then of £140 million of industry-funded investment in new construction training opportunities.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, it sounded from one of the Minister’s earlier answers that the Government are introducing particular measures to make it easier for councils to buy vacant properties and perhaps to build new social housing. There are such long waiting lists for council homes. Did I understand her correctly?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The noble Baroness is quite correct: we want to do that. Despite the very difficult Budget round this time, the Secretary of State for my department was able to achieve further funding for affordable homes of £500 million. That brings the total for affordable housing up to £3.1 billion.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, will the Minister confirm that the National Planning Policy Framework will be published before we rise for the Recess? In that, can we return to the question of metro mayors? Through their economic development activity, they are well equipped to add anticipated employment growth into the standard method for calculating future housing need. Will the Government incorporate that additional measure in their calculation?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for inviting me to Cambridge, which I visited last week. It was a good visit and I am grateful to him. I can commit to publish the NPPF before the House rises for Christmas. I will take his other point back to the department and get the noble Lord a written answer.

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

Can the Minister confirm that parts of this country that do not have regional or metro mayors will be given equal and equivalent consideration by central government in taking forward the kind of subjects she has been talking about?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

That subject is very close to my heart. We have already set up a leaders’ council, which meets again next week. That is our way of communicating, on housing, development and many other issues, with leaders in parts of the country that are not currently covered by mayoral combined authorities. Further progress on the devolution agenda will be announced in the English devolution White Paper, which will also be published before the Christmas Recess.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, in West Yorkshire housing has historically been a matter for local councils within the conurbation, rather than for the metropolitan mayor. Most social housing associations are based at the Bradford, Leeds or Wakefield level. Are the Government proposing to transfer responsibility for housing up from those councils to metropolitan mayors?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The full details will be published in the English devolution White Paper, but the intention is that mayors will have some strategic powers over major infrastructure in their areas and land use planning for housing. Noble Lords will see the details in the English devolution White Paper, which will be out shortly.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, the Government are planning a new generation of new towns to help achieve their targets, at the same time as they are planning to devolve more powers to regional mayors, as we have heard. The location of these new towns will be decided by central government and the new homes will be delivered by development corporations run by central government. Is there not some tension between their policies on new towns and on regional mayors, about which we heard a few moments ago?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

As a new town girl, I absolutely celebrate the drive for new new towns. I know that Sir Michael Lyons, who is in charge of the task force for new towns, is working hand in glove with mayors and combined authorities to deliver this new generation of new towns. He will undertake significant consultation with them about both planning and location. The mayoral strategic development strategy will be part of this process as well. There is no conflict between new towns and devolution; they work very well together.

Train Crew Shortages

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

Question

11:28

Asked by

[Baroness Randerson]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the reasons for the shortage of train crew reported across several train operators as the explanation for the cancellation of services.

[The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill) (Lab)]

My Lords, the current level of train cancellations is dreadful for passengers, and driver, guard and train manager availability has been driving much of this. The railway we inherited has unacceptable levels of staff shortages. We have commissioned detailed work to understand train crew numbers and availability. The previous Government had no useful knowledge of staff levels, recruitment, training, overtime and planning efficiency across individual operators. That work and the Government’s commitment to wider rail reform will drive better staff numbers and more efficient utilisation of those resources and reduce cancellations in the future.

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

I thank the Minister for that Answer and am glad to hear about progress. However, recently, Northern Trains, which is directly government run, and Great Western Railway, which is still in the private sector, have repeatedly given a shortage of train crew as their reason for cancellations. As a previous Secretary of State said, nationalisation is “not a silver bullet”, but it will surely lead to a more coherent approach to employment terms and, hence, a better service for passengers. When and how do the Government intend to harmonise terms and conditions for employees and, therefore, to create a modern rail industry, providing modern standards of service, particularly at weekends?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Hannett of Everton (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very happy if somebody else answers. The noble Baroness will have seen—I know she knows—that the Government’s programme of public ownership will progressively bring train operations currently in the private sector back into the public sector. At the point of transfer, the transfer of undertakings regulations of course require the pay and conditions of staff to be maintained. As we progress with Great British Railways, the consultation which will lead to the wider railway Bill will determine future employment policy, working with staff and the trade unions.

The issues with Northern have a long history. One of the disputes that we inherited there is so old that its conditions are prior to the change in law about the expiry of mandates for strike action—I think it dates from 2017. It is taking a lot of sorting out; the Government are committed to do that. The noble Baroness is right: the conditions of service, which require work on only six days a week and rest days on the seventh, are no longer appropriate for a modern railway. We will have to change that, but we will do that in discussion and consultation with the staff.

[Lord Hannett of Everton (Lab)]

My Lords, I think I was getting so excited by the debate. I think that all in this House would concur that the disputes of the railway industry were lengthy and to the detriment of many people, including rail users. Can the Minister give a bit more insight into what actions his department took in seeking to resolve the long-standing industrial disputes at Northern Trains during the last four years, when it has been in public ownership, and how that contrasts with the previous Administration?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his question. The lengthy disputes were damaging to passengers and to the railway’s revenue and sapped the morale of the staff—and, indeed, of the management. In particular, in relation to Northern, the number of disputes and the length of time for which they have taken place reflect the fact that no serious effort seems to have been made to resolve them in the time that the company was in the ownership of the last Government. The previous Secretary of State, the current Secretary of State and I are absolutely resolute that we have to resolve these issues. They are quite deep-seated, but as we are here today, the management and the trade unions are in discussion about how to do that, and we are strongly supporting them.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I start by commiserating with the Minister on the fact that transport does not appear to be being mentioned in the latest great reset speech today. It must be tough not being a priority. On the running of the railways, the noble Lord knows better than anybody else that, to run a railway, you need management with strong focus and a strong hand. Does he not accept that the morale of management at the train operating companies is absolutely shot to pieces as a result of the recent legislation, while it waits for the Hendy axe to fall, and that, in effect, at least over the next few years, the railways are being run by the unions—much as the Government appear to be being run by the unions?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

There is no need to reflect the Government’s policy on railways in any particular speech by any member of the Government. We have a clear direction to go in, and we are going there. On the management of the railways, I have to say, if the noble Lord opposite knew the managers as I did, he would know that many of them were in fact rather pleased that there is now a direction. Their morale, as with my own when chairing Network Rail, was significantly damaged by the promise of reform, which started after the May 2018 timetable debacle and was not fulfilled by the previous Government. This Government are going to do it.

[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

My Lords, the shortage of train crew is indeed one of the many reasons why we have cancellation of trains, but the puzzlement is—I would like the Minister to look into this—that, if there is a shortage of train crew, surely the company should know that the day before, or at the very least at the start of the working day? Many of the cancellations are at very, very short notice. I will give the example of Euston station. On many occasions, a train is cancelled at very short notice, which has a significant impact on crowd control within the concourse. Will the Minister look into why train companies leave it to very short notice to say that the train is cancelled due to a lack of train staff—whether it is drivers or managers?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

Whether the train is cancelled at a moment’s notice or 28 hours or 48 hours in advance, none of that is good enough. I myself am puzzled by the number of times an apparently competent train company does not seem to have enough staff at short notice. The House may realise that I know how to deal with this. If you have not got enough volunteers to work on Sunday, somebody senior ought to be at the train crew depot on Friday afternoon, putting their arms around the staff and saying, “Would you work on Sunday?” That is what I am expecting from railway managers. We are expecting, in the new world of a joined-up railway, that the management will concentrate on that to the benefit of passengers.

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, latest statistics show that Northern Trains is the worst-performing train company across all types of cancellations, and 80% of those cancellations are caused specifically by the operator. The Minister has talked about resolving issues, but what specific action will he take to tackle this poor performance from a public sector company to ensure that passengers receive the frequent and reliable service that they deserve?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The Northern staffing and industrial relations issues are intractable and, as I said, have been there for a very long time. In the past five months or so, we have at least got to the bottom of how many disputes they have, what they are about and how they might be resolved. The management of Northern is working hard to do that. It is unacceptable—the Government are clear that it is unacceptable—but there is no point in just painting it as a public sector operation. It was brought into public ownership four years ago because the service was dire then. All I can say is that not much effort was made to sort it out in the four years until this Government took office.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, yesterday the Government announced the first transfer, of South Western Railway, to government ownership—I think next May. Can the Minister confirm that what he has told the House about the new industrial relations arrangements for rest-day working and such things will be in place, so that from May, South Western Railway will have a 100% attendance for all staff as necessary?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My noble friend knows as well as I do that actually these matters need to be resolved with staff representatives on a continuing basis. The transfer of South Western to public ownership will improve the performance of the railway, because it will be more coherently run between the track and the train. Of course, I cannot commit to perfect industrial relations from day one, but we will make sure that the resources are available for that to be done, and we shall also review, in each of the transfers, where we stand before the transfer, what needs to be done and how quickly it can be done after the point of transfer.

Political Donations: Cap

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

Question

11:39

Asked by

[Lord Rennard]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to cap donations to political parties.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Lord Khan of Burnley) (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government have committed to reforming political finance rules. We are considering changes that will help protect our system from foreign interference, such as tighter controls on donations. For example, the Electoral Commission has pointed to a need to consider the rules on company donations. Details of these proposals will be brought forward in due course.

[Lord Rennard (LD)]

My Lords, people are absolutely astonished when they discover that there is absolutely no limit whatsoever to how much money can be given by one individual to a political party. This week, Transparency International has produced analysis showing how dark money from dodgy sources can infect British politics, and Unlock Democracy has produced an excellent Democratic Integrity white paper. Will the Minister undertake to ensure that his department properly considers these reports? Is it not high time that the Government accepted the recommendation of the Committee on Standards in Public Life that there should be a £10,000 maximum cap on the sum any individual can give to a party?

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

My Lords, let me first address the noble Lord’s question about reports, in particular that of Transparency International. The Government are committed to safeguarding the integrity of our democratic processes and, as I am making clear today, we will be taking steps to strengthen protections against foreign interference in our elections. We are seeking and remain open to evidence from stakeholders, particularly on threats to our democracy. Our primary concern is reducing the threat of foreign interference.

Political parties play a vital role in our democracy, and it is important that they be able to fundraise effectively and communicate with the electorate. My department is currently developing proposals to give effect to these commitments. We are engaging with key stakeholders such as the Electoral Commission and the Committee on Standards, and we will update the House in due course.

[Baroness Hodge of Barking (Lab)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that it is vital that the new Government take every step to clean up our politics—on political donations and beyond? Does he agree that, as well as a cap, we need greater transparency in respect of political donations? For example, for all donations over £200, we should know the identity of the donor. Does he also agree that we need to ban all foreign donations, cutting off the infiltration of Russia and China into our politics, and that we need to strengthen the remit and powers of the Electoral Commission to ensure both the integrity and legitimacy of our donations?

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

My noble friend makes a number of excellent points. To summarise, I agree that there is a lot more we have to do as a Government. We committed in our manifesto to protecting democracy by strengthening the rules on donations to political parties. While it is clear that foreign donations to political parties are not permitted, the Government recognise the risk posed by malign actors who seek to interfere with and undermine our democratic processes. We will take the necessary steps to make sure that effective controls are in place, in order to ensure that democratic processes are safeguarded.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

Further to the Question from the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, the largest ever donation to the Liberal party was made by a convicted fraudster, Michael Brown. In looking at any changes in the law, will the Government consider forcing political parties that, like the Liberal party, have received money from fraudulent sources to return it to the victims of the fraud?

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord makes an interesting point; however, it is not for me, as a Minister, to consider, but for other parties. This is a decision for political parties on how they operate.

[Lord Beamish (Lab)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that a key point in a democracy is that donations and the sources of them are transparent? Therefore, I urge him to look at unincorporated associations and change the rules. This has been used by the Conservative Party on an industrial scale to make it very difficult to know where large sums of public money affecting our elections are coming from.

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

My noble friend makes a very interesting point. I reassure him that we are going to look at the whole issue of electoral reform, and we will bring legislation forward. There is nothing timetabled in this Session, but it is difficult to specify a particular date. We will take away the issues my noble friend raises and consider them when we bring legislation forward, looking at not just political donations but wider electoral reform.

[Baroness Finn (Con)]

My Lords, if His Majesty’s Government intend to cap donations to political parties, can the Minister confirm that this cap will also extend to clothes and glasses?

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

My Lords, all I can say is that the point the noble Baroness makes is not relevant to the Question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Rennard.

[Lord Dodds of Duncairn (DUP)]

My Lords, will the Minister look again at the backdoor loophole whereby foreign donations to political parties find their way to Northern Ireland through the Irish Republic? In 2022, over $1 million was raised by Sinn Fein, and before the Northern Ireland Assembly elections in May 2022, money from that source found its way to Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland. Will the Minister undertake to look again at that issue—it was raised in the other House many years ago—and take action?

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for making that point. I assure him that I will contact colleagues in the Northern Ireland team, and we will revert back to him.

[Lord Taylor of Goss Moor (LD)]

My Lords, I think the Minister accepts that there is an urgent need to tackle foreign donations, malign actors and donations funnelled through companies that may not, in reality, actually operate in the UK. This is an extremely serious issue, notwithstanding comments from the Conservative Party.

The secondary issue, however, is the one raised by my noble friend: the substantial donations made within the UK. Limiting donations in the UK to small figures would not just democratise the process but would get parties to focus again on membership, which has been in spectacular decline in the UK as parties focus their efforts on just a handful of seats and very major donors. That is not healthy for democracy. Incidentally, if we were to cap that, it might make an interesting change to the representative nature of this Chamber, too.

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord makes a number of points. I reassure him that we want to ensure that the Government’s focus is on our manifesto commitment to strengthen integrity in our democratic process. Democracy is precious, and we want to make sure that no malign actors can contribute to it and that any foreign interference is stopped. However, it is for political parties themselves, under law, to ensure the nature of the donation and the background of the company or individual making it.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

My Lords, the Minister is aware of my long-standing concern about the use of anonymous opinion polls and other forms of campaigning, either in a general election or prior to one. Will the Minister please ensure that he talks to the excellent new chief executive of the Electoral Commission to establish that it uses all the powers it currently has available to check on the issues I have identified, and, if it does not have the necessary powers, that it is given them through changes in legislation where necessary?

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord and I met the new chief executive of the Electoral Commission, and we will continue to have those conversations—together, if need be, given the noble Lord’s expertise in this area. The noble Lord is quite right: the Electoral Commission plays an important part in the UK’s democratic system, promoting public confidence in democratic processes and ensuring their integrity. On his question about anonymous donations, I will take it away and ensure that we come back to him with some more facts and information.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

Does my noble friend recall that the last Government thought it wise, and legislated accordingly, to ensure that people who had lived abroad for more than 15 years and had no intention of ever living in the United Kingdom again should be enfranchised? Can he tell us, in the light of material gathered since the last election, precisely how many more people were given the franchise as a result of that? I have heard estimates of around 2.5 million. What have been the costs involved in ensuring that these people are identified and known to be bona fides residents at whatever residence they last lived at in the United Kingdom? Finally, can he tell us what proportion of the 2.5 million actually exercised their right to vote? He will not be able to answer all of that right now, but will he please send me an extended reply?

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

To the noble Lord’s surprise, I can answer his question. The total number of overseas voters registered was 191,338, according to the Electoral Commission’s recent report on the 2024 general election. The noble Lord made a very interesting point. Overseas voters have the right to participate in UK parliamentary elections, including the right to donate to the parties or candidates they support. However, foreign money is not permitted, and it is a criminal offence to facilitate an impermissible donation. Political parties can accept donations only from registered electors. Overseas electors are subject to the same counter-fraud measures as domestic electors, including having their identity confirmed as part of the registration process. On his other questions, I will write to him.

Chagos Islands: UK-US Defence Relationship

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

Commons Urgent Question

The following Answer to an Urgent Question was given in the House of Commons on Monday 2 December.

“I congratulate the honourable gentleman on securing this Urgent Question. The Secretary of State has asked me to respond on behalf of the department.

On 3 October, the UK and Mauritius reached an historic agreement to secure the important UK-US military base on Diego Garcia, which plays a crucial role in regional and international security. The agreement secures the effective operation of the joint facility on Diego Garcia well into the next century. The agreement is strongly supported by our closest friends and allies, including the United States. It has been supported by all relevant US departments and agencies, following a rigorous scrutiny process.

This base is a key part of UK-US defence relationships, as it enables the United Kingdom and the United States to support operations that demonstrate our shared commitments to regional stability, provide a rapid response to crises and counter some of the most challenging security threats we face. The President of the United States applauded the agreement. To quote him directly:

‘It is a clear demonstration that through diplomacy and partnership, countries can overcome long-standing historical challenges to reach peaceful and mutually beneficial outcomes’.

Several other countries and organisations, including India, the African Union, the UN Secretary-General and others, have welcomed and applauded this historic political agreement.

Our primary goal throughout these negotiations, which started over two years ago under the previous Government, was to protect the joint UK-US military base on Diego Garcia. There will be clear commitments in the treaty to robust security arrangements, including arrangements preventing the presence of foreign security forces on the outer islands, so that the base can continue to operate securely and effectively. The operation of the base will continue unchanged, with strong protections from malign influence.

For the first time in 50 years, the base will be undisputed and legally secure. Continued uncertainty would be a gift to our adversaries. That is why the agreement has been welcomed by all parts of the US system, and other critical regional security partners. Agreeing the deal now, on our terms, meant that we were able to secure strong protections that will allow the base to operate as it has done. We look forward to engaging with the upcoming US Administration on this and many other aspects of the UK-US special relationship.

Finally, honourable Members can be reassured that the long-term protection of the base on Diego Garcia has been the shared UK and US priority throughout, and this agreement secures its future. We would not have signed off on an agreement that compromised any of our security interests, or those of the US and our allies and partners”.

11:51

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

My Lords, there is a world of difference between exploratory discussions, which have always been caveated by UK security interests, and signing on the dotted line, when there has been a material change in circumstances since the inception of the original discussions. I have two questions. First, on our most important ally, the United States, why are the Government charging ahead with this matter with the agreement of an exiting President of the US with diminished authority rather than awaiting the decision of the President-elect with a new and commanding electoral authority?

Secondly, given the increased and deeply troubling levels of global risk, which were alluded to by senior military personnel just last night and which have emerged since this project was first broached, why are the Government contemplating signing anything that removes our security in the region from our control and, critically, leaves us unable to deal with any potentially malign activity in the surrounding environment?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Baroness Chapman of Darlington) (Lab)]

Our view is that this makes us more secure. The UK-US base has been subject to challenge for the last 50 years, and this agreement would be the first time that the presence of our joint base with the US on Diego Garcia would be legally secure. We think that that is a prize worth having.

On the question of why we are rushing, I do not think that anybody could characterise this as being a rush. There have been 12 or 13 rounds of negotiations, most of them conducted under the previous Government, and we think that this is a good deal for the UK. We have prioritised our security at the front of our minds when undertaking this task, and we have been challenged on that, because there are other things that other people would have liked us to have prioritised, such as the legitimate grievance of the Chagossian community. We have prioritised security and making the base on Diego Garcia legally secure, which is the right position for this Government.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, notwithstanding the 11 rounds of exploratory discussions under the previous Government—and I suspect that, in the next Urgent Question on Ukraine, we will be asked not to follow the incoming Trump Administration when setting British foreign policy—does the Minister agree with me that it is perfectly right for the new Mauritian Government to review their own policies? I welcome the fact that the UK Prime Minister’s national security adviser met the new Mauritian Prime Minister in early court. Does the Minister agree with me that the principle of the Chagossians being involved in the process now under way—especially given the deficiencies in parliamentary scrutiny under the treaty-making powers—means that they need to be involved in proper parliamentary scrutiny, to avoid this becoming political football yet again in which they will lose out? That will provide an ability in Parliament to approve any treaty proposals through debates in both Houses.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

I agree with the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, that we need to allow the new incoming Mauritian Government the time and space to do what they need to do. As a newly elected Government, it is absolutely right that they take the time they need to consider the agreement fully. We will be working with them. As the noble Lord said, Jonathan Powell has been there, and we are answering any questions that we would expect them to have.

On the engagement of the Chagossian community in the parliamentary process, I completely understand why the noble Lord wants this to happen. I am not against that happening. My concern is that we do not raise expectations or lead the Chagossian community on. We are very straightforward and clear that this is an agreement between the UK Government and the Mauritian Government. We do not want to compound the cruelty and disrespect with which they have been treated over decades by not being completely straightforward with them at this stage—I am concerned about that. He knows the deficiencies of the CRaG process as well as I do, but it still remains the process.

[Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)]

My Lords, recent elections in Mauritius and the United States have thrown new uncertainties into the equation. Do we know when the review of the new Prime Minister, Dr Navinchandra Ramgoolam, will be concluded? That could add some several weeks or months to the considerations. What message did Mr Jonathan Powell bring back from Washington when he saw the potential new Administration?

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

We are not putting a timetable on this for the Mauritian Government. It is not really on us to chivvy them along; they need as long as they need to consider the agreement in the fullest way, and we respect their right to do that. Jonathan Powell has been in the United States, but we need to remember that the US has very clear rules on its engagement with other Governments in the period between the election and the inauguration in January, and we need to respect its rules on that.

[Lord Lancaster of Kimbolton (Con)]

My Lords, I was the last Minister to visit Diego Garcia. It is depressing to learn, in Answers to Parliamentary Questions, that no Minister intends to visit in future—that is really not a good sign. In the sovereign base areas in Cyprus, we have a working example of ceding sovereign territory while maintaining a strategic sovereign base. Why are the Government refusing to follow that example and that model?

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

I would very much like to visit the Chagos Islands some weeks.

[Lord Lancaster of Kimbolton (Con)]

She should do so.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

I would be very happy to. I point out that Minister West visited Diego Garcia recently. It was before she was appointed as a Minister, but she is now the Minister for Asia and the Pacific, and she has visited the Chagos Island. On the noble Lord’s second point, as he knows, every case is different. This is a unique situation, and our presence in the Chagos Island has been contested for many decades. This is a very different situation to what we have in the sovereign base areas, the uniqueness of which has led to a unique way of resolving the situation.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, I fully understand why my noble friend is cautious and delicate in her language when she talks about participants in whatever agreement is reached, particularly when she is talking about the Chagossians themselves. Of course, we want to make sure that they are fully informed and understand in a transparent way what is being agreed, but can she be a little bit firmer in recognising that in every other aspect of British decolonisation that I can think of, and which I guess most people can think of, self-determination is a crucial principle? This is not easily applied in this respect, but I would like the reassurance that the Chagossians figure very highly in the dialogue that the Government are having.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

That is right. Self-determination is fundamental when it comes to other overseas territories, most notably the Falkland Islands. We have made that very clear. The issue here is different. These issues date back to decolonisation, as my noble friend says, and the legal status. Those were very different times, and there was a move then to separate the colony, which is not allowable under international law. That is why we have ended up where we have.

It is right that we engage with the Chagossians and that we listen and understand. They will now have the right to return to the Chagos Islands but not to Diego Garcia. That is a much better position than they have been in over recent decades. What I do not want to see is the Chagossian community used and abused as a political football because some parties have decided that this is a good way to make political capital at their expense.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness makes a great deal of sense. However, in informal contacts that I have had with Chinese officials and diplomats, they have shown enormous interest in this whole issue, particularly regarding the position of Mauritius, to the point of writing down every word of what they think that they have heard. The report seemed to be that Mauritius remains quite friendly with China. Can the Minister reassure us that, in this rather new situation in the world which the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, referred to, this dimension is being studied very carefully? This is part of a long-term Chinese strategy, which we can see, of hoovering up Commonwealth countries.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

We are very well aware of the activities in the Indian Ocean. I remind noble Lords that Mauritius is one of the few African states not to be taking part in belt and road. It is a close ally with India but, of course, we are concerned deeply about any actions of any state that may jeopardise security in Diego Garcia. We have put that front and centre of our negotiations, and we feel that this secures the base on Diego Garcia in a much better way than it has been handled over recent decades.

Ukraine

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

Commons Urgent Question

The following Answer to an Urgent Question was given in the House of Commons on Tuesday 3 December.

“The UK’s support for Ukraine to defend itself against Russian aggression is ironclad. In July this year, the Government committed to provide Ukraine with £3 billion of military aid every year for as long as needed. In October, we announced that the UK Government would provide a further £2.26 billion as the UK’s contribution to the $50 billion G7 loan, earmarked as budgetary support for Ukraine’s military spending. This will be provided in addition to our bilateral military aid. We are also stepping up and speeding up delivery of our military support.

The UK is also leading the way in terms of pressure on Russia and Putin’s war machine. To date, we have sanctioned over 2,100 individuals and entities under the Russia sanctions regime. Sanctions have deprived Russia of over $400 billion since February 2022, equivalent to four more years of funding for the invasion. Putin’s problems are growing, with 700,000 casualties to date, voluntary recruitment down 40% and an unsustainable war economy. Russia has been forced to rely on Iran for missiles and on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for foot soldiers.

Our support to Ukraine is a core UK national interest. A Russian victory would diminish the West’s global standing, create a zone of instability on our eastern flank, and embolden Putin and other autocrats. This could require cold war levels of defence spending. On 19 November, we passed a grim milestone—1,000 days since Putin launched his full-scale invasion. Millions of Ukrainians have been displaced from their homes or forced into exile, and as we know from our constituencies, we have homes full of Ukrainian families.

The Prime Minister has made it clear that we need to double down on our support for Ukraine. As the Foreign Secretary told the United Nations Security Council last month, we stand with the people of Ukraine during this terrible period of its history. It is wonderful to have cross-party support for that, and for the support that the UK will deliver for as long as it takes until Ukraine prevails, to ensure that this can never happen again.”

12:02

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness will be pleased to know that she will have an easier time on this Question because we remain fully supportive of the Government’s position on supporting our Ukrainian allies in the face of Russian aggression. I have two questions for her. It was reported yesterday that a Russian ship shot at a German military helicopter over the Baltic Sea using signal munitions, according to the German Foreign Minister. Is she aware of this news and has she had any conversations with Germany and our other NATO allies about this concerning development? Secondly, can she update the House on the progress of the discussions with the US and others on the release of the seized and sanctioned Russian assets that are to be given to Ukraine to aid the rebuilding of that country?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Baroness Chapman of Darlington) (Lab)]

My Lords, my colleague, Minister Stephen Doughty, will be taking forward any conversations that may be necessary as a consequence of recent events. On the assets, we are looking at every means possible to ensure that the funds are there for Ukraine when it needs them.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, we noted earlier that Prime Minister Modi took the opportunity to be with President Putin rather than with Ukraine’s allies in the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting recently. The Russian Government are still trading far too freely in energy, especially in oil and petroleum. The Vadinar refinery in India is 49%-owned by Rosneft. The Jamnagar refinery is also trading with Russia, as well as Bharat Petroleum and Hindustan Petroleum. Our Prime Minister has announced that our trade discussions with India will recommence at the beginning of 2025. Can the Minister reassure me that we will not be offering any trade preferences for the Indian energy sector, which is currently profiting from the terrible infliction of the war on Ukraine?

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

I can reassure the noble Lord that every engagement we have with every nation on any topic includes a conversation on Ukraine. Our concerns about countries that are in some ways supporting what is happening in Russia and sanctions evasion are discussed in detail and at length. As for where Heads of State decide that they want to spend their time or which conferences they wish to attend, clearly that is a matter for them. If someone wants to attend BRICS rather than CHOGM, that is their choice. However, the noble Lord can be assured that we take every opportunity that we can to make clear that Ukraine is our top foreign policy.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

Do the Government accept that the principal determinant of the outcome of the war in Ukraine will now be the decisions and actions of the incoming US Administration? Are the Government’s efforts focused on influencing those decisions? If so, do they think that a relatively slow-moving strategic defence review, publicly cost-capped at 2.5% of GDP, represents appropriate national leverage?

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

I am very pleased with our strategic defence review, its wide remit and the engagement that it has from not just the MoD but across Whitehall and more widely into academia and elsewhere. It will be a good piece of work. It reports in the spring, and I look forward to it. As for the noble and gallant Lord’s comment about the incoming US Administration being the principal determinant of the outcome of the war, I respectfully disagree. The people who will determine the outcome of this war and where this goes next should be and are the people of Ukraine.

[Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)]

My Lords, there is an increasing assumption that peace negotiations may begin in the new year and lines will be drawn at the then-existing front lines of the conflict. Is it not therefore important that we provide sufficient arms and help to the Ukrainians to ensure that no further territory is lost over the coming months?

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

I have heard much commentary about the basis on which negotiations may or may not begin. At this stage, this is all speculative and hypothetical. It is probably better that from these Benches we do not try to construct some kind of framework for negotiation without including the people of Ukraine.

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, what further focus has there been, and what further determination has been made, on the Ukrainian children who have been taken by Russia? A recent report by Yale talked of re-education camps and coercion. Close to 20,000 Ukrainian children were taken. The Qataris played an important role in the return of some of them and I would appreciate it if the Minister could update us on the latest efforts in this regard.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

I am very happy to do that. I want to do that justice as it is such an important issue, so I would like to come back to the House and speak on that properly at more length. What has happened to those children is one of the most tragic and upsetting abominations of this conflict. I cannot imagine the hell that their parents are going through not knowing what has happened to those children.

[Lord Taylor of Goss Moor (LD)]

My Lords, I do not believe that what happens next in Ukraine rests with America. It rests in large part with Ukraine, as the Minister indicated. However, it also rests with Europe, the United Kingdom and other countries that want to see that the first attempted military invasion of a country in Europe since World War II is not rewarded in any way or encouraged to go further. It is clear in its announcements that Russia intends to go further and into other countries that it has referenced—by hybrid warfare as well as direct military intervention. Will the Minister and her colleagues remind the Americans of the seriousness of this situation in Europe, the torture of prisoners, who are not all military—many are journalists, one of whom recently died, and civic leaders from Ukraine in Russian detention—and the mass exodus of people from the occupied territories, who live in other parts of Ukraine and across Europe? These issues must be tackled in any negotiations that take place. It is not just a matter of lines on a map.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

I agree completely with the noble Lord. The only thing I would add to that is to imagine the cost of not acting, not just in human and diplomatic terms but in the price of the expenditure on another cold war for who knows how long. What we are spending now is a substantial amount, but it pales into insignificance when you consider what we would need to invest in Europe and elsewhere to maintain peace should we enter another cold war period.

[The Archbishop of Canterbury]

My Lords, I have made two visits to Ukraine, one earlier this year, and many of my colleagues have visited as well. Having seen the very sharp deterioration in civilian morale, we know that external support from the NATO powers, particularly the United Kingdom, makes a significant difference. We are seeing the northern NATO countries not only giving verbal support but actively preparing for the risk of conflict in order to deter it. The situation on the ground will not wait for the SDR. What steps are the Government taking to indicate, by their actions as well as by their words, ahead of the SDR, that we are deeply committed financially to the support of Ukraine, not only by giving weapons but by renewing our Armed Forces?

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

The most reverend Primate is correct. We do not want Ukraine to wait for the SDR, which is why we have already committed substantial sums: £3 billion per year for as long as Ukraine needs it, plus £5 billion in non-military support. As he says, this conflict is felt most keenly in Ukraine, but the uncertainty, anxiety and decisions now being made in other states as a consequence of what has happened in Ukraine need to be considered very carefully too.

[Lord Spellar (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)]

My Lords, it is the turn of the Cross Benches.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

I ask a short question: while I in no way undermine the commendable support of the Government for Ukraine, will the Minister’s department look into the information I have supplied about UK components being used in Russian fighter jets?

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

Yes. I thank the noble Lord for raising this with me and writing to me about this. He is quite right to do so. Following his most recent correspondence, I have asked officials, and we are actively investigating the issues that he raises, including in relation to our overseas territories.

Northern Ireland: Legacy of the Troubles

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

Statement

12:14

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall now repeat a Statement on the legacy of the Troubles made in another place last night by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. The Statement is as follows:

“With permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I would like to make a Statement on the legacy of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The timing of the Statement was chosen so as not to take time away from the Opposition day debates we have just had, while also enabling the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal to be updated today.

Addressing the legacy of the Troubles was one of the aims of the Good Friday agreement, but this task remains incomplete. Too many families I have met have had to wait too long to find out what happened to their loved ones. I have found it difficult to listen to their stories about the brutality of the killings, the way some of them were treated afterwards, and the passing of the years without finding answers.

The approach taken to legacy by the last Government was wrong. It was rejected by the Northern Ireland political parties, victims’ groups and the Irish Government, and it was opposed by the Labour Party when we were in opposition. Aspects of the legacy Act have now been found by the courts to be incompatible with our obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights. This must be remedied, and the Government are committed to repeal and replace that legislation, as set out in our manifesto.

I am today laying a remedial order under the Human Rights Act to take the first steps to honour that commitment. This order will remedy all of the human rights deficiencies in the legacy Act identified by the Northern Ireland High Court in February in the case of Dillon and others, and one issue from the Court of Appeal judgment in September. Specifically, the order, if adopted by Parliament, will remove all provisions from the Act relating to the immunity scheme, which—let it not be forgotten—would have enabled any of those who perpetrated the most appalling terrorist crimes to seek immunity from prosecution from the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery—ICRIR. Of course, as many victims’ families recognise, with the passage of time the prospect of successful prosecutions is increasingly unlikely.

The order will also enable all civil proceedings that were prohibited by the legacy Act, including future cases, to proceed. This means that individuals will once again be able to bring Troubles-related cases to the civil courts—a basic right denied them by the legacy Act.

In addition to laying this remedial order, I can also announce today that I will introduce primary legislation when parliamentary time allows. This legislation will implement our promise to restore inquests, starting with those that were previously halted by the legacy Act. It will also, in direct response to the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal’s findings, amend the Act’s disclosure regime so that it is fair and transparent and, crucially, allows for the greatest possible disclosure of information, following very closely the model for statutory inquiries and other established processes.

We will also ensure that, in specific circumstances—namely, in cases that are unable to proceed as an inquest—the independent commission is able to hold public hearings, take sworn evidence from individuals and ensure that families have effective representation. While the courts have found the commission to be sufficiently independent to conduct Article 2-compliant investigations, the confidence of families in its work is paramount, so we will make further changes to reform and strengthen the commission’s independence, powers and accountability. As part of this work, we will consider provisions previously included in the draft Stormont House agreement legislation, as well as learning from the experience of Operation Kenova.

The steps I am outlining today seek to correct the mistakes of the previous Government’s approach, ensure compliance with the ECHR and deliver on what this Government have promised: the removal of conditional immunity; the reinstatement of legacy inquests halted by the Act; restoring civil cases; and reforming ICRIR, while enabling it to continue working on behalf of the growing number of families who have already sought its help.

The many discussions that I have had with interested parties in recent months have been invaluable in the development of this approach. I will now undertake further discussions on specific measures to be included in primary legislation so that, together with the remedial order, the Government fulfil our commitment to repeal and replace the legacy Act. To be clear, this will include further meetings with families, victims’ and survivors’ groups, Northern Ireland parties, civil society and the veterans community, recognising the dedicated service of the vast majority of police officers, members of the Armed Forces and the security services who did so much to keep people in Northern Ireland safe during the Troubles. I want to take the opportunity to reassure the House that, as a Government, we are committed to ensuring that veterans receive the right welfare and, where appropriate, legal support.

I will, of course, also continue to have detailed discussions with the Irish Government, who, as co-guarantors of the Good Friday agreement, are an essential partner in this process. I hope that the UK and Irish Governments will be able to agree a way forward that helps provide victims and families with as much information as possible and does so in a way that is underpinned by the principles set out in the Stormont House agreement.

I am sure everyone recognises that, as time passes and families get older, we need to get on with enabling them to obtain the information, accountability and acknowledgement that they have long sought. In parallel, the Government also need to set out the grounds for appeal on elements of the Court of Appeal judgment. As I have said, the Government will use primary legislation to respond directly to a number of the Court of Appeal’s findings on disclosure. However, the primacy of the Executive in decisions relating to the security of the state is a principle long recognised by UK courts and is a crucial element of the state’s ability to keep people safe. For this reason, we will appeal the court’s specific finding regarding the Secretary of State’s power to preclude the disclosure of sensitive information in circumstances where such disclosure would prejudice the national security interests of the United Kingdom.

Furthermore, the court’s findings relating to effective next of kin participation in cases that would otherwise be inquests raise issues that could reach far beyond the scope of the legacy Act. It is important that the Government seek legal clarity from the Supreme Court, and that is why we have decided that the Government must seek to appeal on this issue as well. The Government will also pursue an appeal in relation to the findings on Article 2 of the Windsor Framework, for reasons I set out in my Written Ministerial Statement of 29 July.

I would like to say as clearly as possible that these decisions on appeal are to address wider concerns and their potential impact far beyond the legacy Act and Northern Ireland. They will not slow down our efforts to seek agreement and bring forward legacy legislation so that the ICRIR, which has begun its work, can demonstrate its capacity to assist victims and their families.

Finally, what is all this for? It is to enable families who have lost loved ones—families who above all should be in our hearts and minds today—finally to learn what happened. Nothing will ever ease the pain that they endure to this day, but we must hope that society in Northern Ireland, which has come such a long way since 1998, can begin to heal the terrible wounds of the past and look to a better future. I commend this Statement to the House.”

My Lords, that concludes the Statement.

12:21

[Lord Caine (Con)]

My Lords, I am not normally nervous at the Dispatch Box, but then I never anticipated responding in the presence below the Bar of one of my greatest musical heroes. I will try not to go over too much of the same old ground.

I thank the noble Baroness for repeating the Statement given by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in the other place yesterday. I note that, having pledged to repeal and replace the legacy Act, the Government are committed to supporting the new legacy commission, the ICRIR, the establishment of which formed the vast bulk of that Act.

We welcome the decision to appeal the judgment in relation to Article 2 of the Windsor Framework. The previous Government were clear that the commitment to no diminution of rights was intended to cover those specific to Northern Ireland, as set out in the 1998 Belfast agreement. It was never our intention that the article should apply more broadly than that and enable the courts to disapply primary legislation where they believe it engages provisions of EU law that no longer apply in Northern Ireland. Can the noble Baroness confirm that this is also the current Government’s position?

We also support the decision to appeal the court’s ruling on the Secretary of State’s powers to preclude the disclosure of sensitive information that could prejudice national security. The overriding responsibility for ensuring that no individuals are put at risk and that people are kept safe and secure in Northern Ireland rests with the Secretary of State and His Majesty’s Government.

The onward disclosure of information was all set out clearly almost exactly 10 years ago in paragraph 37 of the Stormont House agreement. Can the noble Baroness assure the House that none of the measures the Government are contemplating to strengthen further the independence of the new commission, or the commitment to amend the current Act’s disclosure regime, will in any way undermine that fundamental duty?

Can the noble Baroness be clearer as to what reform of the commission’s independence, powers and accountability means, given that both the High Court and Court of Appeal have, in the words of the chief commissioner, Sir Declan Morgan, in September,

“clearly and unequivocally declared that the ICRIR is an appropriately independent public authority, both operationally and organisationally”.

The Government have already stated their intention to lay a remedial order under the Human Rights Act to repeal the conditional immunity provisions in the 2023 legacy legislation. Of course, they have every right to take that position. As a Minister, I never sought to hide the fact that these were the most controversial parts of the legislation, which a great many people in Northern Ireland and elsewhere found extremely challenging. That is why, during the passage of the Bill, I sought to toughen the criteria for granting immunity and to introduce sanctions where an individual was found to have misled or lied to the commission.

The immunity provisions were introduced as part of a response to the views expressed by some during the consultation on the Stormont House proposals in 2018 that they would never co-operate with any form of information recovery process if there was ever a chance of prosecution. As a result of the removal of these proposals, therefore, what assessment have the Government made of the possible impact on the willingness of people, particularly former paramilitaries, to give honest and frank accounts in respect of Troubles-related events, and on the work of the commission itself?

The decision to restore coronial inquests in Troubles-related cases will reopen the prospect of elderly veterans and police officers being hauled into court in Northern Ireland, in a highly adversarial environment, to be cross-examined by highly committed lawyers with years of experience dealing with legacy matters. Can the noble Baroness therefore expand on what additional support, including legal and pastoral support, will be given to veterans who find themselves in this highly charged and uncomfortable situation? As the Statement makes clear, we owe the vast majority of those who served in the security forces—including Members of your Lordships’ House present today—a huge debt. Frankly, they deserve better than this.

One of the criticisms of inquests in Northern Ireland is that, in respect of legacy cases, they work for only a very small number of victims and survivors. Can the noble Baroness tell the House what proportion of the stalled inquests deal primarily with the actions of the state and what proportion are focused on the activities of terrorist organisations? Furthermore, can she say how the inquest system and the commission will work in tandem? Who will decide, and by what criteria, whether a case warrants an inquest, a public inquiry or referral to the commission? Does she agree that it is surely better to have one body—that is, the new legacy commission—for victims and survivors to deal with all legacy issues, rather than a fragmented system that the Government intend to recreate?

On civil actions, before the cut-off point in the Act there were some 800 cases clogging up the Northern Ireland courts. In allowing cases filed after May 2022 to proceed, can the noble Baroness tell the House how she expects the courts to cope with this workload and what discussions she has had with the Justice Minister on this? Can she also tell us what the implications are for the £250 million of legacy funding that we allocated from Stormont House and New Decade, New Approach, and where the financial burden will fall for the resumption of inquests and civil cases?

Finally, the communiqué issued after the meeting of the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference on Tuesday referred to a number of legacy issues falling within the responsibility of the United Kingdom Government but was totally silent on Ireland’s failure to do anything meaningful to address legacy issues within its own jurisdiction since 1998. Can the noble Baroness explain that imbalance and what the Government plan to do to address it?

[Baroness Suttie (LD)]

My Lords, I too thank the Minister for repeating this important and detailed Statement. These Benches strongly welcome both the content of the Statement and the constructive approach that it sets out.

Dealing with the past is an issue which provokes so much hurt and emotion. So many families have waited far too long for truth and justice. The previous Government’s approach regarding immunity was misguided and wrong, and has all too often resulted in a distrust of the process. As Sir Julian Smith MP said yesterday in the House of Commons, the new approach set out in yesterday’s Statement

“tilts back in favour of the rule of law and in favour of families”.—[Official Report, Commons, 4/12/24; col. 424.]

All political parties and victims’ groups in Northern Ireland were against the legacy Act as it was. It is therefore welcome that the Government have listened and responded.

It is welcome too that the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland has had several meetings with the Irish Government. Clearly, it is to be hoped that the Irish Government will feel able to drop their court case. It is a matter for them, but I hope they will soon feel able to do so. Can the Minister confirm that it is the Government’s intention to maintain constant and regular engagement with the new Irish Government to achieve that end, as well as, as the noble Lord, Lord Caine, said, dealing with legacy issues in general?

I pay tribute to Sir Declan Morgan and the work he has done on the independent commission, but I none the less welcome the proposed reforms of that commission. Some, including in this Chamber, want to see it abolished altogether, but that was in the context of the immunity provisions in the legacy Act that are now being removed. Can the Minister say a little more about the process for consultation with families of victims and political parties in Northern Ireland to judge how the independent commission is operating in this revised context? As others have said, it can work only when it has the full confidence of victims and families.

“Reset” has perhaps become an overused term since the election of the new Labour Government, but I believe this Statement represents an opportunity to provide truth and justice for so many people in Northern Ireland who have waited so long.

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

There were lots of questions. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Caine, and the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, for their constructive response to this Statement. I will attempt to address their questions and concerns. Considering the time available to us, the complex legal nature of the issues at play and ongoing legal cases, I also commit to write in response to some of the questions raised and will review Hansard immediately afterwards.

I commence by recognising the anniversaries of Troubles-related deaths that fall this week, particularly those in McGurk’s bar, Droppin Well, Ballykelly and Ballygawley barracks. These heartbreaking anniversaries emphasise why we are here today discussing how we can ensure that survivors and victims’ families can secure some level of peace. First, let me reiterate the goal of this Government, as the Secretary of State did in his Statement yesterday. We are trying to help families who lost loved ones in the Troubles finally establish what happened. This is one of the aims of the Good Friday agreement, and it is clear that the correct approach is yet to be found. This Government have rejected the approach taken by the previous Government. Their approach was wrong. It did not gain the support of Northern Ireland parties, of a majority of victims’ groups or of the Irish Government. It is for this reason that the Government committed to repeal and replace that Act in line with our manifesto commitments.

The steps being taken today are part of that process, with a remedial order being used to take the first steps towards that goal. The aim of that order is to address legal deficiencies identified by the Northern Ireland High Court and one issue identified by the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal. The remedial order will remove from the Act all provisions related to immunity and the prohibition imposed on retrospective and prospective civil proceedings.

The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland announced yesterday that this remedial order will be followed, when parliamentary time allows, by primary legislation, which means that will be phase 2 of the discussions that we will have today. That legislation will respond to the other findings of the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal, including reforming the disclosure regime, which the noble Lord, Lord Caine, raised. The Government’s aim is to allow the maximum disclosure of information while ensuring that proportional safeguards remain in place to protect the security of the state. I want to assure the noble Lord that that is our objective. This will closely mirror the process in statutory inquiries and other established processes. Further, it will realise the commitment made by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland to allow inquests that were previously halted by the legacy Act to proceed.

On some of the noble Lord’s specific questions on financing and support, I will write to him with detail.

In cases that are not able to proceed as an inquest, the Government will ensure that the independent commission is able to hold public hearings, take sworn evidence from individuals and allow families to have effective representation.

Although the court found the commission to be sufficiently independent to conduct Article 2-compliant investigations, as the noble Lord highlighted, we will make further changes to its powers and accountability to strengthen the commission’s independence in order to secure the confidence of the public and the families. As the Secretary of State said yesterday, this work will consider provisions included in the draft Stormont House agreement legislation and learn from Operation Kenova, which sets out a framework for disclosure without immunity, which is why we will work so closely. That answers one of the questions from the noble Lord.

These steps, taken together, will ensure compliance with the ECHR, remove conditional immunity, ensure the reinstatement of legacy inquests halted by the Act, restore civil claims and reform ICRIR. Importantly, this will be done while ICRIR continues working on behalf of the growing number of families who have already sought its help.

In answer to the noble Baroness, the Secretary of State has made clear the value he places on engagement, and this Government will carry out an additional time-limited process of engagement on measures to be included in primary legislation. That includes ongoing engagement with Members of your Lordships’ House. I thank all noble Lords for how generous they have been with their time to date.

Engagement will include families, victims’ groups and veterans and, of course, the Irish Government. I emphasise that engagement with veterans will recognise the dedicated service of the vast majority of police officers and members of the Armed Forces and security services who did so much to keep people in Northern Ireland safe during the Troubles.

It is clear that the full participation of the UK and Irish Governments in all legacy mechanisms is important if we are to provide as much information as possible for as many families as possible, and that is what we seek to do.

In line with the Secretary of State’s Statement, we have sought leave to appeal elements of the judgment in Dillon and others in the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal. This will address wider concerns and the potential impact far beyond Northern Ireland. As set out in the Statement, though, this will not slow down our efforts to seek agreement and bring forward legacy legislation so that ICRIR, which has begun its work, can demonstrate its capacity to assist victims and their families, helping them and society in Northern Ireland to take the next steps in the healing process.

I assure noble Lords about our support for veterans. Some Members of your Lordships’ House know that I am an honorary captain in the Royal Navy. I consider myself, if not a member of our military family, at least on the periphery of our military family. This is a matter very close to my heart as well as to many in this House. I thank the quarter of a million people who served during the Troubles to keep us safe. Our Government will work closely with veterans and veterans’ groups to ensure that the right pastoral care and welfare support are in place, as well as the right legal support as and when required.

With regard to other points raised, I want to reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, about our constant and regular engagement with the new Government of the Republic of Ireland. The Secretary of State met Micheál Martin earlier this week and is meeting him again this week to discuss legacy issues. Regular engagement has started and will continue.

I outlined the process for consultation on the revised ICRIR. It will be with every Member of this House, if they wish to engage with me. We want to take as many soundings as possible to make sure that people have confidence and faith in what comes next.

I think I have answered the majority of questions, but I will reflect on Hansard and come back to noble Lords. I look forward to working with noble Lords from across the House as we bring forward the Government’s next step in dealing with some incredibly complex but crucial issues.

12:37

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome my noble friend’s explanations in answer to the questions, which are very helpful, as well as the Statement. I also welcome the restoration of inquests and civil actions as routes to truth and justice for victims and survivors, because they should never have been closed in the first place.

Does my noble friend agree that ICRIR needs significant reform to win trust? It does not have that trust among victims and survivors at the moment, and it must gain it. There is real fear that it will focus on what one might call light-touch reviews rather than proper Operation Kenova investigations—truth recovery investigations. I accept that it should not undermine the security services, and Operation Kenova did not do that. It had the confidence of victims and survivors. The new process needs genuinely unfettered access to information, unencumbered by the test of reasonableness. The Minister explained that the Secretary of State will complete the repeal and replace commitment made by the Government. How will he do that specifically in the interest of victims and survivors, because that has to be paramount?

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend and put on record my personal thanks for the support that he has given me since I took on these responsibilities, as well as for the work that he has done for a long time in working with veterans groups and attempting to tackle some of the issues associated with legacy. I thoroughly agree with him that Operation Kenova could provide a template for going forward and the Secretary of State is committed to looking at how that worked. While protecting national security, it does provide a potential way forward. With regards to the reform of ICRIR, right now our intention is to reform it to build confidence. That is at the heart of everything we will seek to do with the primary legislation, and we can do that only with ongoing engagement.

The reality is that the victims of the Troubles are still in pain. We saw some of that in the other House yesterday; the heartbreak is real and tangible. It is not for me to decide what will work in this area to give them confidence. Candidly, it is not for many of us to determine what happens next. We need to talk to and engage with them to make sure that they have confidence in processes that they will be working with every day, so that they can get a level of peace. It is for them that we are doing this work.

[Baroness O'Loan (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister and the Secretary of State for the Statement. I welcome very much the reinstatement of civil proceedings, the removal of immunity and the commitment to restore inquests. I look forward to ongoing engagement on these issues. I have to declare my interest as a member of the international steering group of Operation Kenova, which has been repeatedly referenced today.

Is the Minister aware that the court’s findings on the Northern Ireland Troubles Act derive from the very limited number of cases which Mr Justice Colton agreed to accept for judicial review? There were in fact 20 applications for judicial review and the majority were turned down. The consequence of that, as I am sure the Minister is aware, is that many issues were not adjudicated on and the Court of Appeal could adjudicate only on matters in the High Court, so there were very limited outcomes from that process. Can the Minister provide further clarity about what is meant by repeal and replacement of the Act?

The exceptional powers granted to the Secretary of State and the ongoing situation in which his decision-making will inevitably be informed by the intelligence services create a massive problem of trust. Is the Minister aware of the difficulties experienced by Kenova and the inappropriate classification of material as secret and not to be disclosed to families, which has occurred as a repeated feature in Northern Ireland, and can she ensure that restrictions on access to information are removed and that the assurances of support to veterans will apply equally to victims?

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her constructive engagement on this issue and for how generous she has truly been with her time with me and the Secretary of State. I look forward to working with her in the months ahead as we develop next steps; her voice will be incredibly important.

With regard to the specifics, I am of course aware of the detail of current legal cases and why some issues were raised and others were not. Bringing forward primary legislation means that we get to look at some of the other issues in the round, and I look forward to that process. That will also relate to disclosure and national security, and we will have those conversations, because for some that will be at the crux. I reassure the noble Baroness that we seek to do nothing to the people of Northern Ireland on the issue of legacy; we want to do this with the people of Northern Ireland, to deliver for them and for victims. That is the approach this Government will be taking as we develop the primary legislation.

[Lord Dodds of Duncairn (DUP)]

I welcome what the noble Baroness the Minister has said about the decision to appeal on the disclosure of sensitive information and in relation to the question on Article 2 of the Windsor Framework. The Minister in the other place spoke about seeking clarification of the legal position. Can she go further and say that, if this does not turn out as the Government expect, they will legislate to put matters right on both of those issues, in the unfortunate circumstances where the courts may rule against the Government?

On primary legislation, I welcome the noble Baroness’s commitment to talk to victims and victims groups, as well as her commitment to this issue and to talking to colleagues here in this House. Will she ensure that there is proper redress for the innocent victims of the IRA, as it is not a one-sided process? Sinn Féin’s First Minister of Northern Ireland—a so-called Minister for all—continues to eulogise and support murder by the IRA against innocent victims. Will that be called out as well? The Irish Republic’s position has been outlined by the noble Lord on the Benches opposite. Will that also be brought into the discussions?

Finally, the noble Baroness mentioned having consultations with the Irish Government. Will she commit to undertaking once again to follow the three-stranded approach, which is that the Government of the Irish Republic should be consulted only on matters that are outside the remit of Northern Ireland and only on matters that affect them?

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his questions and his ongoing engagement, and for the support that he has given me in recent months as I have tried to get to grips with some of these issues. With regard to the Windsor Framework Article 2 appeal, he will know full well that I cannot speculate on what we would or would not do post any judgment, or what that judgment would be likely to do. But as and when—or if and when—that is the case, I will revert to your Lordships’ House, I am sure.

With regard to the victims of the Troubles and the perpetrators of some of the most vicious terror attacks that our country has ever known, there is no hierarchy of victim nor of persecutor. Those people who perpetrated these acts should be held to the same account, regardless of which section of the community they come from. We will do everything that we can to make sure that all partners who have a level of responsibility for next steps forward, as we work towards rebuilding and a genuine legacy process that works for the people of Northern Ireland, take full responsibility and fulfil all the commitments that they have made under a series of pieces of legislation. That includes the Government of the Republic of Ireland.

[Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the Statement on legacy from my noble friend, particularly in relation to the removal of the immunity scheme, the reinstatement of civil proceedings and the restoration of halted legacy cases. Undoubtedly, challenges remain so can my noble friend confirm that she will continue to work through the remedial order, the repeal legislation and the reform of ICRIR, already referred to, to ensure that confidence in the rule of law, policing, reconciliation and support for victims and survivors will be the prime objectives to achieve the shared society that we earnestly desire in Northern Ireland and the transformational change that is required in legacy?

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for her support and for the question. We are clear that the remedial order tabled yesterday is a first step in delivering on our manifesto commitment but, more importantly, our promise to the people of Northern Ireland to deliver a pathway through on legacy related to the Troubles. Our next step will be to reform ICRIR to build confidence, which will require ongoing engagement with everyone in your Lordships’ House.

Last month, I was in Northern Ireland and met a youth group who were aged 18 to 25. They were exploring the Good Friday agreement and, for them, it was history; for them, it was the lived experience of every day in Northern Ireland that they contend with. I am delighted and so privileged to say that so many people in your Lordships’ House worked together to deliver a society where, for them, the Troubles were history. But we now need to make sure that we work with the families who were touched by the Troubles—the thousand cases—so that the next generation is not affected by intergenerational trauma and have answers about what happened to their families.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, the whole House will be in the debt of the noble Baroness, Lady Anderson, for the way in which she has repeated the Statement. She is, palpably and demonstrably, personally invested in this process, and everyone owes her a debt of thanks. She will know that the primary responsibility for oversight of remedial orders falls to the Joint Committee on Human Rights. At its meeting yesterday, it decided that it would look at this remedial order urgently, from a human rights perspective. It would help the committee if the noble Baroness could provide clarity on when she expects the Supreme Court to hear the Dillon appeal. If she does not have that information, will she be good enough to try to establish that, so that we have some idea of what the process will be and how long it will take?

Given the impact on grieving families—which, as she said, was raised yesterday in a very moving way in another place—and the effect of justice delayed inevitably being justice denied, can we be assured not just that it will happen “in due course” but that the primary legislation will be in this Session of Parliament? Given that the Government have to deal, 20 years later, with outstanding matters such as the McKerr group of ECHR judgments, will the noble Baroness undertake that they too will be dealt with in the primary legislation, when it is brought forward? Twenty years is a long time to wait to resolve issues raised by the European court.

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord. I will write to him on matters pertaining to the Dillon appeal and the Supreme Court. Many things are in my gift, but that is not one, in terms of timing. On when the legislation will come forward, noble Lords will be aware of how busy the legislative agenda in this House is right now, and with forthcoming legislation. I assure noble Lords that we are making every effort, although the timing is not in my gift. We will bring forward primary legislation as soon as parliamentary time allows and I promise that appropriate representations are being made.

On what will be included in the primary legislation, we want to make sure that it is genuinely effective and has the confidence of the families, so of course we will work to try to address as many issues as we can. I look forward to engaging with the noble Lord on every specific case, if he would like to have those conversations.

[Lord Murphy of Torfaen (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on this significant achievement. It puts into practice what we said we would do before the general election: repeal the legislation. Some of the problems we faced with the current legislation were that every single political party in Northern Ireland disagreed with it. So can she assure me and your Lordships’ House that there will be proper consultation with every political party and with the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister—as well as with the Irish Government, where appropriate—to ensure that we have the widest possible consensus on what is so very necessary? But I give many congratulations to her and the Government on this.

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend both for his question and for his generous mentoring of me since we came into government. I am in awe of the work he did when he was Secretary of State and I am very grateful for how generous he has been with his time. He knows better than I quite how difficult and challenging it can be to secure consensus on matters pertaining to Northern Ireland—there is nothing more emotive than the issues we are discussing. But we will have proper engagement with all political parties to try to build a way forward. We are very clear that one reason why the current legacy Act has failed to receive cross-community support—and failed to secure the trust of communities in Northern Ireland and of the victims and survivors—is that none of the political parties was in agreement. Although these conversations will be very challenging, I look forward to working with noble Lords across this House to try to build a level of consensus, as the Secretary of State promised in the other place yesterday.

[Lord Elliott of Ballinamallard (UUP)]

My Lords, some things in life are very difficult to get a conclusion to. Some things are even difficult to get agreement on, and legacy in Northern Ireland is certainly one of them. If the noble Baroness listened to Radio Ulster this morning, she will know that, although she has brought forward some new proposals—which I welcome, and the Government have—they are just a little less undesirable than the ones that were there before. That is not coming from this House, because I hear much more welcome here—but, if noble Lords listened to the radio this morning, they would know that it is much different.

I am hugely frustrated, particularly given that the Government were only just in place when they announced a public inquiry into the Pat Finucane murder, when we have hundreds and thousands of innocent victims in Northern Ireland without that opportunity. I declare an interest: I served in the security forces in Northern Ireland for 18 years and saw some of those people murdered. I visited and continue to visit their families. They say to me—for example, the victims of the Enniskillen bomb—“Where is the public inquiry? Where is the equality for me?” There is none. Until the noble Baroness and her Government get some equality into dealing with the legacy and the victims in Northern Ireland, there will never be agreement or support for that process.

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

I will take this opportunity to thank the noble Lord for his service. I can only imagine the things he saw when he served. The support that he and all colleagues in Northern Ireland, as dedicated public servants, have provided to families who were touched by the Troubles, as many of them have been, shows a level of public service that very few of the rest of us have ever had to experience. It puts them in a class above and we are grateful for everything that they have done to support people.

On what was on the radio this morning, it will not surprise noble Lords to hear that I have been taking a particular interest in the media of Northern Ireland for a while—but definitely in the last 24 hours, to see the response. As was said, everything to do with legacy is so emotive that it becomes very challenging. Nothing is more complex than next steps, but our response is to make sure that we engage as broadly as possible with all members of the community.

On the Finucane public inquiry, delivering a public inquiry was a solemn commitment made by the last Labour Government, which is why we have fulfilled our commitment. We did that post the Good Friday agreement, and it does not suggest that other arrangements cannot and will not provide a level of closure and information for noble Lords. That is why we want to strengthen ICRIR for the families.

[Lord Eames (CB)]

My Lords, much of what we have heard in the last hour or so has not come as a surprise to many of us. I am reminded of a phone message I received from Northern Ireland early this morning, from one of the families that I have been literally living with since they were faced with the tragedy of a murder in the Troubles. Speaking as the former archbishop who led so many of the clergy during the Troubles, I say that my clergy have often heard good words, promising much and never being able to deliver.

I speak from my heart—I did not intend to contribute today because we have heard it all before, but I will just put into words what many people listening to this debate in Northern Ireland would say: “We have heard it all before”. We have heard the promises. We have heard the good intentions. We do not doubt the morality of those who say these things, but we plead with those who have the political power to deliver now, at the 11th hour: “Please back up your words with actions”. I am still dealing with the children of those whom I buried; I am still dealing with the children of families that will never be the same again; and I am still in touch with those who served in the forces of the Crown during the Troubles, at great personal cost. I reassure the House that they are listening today, yet again, to wonderful words and promises. I beg you, “Back up your words with actions”.

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

The noble and right reverend Lord speaks much more eloquently than I ever could. There is very little that I can say to him that has not been said before at this Dispatch Box and in this building. All I can do is ask for his indulgence, and that of the community, while we try to find a way forward so that we can truly, finally, deliver a pathway through based on truth and justice for those people affected by the Troubles. I ask him to give us a little more time so that we can deliver for them and with them, and not to them.

Tackling Stalking

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

Statement

The following Statement was made in the House of Commons on Tuesday 3 December.

“With permission, I will make a Statement on the action that this Government will take to improve the response to stalking. Depression, anxiety, fear, trouble sleeping and loss of confidence, these are just some of the ways that stalking can ruin lives. Victims are subjected to an onslaught of psychological and emotional terror that can go on for months or years. Even if the perpetrator is caught and the stalking comes to an end, the impact of being tormented day after day and night after night persists. For many victims, it never leaves them.

I am sure the whole House will agree that it is unacceptable for anyone to suffer in this way. This is a serious threat, and one that affects a substantial proportion of the population. According to the latest statistics, in England and Wales, one in seven people over 16 has been a victim of stalking at least once in their lifetime. Alas, I think that the statistics would be even higher in this House. Given the scale and impact of these crimes, it is right that we ask ourselves whether enough is being done to stop them and, when they occur, whether we are responding effectively. I am afraid that the answer on both counts is no.

In September, following a joint investigation, His Majesty’s chief inspector of constabulary, the Independent Office for Police Conduct and the College of Policing published a report in response to a super-complaint on stalking made by the Suzy Lamplugh Trust. The report found

‘significant changes are needed to improve the police response’.

I have heard first-hand accounts of stalking victims who have not been listened to, or who have even been told that they should be ‘flattered’ by their stalker’s actions. This is totally unacceptable, and it has to change.

The report on the super-complaint made nine recommendations to the Government, and today I will update the House on the actions we intend to take in response. We will introduce a power to issue multi-agency statutory guidance on stalking, which will set out for the first time a robust framework for how front-line professionals should define stalking and better work together. We will review stalking legislation to determine whether and how the law can be changed, and we will improve our understanding of the operation of the current law by publishing more data on stalking offences.

We will also make good on our manifesto commitment to give victims the right to know who their online stalker is. The House may be surprised to hear that victims do not already have this right. The broadcaster and activist Nicola Thorp told me about how she was stalked and abused online by a stranger whose identity she did not know. Her stalker set up almost 30 social media accounts to send her a constant stream of violent and misogynistic messages. Her ordeal was made worse when she was told by the police that, although they knew who her stalker was, they could not tell her, even after he was arrested. Nicola had to continue living with that fear, looking over her shoulder and not knowing whether the person near her was her stalker, until she finally saw him in court. That is not right, and she is not the only victim to have endured this. Nicola is with us today, and I pay tribute to her activism for change.

I take this opportunity to pay tribute to my right honourable friend the Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) who, unfortunately, is busy chairing the Foreign Affairs Committee. She heard about Nicola’s story when we were in opposition, and she worked with her to develop a new policy that is coming to fruition today. Inspired by Nicola, and with thanks to my right honourable friend, the Government will introduce statutory ‘right to know’ guidance that will set out the process by which the police should release identifying information about anonymous stalking perpetrators to victims.

We are also acting to ensure that the risk posed by perpetrators is managed, and that the causes of their behaviour are addressed. We will legislate to enable the courts to impose stalking protection orders of their own volition, which can impose restrictions and positive requirements on those who pose a risk, on conviction and on acquittal. These orders are currently available only where the police make an application to the magistrates’ court. We will publish national standards for stalking perpetrator programmes that seek to engage with perpetrators to address the behaviours that are leading to stalking offences. This will help to ensure these programmes are evidence-based and consistent.

Taken together, our package will strengthen the system so that victims have the protection they need and the support they deserve. I have seen at first hand the good work being done in some forces. I recently visited Cheshire constabulary, which has a multidisciplinary team of police, psychologists and probation officers working effectively together. We need to see all forces taking this sort of action. We will ensure that stalkers are robustly targeted, with effective arrangements in place to address the root causes of their behaviour, as in Cheshire, and we will respond to concerns that front-line professionals’ understanding of stalking is still not where it needs to be and that stalking legislation may not be working as intended. These are important first steps, but I emphasise to the House that we are in this for the duration, because only through a sustained effort will we achieve the change that is so badly needed.

Before I finish, I pay tribute to organisations such as the Suzy Lamplugh Trust and the wider National Stalking Consortium, and to brave victims like Nicola who have spoken out and campaigned for change. Their tenacity and persistence have been instrumental in getting us to this point, and I am grateful to them for all that they have done and continue to do. We will work closely with them and other key partners as we progress our mission to halve violence against women and girls in a decade. Through that mission, we will show stalkers and other offenders that they have nowhere to hide. We will stand with victims and survivors so that they know that they are not alone. We will work relentlessly to give everyone the peace of mind they deserve as they go about their lives, whether they are at home, online or anywhere else. Our streets belong to the law-abiding majority, and under this Government they always will.

I commend this Statement to the House.”

12:59

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for bringing this Statement to your Lordships’ House. On this side, we welcome the Government’s announcement on stalking. I am sure that all noble Lords will wish to do everything that we possibly can to tackle violence against women and girls. There have been many tributes paid to Nicola Thorp for sharing her experiences, and I wish to echo those. It takes courage to speak up, and I cannot thank her enough for raising this situation.

The previous Conservative Government made real progress on this issue. I can put it no better than the shadow Minister in the House of Commons, who said:

“We launched our tackling violence against women and girls strategy to increase support for victims. We elevated violence against women and girls to a crime type that police leaders must treat as a national threat. We ensured that victims can always access professional support. We doubled the maximum sentence for stalkers from five to 10 years, keeping behind bars for longer those who devastate their victims’ lives. We also made stalking a specific offence, to ensure that women and girls are protected and to show beyond doubt that stalking is a crime”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/12/24; col. 184.]


The number of people who have been stalked dropped 0.5% from 2010 to 2024, according to the Office for National Statistics. We on this side of the House very much welcome the Government’s actions on stalking, and we want to work with them to eradicate this crime once and for all. I wish to ask the Minister just a couple questions around this. Can he confirm that, in continuing the excellent work of the previous Government, conversations are happening with relevant Ministers in the Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to ensure that there is a truly cross-departmental focus on eradicating stalking? Also has the Minister had conversations with officials in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology to ensure that cyberstalking is being clamped down on? What resources is the Minister providing to police forces to ensure that this heinous crime is being tackled in all cases?

In closing, let me say that the Government can be assured that we on this side of the House will continue to fully support efforts to combat this abhorrent behaviour.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, it is a very old declaration of interest, but I was a member of the independent parliamentary inquiry on stalking, led by Elfyn Llwyd MP, which published its results in 2012 and led to the first change of legislation that identified stalking as a separate criminal offence, as opposed to it just being gathered in under harassment, as had happened before. I was also a victim of sustained stalking before the days of online stalking, over a period of two and a half years. Indeed, my noble friend Lady Thornhill was also in receipt of some of the very unpleasant attentions of this person.

The independent inquiry found that victims of stalking, whether domestic or not, had little confidence in the criminal justice system, from the way that police handled cases and helped victims and how the CPS frequently plea-bargained with perpetrators, resulting in a distinct lack of justice for egregious cases of stalking. I wish that I could say that this was history, but it is not. Nothing has changed in the cultural way that the entire criminal justice system deals with stalking. The law may have changed, but far too many stalking victims are still told that they should welcome the attention. Far too many find that their cases are plea-bargained away to harassment or some other minor offence and, as a result, that gives encouragement to the perpetrators. The reason that I mention this is that one of the things that was recognised was that many stalking cases involve perpetrators with fixated threats; they are manipulative people who have coercive-control behaviour, very deceitful behaviour and—most worryingly—with some perpetrators, a ratcheting-up of their illegal behaviour. Not enough is done to support victims of stalking.

In my particular case, it did not start with violence at all, but the reason why the police moved quickly at the end of a two and a half year period was because the perpetrator was using kitchen knives to slash tyres and their adviser said that, having done this to houses and damaged houses of the people he wanted to target, the next thing he would do after using these knives on inanimate objects would be to move to people. He was then swiftly arrested. Helpfully, he pleaded guilty and there has been nothing else since, but it was a pretty awful two and a half years.

This Statement focuses on the police response, where the Minister talks about those who have not been listened to or have even been told that they should have been flattered by the stalking actions. I welcome the fact that the Government recognise this, but the three issues that the Government are responding on—multi-agency statutory guidance on stalking, again; a review of stalking legislation, again; and publishing more data, again—are all welcome, but will not change things.

I pay particular tribute to Nicola Thorp. She is a brave woman, and we salute her, but she is one of many women who repeatedly have to tell their stories. Why, therefore, are false claims to families, friends and workplace victims able to be ignored when it comes to plea bargaining? I ask that, because these really manipulative stalkers do that. London’s victims’ commissioner, Claire Waxman, is herself a victim of stalking. Her perpetrator, whom she did not know, has been jailed seven times, and the behaviour continues. Once known, police can advise victims on how to protect themselves—for example, by installing alarms in their homes. If the individual who is being stalked recognises them, they can go to the police and say, “I’ve seen them in the vicinity of my house”. If they do not know who they are, how can they report when they are in danger?

I briefly mention one particular case where an ex-partner, who had continuously stalked his ex and her son, was given her new secret address by the children’s social worker, because he said he was so distraught at not being able to see his son. As a result of that action a handful of years ago, he broke into her new flat, threw his son against the wall and then raped the mother in front of the child. That is because the agencies did not know. It is fine to have victims informed, but can the Minister say whether other agencies involved in these cases will also know, so that that sort of mistake cannot be repeated?

Can the Minister also confirm, as has already been mentioned, that he will commit to requiring social media companies to publish reports setting out the actions that they have taken to address online abuse and stalking against women and girls? Will they be informed about these perpetrators who are repeat offenders? Social media companies will not pick it up on their own but, once they have a name and an IP address, which the police will have, it would be easy to do so.

I end by saying that I broadly welcome this Statement, as I think all victims of stalking do, but the biggest issue is how we can change the culture in the police and the criminal justice system. It is apparent that, 12 years since the new laws were introduced, it is the culture on the front line of the criminal justice system that needs to be changed.

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)]

I am grateful to His Majesty’s Opposition for their support for the measures and for the work that was done by the previous Government in highlighting and putting in place legislation that had Opposition support at the time to at least start to address this problem. I say to the noble Lord and to the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, that I think the Government’s pledge, our manifesto commitment, to halve the level of violence against women and girls over a 10-year period will send a clear signal to both central government and external agencies that relate to government on this issue and many others that this is a really important issue that has to be addressed by the state and by other bodies involved in dealing with the state. I hope that will assure the noble Baroness that this issue is being raised in importance. With a target being set of halving of violence against women and girls, of which stalking forms part, that is a measurable impact that agencies, the police and others will need to respond to government on, and I hope that raises it as a whole.

I particularly welcome the mention by the noble Lord, Lord Davies, of Nicola Thorp and her work. It takes a great deal of bravery to come forward, and she has done that. He mentioned the co-operation between government departments. Certainly, the Ministry of Justice, the department of the Home Office that I represent, and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology have a stake in improving the performance of the Government and agencies in this area.

One thing that came out of this Statement, which both noble Lords mentioned, is the multiagency guidance and the guidance to various agencies dealing with this, including government agencies that are responsible as arm’s-length bodies or agencies delivering for central government departments. I note that the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said “again”, but I say to her that there has not been any guidance given to date by government on a multiagency basis that is effective. This is the first time this has happened and, in the Statement, we have agreed to do that.

Cyberstalking is important and will be part of the assessment of the government response downstream. The noble Lord, Lord Davies, mentioned resources. We are in a very strange time, as the House will recognise, when we have not yet announced the police settlement for next year until December, we have not yet allocated resources for 2025-26 and we have not yet determined, with the Treasury, resources for 2026-29. These matters will come in due course, but we have not done that yet.

The issue of culture change, mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is extremely important, as is putting victims at the heart of the response, which is why we refer not just to Nicola Thorp but to the work of the Suzy Lamplugh Trust and the way it has responded. The noble Baroness raised a number of issues relating to social media. That is equally important, but I say to all Members of this House that if they look at the Statement, the work on multiagency guidance will be brand-new and important. The review of legislation to see how we can improve many of the areas which both Front Bench spokespeople mentioned is important. The collection and publishing of data for the first time is important. The victim’s right to know, which the noble Baroness focused on, is extremely important, because once the victim knows, then steps can be taken and action monitored and individuals can respond to the agencies that I mentioned. That is in this proposed legislation the first time. The management of behaviour to tackle some of the long-term issues of low-level offenders, initially, who may raise the level of their game is equally important and is in for the first time. The stalking protection orders that we will put in place when parliamentary time allows are extremely important and will help prevent further engagement by stalkers when those are legislated. The national standards for examining how we can deal with individuals will raise the level of this issue and improve the performance of our agencies, which are all equally important.

Many of these matters that were announced in another place this week and are being repeated here today will require legislation in this or a later Session of Parliament, but I hope the Government’s intention is clear: we will not stand for stalking; we want to give victims protection; we want to improve the performance of the Government and their agencies in this area; and we want to ensure that there is a legal basis to give the type of protection that the noble Lord, Lord Davies, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, both suggested. This will be an ongoing discussion as legislation comes before the House, and I look forward to both noble Lords contributing to helping improve the performance for victims and the prevention of this activity in the first place.

13:14

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome the Statement yesterday by the Government. I was taking part in an online conference organised by the Suzy Lamplugh Trust yesterday morning and the Minister, Jess Phillips, was there in her usual form—she has the ability, as a politician, to speak words that do not sound as if they are being spoken by a politician. In a way that was slightly pertinent to the debate we have just had, she understands the language that victims use themselves and need to hear so that they know they are being heard. I commend her for that. I have four particular points that I would like to raise.

The first is that the Government’s pledge to reduce the level of violence against women and girls is entirely welcome. It is a no-brainer. How to do it is of course the problem. At the moment, a lot of the funding for stalking is inextricably linked with that for domestic abuse. The two are not the same. They overlap, but a very significant part of stalking, about 64%, is not domestic abuse related and, if that is not recognised as the separate issue that it is, and is not given the right resources, we will continue to have all sorts of problems.

The second is that, while it is valiant to try to do something about the perpetrators, I think that that will not be done effectively by the current ways in which it is being done. The Suzy Lamplugh Trust has pioneered a programme called MASIP, which is a way of getting every informed body around the same table so that together they can speak with a real insight into and knowledge of the individual perpetrator, his history—it is usually a he—and behaviour, the type of stalker he is, the probability or possibility, if there is any, of his being able to be influenced to stop doing what he has been doing. That really needs to be encouraged. It is an existing best practice and it works.

Thirdly, access to independent stalking advocates is vital. The statistics are simply spellbinding. For every victim who has access to an independent stalking advocate, the chance of conviction is one in four. For a victim without that access, it is one in 1,000. Even those who do not know very much about statistics would recognise the quantum difference between the two.

The last is best practice. Jess Phillips mentioned yesterday, and it is in the Statement, the best practice that exists, for example, in Cheshire. Cheshire is really at the top of the Premier League—thinking about another Bill that is taking an inordinate amount of time your Lordships’ House—in terms of working in a co-coordinated way, being very open-minded and prepared to pioneer approaches that I fear the majority of police forces, for all sorts of good reasons, I am sure, have not done. We know that it works there incredibly well. The Government have inherited a system of 43 different police forces and 43 different police and crime commissioners, and we have a system where the British tendency to try to create the wheel in our own image repeatedly exists and flourishes in that environment. There is a point at which His Majesty’s Government will have to mandate best practice and ensure that it is adhered to. If we know it works, let us use it.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his very constructive contribution. I cannot compete with Jess Phillips in terms of language, but I will certainly refer the points that have been made throughout this debate back to her. I think the noble Lord will recognise that Jess Phillips is absolutely 100% committed to meeting the target set in the Government’s manifesto. She is passionate about the issue of violence against women and girls and understands the very point the noble Lord mentioned about the difference between domestic violence and stalking. She is cognisant of the fact that she will need to work with other government departments, such as the Ministry of Justice, in particular, to improve performance in these areas.

The noble Lord mentioned stalking advocates, which is a very constructive contribution. I will refer to Jess Phillips’ speech, note it and look at how we can work with the suggestion in due course.

Best practice is extremely important. Cheshire is just over the border from where I live, and I know the area very well and all the good practice going on there. Part of the Government’s objectives, as set out in the Statement, is to ensure that we look at best practice, incorporate it into guidelines and work together with a number of agencies—health, police, probation and others—to give statutory guidelines downstream and to help support agencies in reducing the level of stalking and linked criminal activity.

The noble Lord makes an extremely valid point, because the question of advocates has arisen. Last year, the police recorded 131,912 stalking incidents, and only 8% of those ended up in a charge. Some 66,000 of those cases—this shocked me and will shock the noble Lord—were closed due to the victim not supporting action. The point he makes about stalking advocates is central to that issue; people need support, because for many it may be the first time they have come into contact with the criminal justice system. All of us have different experiences of it, but this might be the first time they have met with a police officer in the context of themselves or a court. Therefore, an expert who can stand back and provide guidance and reassurance might well lift that 52% non-progression rate. The number of people convicted of stalking offences, which increased last year under the previous Government by 39%, is still only 1,239; that compares with a recorded stalking offences figure of 131,000. That needs to change, along with the culture. I hope that the measures in this Statement will assist in that, if not complete the task.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the Statement. Can the Minister respond to the question about whether the stalking legislation review will deal properly with stalking on the internet, which is increasing and terrifies people? I am concerned in particular about the circulation of deepfake pornography, its use and its close connection to stalking. Is he aware of the Private Member’s Bill which is going to be brought forward on Friday by the noble Baroness, Lady Owen? It deals with deepfake pornography and would provide a quick and easy win for the Government, should they be prepared to take it on. Can the Minister look at that?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend for raising that issue. I can assure him, which I hope will help, that the Government intend to review the legislation on stalking. There are two pieces of legislation relating to stalking offences, and we want to have a deep dive into whether they are fit for the 21st century and for current offences. Are they appropriate not only for today, but for the future and the fast-moving pace of things such as cyber stalking, deepfakes, the internet, AI and other such mechanisms?

The legislation being debated on Friday will be responded to by the appropriate Minister, which is not me. I hope my noble friend will recognise that this a serious issue, and that the deep dive into reviewing such legislation will take into account all these matters.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, I want to follow up on the last question, about online issues. I support today’s announcement of an extra 3,000 police officers, which is excellent. There will be 13,000 people working in neighbourhoods, which is fantastic. I also support this extra work for all the reasons that have been outlined, particularly the right to know who your online stalker is.

My question goes back to resources, and it is typical in one way, but I hope the Minister will understand exactly what I am talking about. Online investigations are difficult. Often, the attacker is abroad; you have to establish the digital profile and, once it is known that they are abroad, the investigation may go no further. The neighbourhood officer will not be able to do that; specialists will be needed. If we are to mimic the Cheshire example, which follows the Met example of individuals fixated on members of the monarchy—it is a good example, and it works—that will take resources. My plea is not a general one for the police to have loads more; it is about the specialism of the resources, and it will not all be cops. It is about how you get the balance right to make sure that these things happen.

Often, the cultural response, which has been rightly identified, is that they do not know how to approach this issue and have not got the resources to do it, so it ends up getting parked. That is not a good outcome, but I am afraid it is what happens when the expertise and resources are not always available to follow things up. If the Government can address that issue, without using tens of thousands of people, it will really help going forward.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his broad welcome for the Statement on stalking made by my honourable friend Jess Phillips in the House of Commons yesterday. It is important that we get former senior police officers such as him endorsing that approach, so I welcome his endorsement and thank him for it. He will know that the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary have today reconfirmed the provision of an additional 13,000 neighbourhood police officers. That will help at a local level with a range of issues, but I take his point about the need for specialist support.

As I mentioned to the noble Lord, Lord Davies, I cannot give a commitment on resources today because December’s police settlement, next year’s settlement and the spending review have not yet been announced. However, the specialism to which the noble Lord refers will form part of the needs and assessment review. The Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing need to look at those issues, and again, that will be part of the mix going forward. I assure the noble Lord and the House as a whole that the Government wish to address this serious issue. They have taken steps to do so in this Statement, and welcome contributions on how that can be built upon.

Ultimately, we will be judged by the test of whether we reduce the number of reported incidents, increase the number of incidents that are followed up and increase the number of prosecutions, as well as, in the longer term, taking steps to ensure that young boys, as they grow into young men and adults, have respect and understand their role in society. That is a longer-term issue that we need to be working on. I take the noble Lord’s points and I hope I have answered them as best I can, but they are issues we will return to.

[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the Minister’s repeat of the Commons Statement. It is right that the Statement should focus on the victims of this horrendous behaviour, and that that is the heart of the response. However, we have to ask ourselves what we are getting wrong as a society that causes people to perpetrate this sort of behaviour. I do not think it is just about evil people; it is learned behaviour, and learning is part of how we raise people in this society.

The Statement touches on that issue, as did my noble friend towards the end of his last reply. It refers to the need to engage with the perpetrators, to consider the root causes of the behaviour and to address it. All of that needs more attention and more resources, particularly but not just in the sphere of mental health. I was particularly struck by the reference by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, to someone who had been in prison seven times because of this behaviour. My assumption is that nothing happened in that prison to address those behaviours, and unless we get that right, dealing with the outcomes is the wrong end of the issue.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend for his contribution. He raises an issue which I touched on briefly in answering the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe: how society approaches stalking. Stalkers do not just appear, aged 18, 25, 35, 45; they are formed by the way in which they are educated and the communities they live in, in the context of the respect they need to show to their fellow members of society. That is a much wider issue, but the Government are cognisant of it and are trying to look at long-term solutions.

My noble friend mentioned the individual mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, who had been in prison for multiple offences. That is a difficult challenge that we have to address. Again, this will be partly through the national standards for progress and the examination that has been trailed in this Statement on managerial behaviour and partly through the way in which the Probation Service, on a multiagency basis and with the guidelines that we will set, will make interventions with those individuals who have been proved to be perpetrators. The Government are cognisant of those issues, and we will be taking them forward in the next three years.

An extremely important issue is the right of victims to know who the perpetrator is. Pre conviction, that gives at least some security that we know that steps can be taken and we can look at interventions to change behaviour. This is about preventing stalking and the harm that it brings. That goes right back to early prevention and early education, right the way through to dealing with persistent offenders. I hope that, at the very least, this Statement has set a direction of travel that the Government can follow.

Housing Supply and Homelessness

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

Motion to Take Note

13:30

Moved by

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe]

That this House takes note of the need to increase housing supply and tackle homelessness.

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome this opportunity to highlight again the current housing crisis and the rise in homelessness, and I am grateful to all noble Lords who have chosen to speak in this debate.

The facts are truly shocking. They are reflected in innumerable reports over the last few years. Charities such as Shelter and Crisis have been sounding warnings for years. Sector bodies such as the National Housing Federation have lobbied hard for an increased supply of homes that can be afforded and are of good quality. The Church of England has produced two important reports re-emphasising the crisis we face, and I am glad that the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury has chosen this debate to make his valedictory speech to the House. He instigated the two reports and has shown a strong commitment to ending homelessness. I know that the House will appreciate his many valuable contributions over the years and looks forward to his valedictory address.

It must be a crisis when millions of people and families in this country cannot find or afford a decent home: a home where they feel secure, where they can thrive and where their children can learn. The Labour manifesto was clear that the housing crisis was a national priority and committed to delivering 1.5 million homes over the Parliament. Beneath that headline commitment is an ambition to provide the biggest increase to social and affordable housing for a generation. As I hope to outline today, a major new programme of social housebuilding is more critical than ever, and the role that supported housing can play as a part of that is urgently needed if we are to make any progress in dealing with homelessness.

In the Autumn Budget, the Chancellor promised to deliver not only a £500 million boost to the affordable homes programme but flexibilities to councils when using right-to-buy receipts and consultation on a new social housing rent settlement. On homelessness, additional funds of £233 million were announced—a positive initial step, but these are only foundations on which to build. Demand will still exceed supply even if that target is fully met. Housing has an impact on health policy, education policy, immigration, justice, transport and employment; just about every arm of government has a role to play in addressing this crisis. It is a huge challenge for the Government and for the Minister. I urge the need for a long-term strategy, which will depend on achieving not only cross-departmental support but some degree of cross-party support for long-term policies that can be sustained beyond the lifetime of one Parliament or one Government. I hope the party opposite will agree to play its part in achieving this.

The sheer scale is daunting. Over 8 million people in England cannot access the housing they need, with a large portion requiring social housing. National Housing Federation research into overcrowding found that more than 310,000 children in England are forced to share beds with other family members. One in six children is living in cramped conditions—that is around 2 million children.

An increase in the number of people facing homelessness has been compounded by the cost of living crisis. The latest official statistics show a 10% increase in the number of households who contacted their local authorities due to being at risk of homelessness. A record number of families are homeless and living in inadequate temporary accommodation, which is disrupting children’s education, undermining their well-being and piling enormous pressure on families. Temporary accommodation, predominantly delivered by the private sector, is often of poor quality and unsuitable for families, who report high levels of stress, anxiety and depression.

Temporary accommodation was created as a short-term solution, but the rise in homelessness and lack of suitable social housing means that households can spend years in it, even where social housing is available. The increased need has meant that local authorities have to rely on B&Bs and hotels. This has become a huge financial burden on local authorities, which between April 2023 and March 2024 spent a total of £2.3 billion on temporary accommodation. The number of rough sleepers has also continued to rise to record levels. In London alone, the Combined Homelessness and Information Network has reported a 19% increase in rough sleepers compared with last year.

The last Labour Government reduced rough sleeping by more than two-thirds in their first term by taking a cross-departmental approach. Can my noble friend the Minister update the House on the work of the Deputy Prime Minister’s ministerial task force to end homelessness? Will the Minister commit the Government to working with mayors and local government leaders to achieve this?

The link between homelessness and health is well known. Unmet mental health needs and lack of treatment for substance misuse are known factors that can trap people in the cycle of homelessness. Health is more than just the absence of disease; it is about people’s overall well-being. Health starts at home, and the housing crisis has had an awful effect on people’s health, with long-term consequences. It is increasing the financial burden on the NHS and costing £1.4 billion per year to treat people affected by poor housing.

Housing that is properly adapted to suit the needs of residents and having the right support in place are key to keeping people out of hospital and living independently. The tragic death of Awaab Ishak reminds us that poor-quality homes can also contribute to avoidable deaths and increase the risk of developing asthma and other respiratory conditions. We must commit to ensuring that nothing like this ever happens again.

Overcrowding can put a real strain on families. Reduced privacy and lack of space to study or play have been linked to developmental issues and poor mental health in children. Appropriate housing with support where needed can help relieve pressures on the NHS by enabling timely discharge from hospital, preventing readmissions and helping people access health services early on. Will the Minister ensure that the long-term housing policy is integrated into the ambitions set out in the NHS 10-year plan, to ensure that it looks beyond just the number of new homes and addresses housing conditions and types, affordability and support?

I referred to supported housing. Homelessness schemes are essential to ensuring that people get the support they need to break the cycle of homelessness. But the sector is facing a truly dire financial situation. Cuts to funding and the financial stress of supplying temporary accommodation have forced local authorities to make some very difficult decisions. This has included decommissioning vital supported housing and homelessness services—a lifeline for vulnerable groups at risk of rough sleeping. Despite the increasing need for supported housing, one in three supported housing providers has had to close services in the past year, and 60% expect to close schemes in the future due to unviability. This will lead to an increase in need for temporary accommodation and residential care, and so increase even more the financial pressures on local authorities.

The NAO’s July report argued that:

“Dealing with homelessness is creating unsustainable financial pressure for some local authorities”.


Funding constraints are undermining local authorities’ capacity to prevent homelessness and invest in good-quality temporary accommodation and other forms of housing. I hope the Government are under no illusions about the scale of the pressure that councils are facing after years of underfunding and increasing demand for services. It would be helpful if the Minister could confirm the steps the Government are taking to reset the relationship with local government.

There are some things that can be done quickly. The empty homes round table on 19 November highlighted the urgency of tackling long-term empty homes as part of broader efforts to alleviate housing shortages, reduce homelessness and improve housing sustainability. It focused on the need to improve funding flexibility to enable local authorities to acquire and refurbish empty homes, simplifying enforcement measures such as empty dwelling management orders, and the importance of linking empty homes initiatives to wider national housing, homelessness and retrofitting strategies.

Although the NAO report I referred to was based on the legacy of the previous Government, it presents a further challenge for the Government now as they develop their own strategy for dealing with that legacy of homelessness and insufficient housing supply. Local authorities, along with housing associations, are key deliverers of social and supported accommodation. The Government’s commitment to a long-term strategy is essential if they are to ensure a stable and sustainable building programme. The NAO also warned that funding had remained fragmented and generally short term, and it is worth noting that the constant changes in Housing Minister over the last 10 years cannot have done much to encourage longer-term thinking. I hope this Government will learn that lesson.

I turn briefly to the private sector, which has a significant role to play in housebuilding but has severe limitations. The private market has rarely delivered more than 150,000 homes a year, and in many years fewer than that. The only post-war period where we have built more than 300,000 homes a year was when we were building over 100,000 council homes as part of the mix. Importantly, this was founded on a firm cross-party commitment to the value of social housing. The speculative private housebuilder model means market homes will not build out quickly enough to deliver 1.5 million homes this Parliament. Boosting social and affordable housing will be vital to the new Government’s plans for housing-led growth and delivery. So I hope the Minister will agree that we need a big uptick in social housebuilding, as well as moving ahead with planning reform that will open up sites over time.

I will comment briefly on planning. In recent years, the total number of homes that were granted planning permission fell sharply, from 302,000 in 2021-22 to 236,000 in 2022-23. Can the Minister tell us what the Government are doing to reform the planning system in order to deliver the quality of homes and infrastructure the country is crying out for? I hope these issues will be raised in more detail by other speakers.

Let me conclude. We know that building social homes speeds up and stabilises overall housebuilding, as well as increasing the resilience and productivity of the construction sector and boosting growth. The National Housing Federation and Shelter commissioned research which showed that building 90,000 social rented homes a year would add £51.2 billion to the economy. Social housing is not a debt or financial burden on the Exchequer, it is a precious national asset that we need to invest in, protect and maintain. Will the Minister commit to reinforcing this vital message with the Treasury in the forthcoming spending review?

Increasing the supply of homes alone will not solve the housing and homelessness crisis. We need investment in our existing homes to improve quality. We need to secure long-term, ring-fenced funding to protect supported housing and homelessness schemes.

We should consider the scale of the opportunity as well as the challenge. Every year, social landlords save their tenants £18 billion compared with equivalent rents in the private rented sector, meaning lower-income families have more income after housing costs to spend on essentials. This is a contribution that has been overlooked by successive Governments.

Looking ahead to the spring spending review and the Government’s long-term housing strategy, will the Minister urge her Secretary of State and colleagues at the Treasury to ring-fence funding for housing-related support allocated to local authorities? It is also vital we provide more flexible revenue and grant funding, so that supported housing can deliver and develop according to local needs.

Fourteen years of austerity and piecemeal solutions have had an appalling impact on housing, but solutions remain within reach. Will the Minister commit to working across all government departments to cover all aspects of housing and ensure that this feeds into their long-term strategic planning?

13:44

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, for sponsoring this debate and introducing it in such a compelling and moving way. Like her, I also look forward to the valedictory speech from the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury. I pay tribute to the work of the Church under his leadership in raising the profile of housing and identifying some solutions, and, in particular, to the report of his commission on housing, Coming Home, which was published in 2019. I am sure he will want to develop some of those themes in his speech today.

This debate follows a similar one in March this year, which I initiated. I started that debate by saying:

“I want to outline what steps might be taken in the next Parliament to improve housing outcomes for everyone”.—[Official Report, 14/3/24; col. 2208.]


I then outlined a large number of policy changes and, in response to three of my suggestions, the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, then in opposition, said:

“He raised some important issues around downsizing incentives, incentivising to sell properties from the private rented sector and institutional finance, especially pension funds. That is something we definitely have to look at”.—[Official Report, 14/3/24; col. 2231.]


So I will briefly refer to those three initiatives and gently inquire about progress.

I begin with the last, as the need for institutional finance for rented accommodation has been underlined by the passage of the Renters’ Rights Bill. I support that Bill, as I did its predecessor, the Renters’ Reform Bill, but, as I said then, it must be accompanied by measures to increase supply. All the evidence is that private landlords are exiting the market—a process accelerated by the recent Budget. The number planning to sell is predicted to grow exponentially next year, with a massive 41% of private landlords planning to sell at least some rental properties and only 6% planning to buy.

This has an important impact on rents. Recent figures from Zoopla show that there are now 21 households bidding for every property to rent. Recent Budget decisions were branded as “disappointing” by Paul Johnson, the director of the IFS. Referring to stamp duty, he said that

“at least part of the consequence will be to reduce the supply of rental housing and so increase rents”.

We need to put the private rented market on a much more sustainable basis.

Other countries have a different model, which we should progressively adopt. In Europe, long-term institutional finance provides secure, well-managed rental accommodation. In this country, it provides just 2% of the rented stock. We need progressively to reduce our overdependence on the private landlord, who can release this capital only by selling, and get the financial institutions to invest in what historically would have been an even better investment than equities. At the meeting that the Minister was kind enough to hold with me last week, she explained that she was working on this with the Treasury, which also wants pension funds to invest more in the country’s infrastructure—so where better to start than housing? Local authority pension funds have an interest in increasing housing supply, in turn helping the Government to achieve their ambitious target of 1.5 million new homes. We need urgent progress on that front.

I turn next to downsizing initiatives. There are 3.6 million homes with two or more spare bedrooms. Many older people want to trade down or rightsize, freeing up their homes for young families. An older person triggers a chain of movements promoting labour mobility and making better use of the country’s housing stock. In the medium term, the planning system should be much more proactive in ensuring the right mix of new build, and we look forward to next week’s NPPF to see whether there is a step in that direction. Professor Mayhew estimated that we need 50,000 homes per year for older people who want to rightsize, but we are producing only 8,000.

Finally, on incentivising to sell properties from the private rented sector, many families have to rent but, as I have said, private landlords are leaving the market due to high interest rates, concerns about impending legislation, a less attractive tax regime and new energy efficiency standards. We should say to private landlords that, if they sell to their tenant, no capital gains tax and no stamp duty would be paid. This would be not a right to buy but an incentive to sell. This would have a dramatic effect on home ownership for those who would prefer to own and not rent; it would almost certainly lower their housing costs and enable them subsequently to move up the home ownership ladder. The landlord could realise their capital without having to give notice to the tenant. It would be a win-win policy that I would gladly allow the Government to adopt.

I look forward to hearing from the Minister about the progress on the three initiatives that she commended only a few months ago.

13:49

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I first remind the House that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, for this debate. I agree with her that we need a long-term strategy and that the scale of the problem is daunting. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, for his important suggestions around the private rented sector, in particular the potential impact of the increase in stamp duty on rent levels in the private sector.

There have been many reports on the housing crisis and how to address it from Shelter, Crisis, the National Housing Federation and the Affordable Housing Commission, which is chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Best, and was established by the Smith Institute with the support of the Nationwide Foundation. Of course, Homes for All, the Church of England report published earlier this year, rightly talked of our moral duty to ensure that all households have access to affordable, safe and quality homes—and I agree. It is appropriate that the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury has chosen this debate to make his valedictory speech.

All those reports have urged that a national housing strategy and affordable housing—that is, genuinely affordable housing—should be a national priority. Today’s homelessness figures give us a stark warning, with 123,000 households, including 159,000 children, in temporary accommodation. Council spending on temporary accommodation reached £2.29 billion last year, which the National Audit Office said is unsustainable. It is unsustainable, but we cannot solve homelessness without building many more social homes for rent.

We should always remember that secure, affordable homes are fundamental in addressing child poverty. We must build capacity in social housing for rent. I acknowledge the immediate help recently offered by the Government for up to 5,000 new social and affordable homes. I also acknowledge the need to protect new-build social homes. The fact is that around 11,000 council or housing association homes are being built every year but, last year, 23,000 such homes were sold off on knock-down. We must stem the loss of homes for social rent. Indeed, some 2 million homes have been sold under right to buy, of which some 40% are now in the private rented sector, with higher rents in that sector pushing up the housing benefit bill.

I applaud the scale of the Government’s ambition. They have promised the biggest increase in affordable housing in a generation. I welcome this and hope that it proves true. The Government promise 1.5 million more homes by 2029, but we should bear in mind that the chief executive of Homes England said in a recent message to staff that this would need “two parliamentary terms”, while the Centre for Cities has said that the Government will undershoot by 388,000. In any case, a target is not an outcome. Outcomes need plans, and plans need to be published and debated outside of the spending review.

There is a big problem: since 2015, 1 million homes in England and Wales—that is one in three—have had planning permission but not been built. Also, 70,000 housing association and council dwellings currently stand empty—a figure that has been rising. So, as an urgent priority, might the Government address solutions to these two immediate problems?

We should also remember that government spending on housing is at its highest ever level, in real terms. Fifty years ago, 95% went into building and improving homes; today, it seems that almost 90% is going into housing benefit, on which the Government are now projected to spend £35 billion a year by 2028. This is clearly unsustainable.

On the numbers, lots of ambitious targets have been set by a wide variety of bodies. It appears as though the Secretary of State may be thinking of a number lower than some of those reported by, for example, the National Housing Federation. That, I suggest, is a consequence of their understanding of the significant structural problems with delivering large numbers in the short term. We need to build capacity in councils and housing associations. We need a bigger construction workforce and more planning officers. It is not just the planning system but its resourcing. We should bear in mind that more planners can be self-financing.

I welcome the Government’s sense of direction but, with 1.2 million households on local authority waiting lists, solutions have become urgent. Let the Government concentrate on putting in place the foundations we need to address this housing crisis of high demand and inadequate supply. One of those foundations could be that local authorities should be able to buy land at current use value rather than hope value. But the test of success will be that homes become genuinely affordable to those on medium and low incomes.

13:55

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, for introducing this debate so brilliantly. I am also looking forward to hearing from the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has been a consistent champion on behalf of the homeless and the badly housed.

There is likely to be almost universal agreement in this debate on the need for a huge increase in genuinely affordable, secure accommodation. I am only the fourth speaker, but I find that I will be repeating what has already been said. Perhaps that shows a unanimity of view on the urgency of the situation.

We have heard the figures for homelessness and temporary accommodation; I give special thanks to Crisis for its comprehensive briefing. We know of the impossibly long waiting lists for social rented housing. The Government want the housing associations and councils to build far more new homes, but there is an urgent need for investment in the existing social housing stock. The Grenfell tragedy has highlighted the necessity to spend billions on remediating unsafe buildings. We now have the Social Housing (Regulation) Act, with Awaab’s law, which requires cold and mouldy properties to be treated quickly. It is backed up by an enlarged role for the Housing Ombudsman, so the social housing sector has turned its attention to the need to address its backlog of maintenance and major repairs.

Meanwhile, we see the impact of inflation on building costs, land costs and interest rates. All this means that we are unlikely to build nearly enough new homes to meet the pressing demands. A quick calculation of the proportion of the 1.5 million homes the Government hope to see built during this Parliament suggests that less than 10% of those new homes will be affordable for those on average incomes or below.

So what can be done to dramatically and rapidly increase output of social rented accommodation, at a time when public funds are so scarce? I will suggest three potential ways forward. There has been no pre-discussion of this, but I find that space for two of my three has already been taken by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham. I will expound my three.

First, it seems quite possible that the huge expense of the land for development may, in future, be reduced where the uplift in value can be captured for the public good; if necessary, backed by compulsory purchase powers. Where land is bought by local authority arm’s-length development corporations—not least those established for the new generation of new towns and urban extensions—a comprehensive master plan can parcel out sites to a range of private and social developers, achieving quality place-making as well as higher levels of social renting.

Secondly, we have failed nationally to recognise the opportunities as well as the obligations from demographic change. By building specifically for older people, as noted in last week’s Older People’s Housing Taskforce report, significant financial benefits can be achieved. On the one hand, more suitable accommodation for older people pays its way in postponing or preventing hospital admissions, delayed hospital discharges, home-care costs and moves into residential care; on the other hand, each new home for an older person is likely to achieve two for one by releasing a family home for the next generation. This secures the precious asset of a social rented family home at no cost, while better serving the needs of an older person.

Thirdly, a shortcut is needed to secure accommodation for those forced to accept highly unsatisfactory temporary accommodation, and to address the crippling costs of this temporary accommodation for local authorities. An answer lies in channelling funds to the acquisition and modernisation of the private rented properties where landlords want to exit the market, not least under new pressure from the Renters’ Rights Bill coming down the track. The Government could incentivise the outgoing landlords to sell to a social landlord through exemption of capital gains tax. Stamp duty does not work so well because it is paid by the purchaser, and the social landlords will not be paying stamp duty, but capital gains tax presents a real opportunity. This approach, as advocated by the Affordable Housing Commission, represents “Back to the Future” for housing associations, whose main output in the 1960s and 1970s was in buying and improving street properties. It means investing in property rather than paying private landlords exorbitant rents for low-quality, short-term use: bricks, not benefits.

I hope the Minister can comment on these three ways of getting a bigger bang for the public buck: capturing land value; addressing unsuitable, underoccupied housing for older people; and, once again, purchasing and upgrading unsatisfactory private rented housing. Now I am honoured to hand over to the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, and I pay tribute to the leadership and inspiration he has demonstrated in relation to the housing crisis.

14:01

[The Archbishop of Canterbury (Valedictory Speech)]

My Lords, it is often said and it is a cliché to say it—but hey, I am the Archbishop still—that if you want to make God laugh, make plans. On that basis, next year, I will be causing God more hilarity than anyone else for many years, because the plans for next year were very detailed and extensive. If you pity anyone, pity my poor diary secretary, who has seen weeks and months of work disappear in a puff of a resignation announcement.

The reality, which I wish to start with—then pay some thanks, and then talk about housing—is that there comes a time, if you are technically leading a particular institution or area of responsibility when the shame of what has gone wrong, whether one is personally responsible or not, must require a head to roll. There is only, in this case, one head that rolls well enough. I hope not literally: one of my predecessors in 1381, Simon of Sudbury, had his head cut off and the revolting peasants at the time then played football with it at the Tower of London. I do not know who won, but it certainly was not Simon of Sudbury.

The reality is that the safeguarding and care of children and vulnerable adults in the Church of England today is, thanks to tens of thousands of people across the Church, particularly in parishes, by parish safeguarding officers, a completely different picture from the past. However, when I look back at the last 50 or 60 years, not only through the eyes of the Makin report, however one takes one’s view of personal responsibility, it is clear that I had to stand down, and it is for that reason that I do so.

Next, I want to say thank you to so many people in the House. In these 12 years, I cannot think of a single moment when I have come in here and the hair on the back of my neck has not stood up at the privilege of being allowed to sit on these Benches. It has been an extraordinary period, and I have listened to so many debates of great wisdom, so many amendments to Bills that have improved them, so much hard work.

I have also found that, despite the fact that I still cannot find my way round this building, the staff here are endlessly patient as I look panic-struck when I suddenly find I am standing on a green carpet, not a red one, and have guided me to the right place. I am hugely grateful, and I am very grateful to noble Lords who have been kind enough to send supportive and encouraging notes over the last few weeks. It has been a great privilege and strength to have that.

Housing, as has been said, is one of the key areas of life in any society. When I look back historically—I will not develop the whole history—whenever this nation has taken a huge step forward since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, three things have played a part: housing, education and health. Where they have changed, they have laid a new basis for a healthy society, not just physically but in every way, and I believe that is what we are called to do now.

There has been much reference to the two reports that the Church of England has issued, and I am in the same place, as much of what I was going to say has been said. So, I will not say it again and will say something slightly different—but very briefly. The Coming Home report that the noble Lord, Lord Young, referred to so kindly, sets out five words beginning with “s” which it decided to recommend as the moral centre of good housing. They are: that housing should be safe, and we have heard and know about the need for that through Grenfell, mould, and the need to improve the safety of housing; that housing should be secure, so that people know they can bring up families; that housing should be stable, as people should not constantly be forced to move without choice—it is utterly disruptive; and that housing should be sustainable and zero carbon. We cannot afford to build tens of thousands of houses which increase the problems of climate change.

But I want to add two things. First of all, housing must be affordable, particularly social housing. Social housing is one of the areas which is very inelastic in terms of supply and demand. We need clear criteria for what “affordable” means. One of them should not be in proportion to the average cost in the area, which is the present test: 80% of average cost. I can assure noble Lords that, as we come to the end of our time where we are living at the moment and start looking for a house to buy, 80% of average market cost puts us a very long way away from where we would like to be—and that serves us right, in some ways. Affordable housing needs to be related to income, not to average cost. It needs to be measured against real living wage in a particular area if it is going to be genuinely affordable.

Secondly, it is no use building houses unless you build communities. Housing without community sets us up perfectly for the social problems of the future, so, when we build houses, we have to create the open spaces. And I forgot one “s”, which is satisfying. It has to be a place where children can play, where families get to know each other and where—obviously, I would say this—there is a church, or at least a community centre that acts as a church, where people are brought together. Community facilities in most of our new developments are nugatory, nil, useless; we have to do better.

My last comment: the Church Commissioners for England hold about 5,000 to 6,000 acres of strategic land, out of the 100,000 acres of the Church Commissioners’ total landholdings and another 100,000 acres in the hands of dioceses, parishes, trusts and so on. I know that they are now working on plans for working with government and local authorities, using the mapping tool developed in the Coming Home report, to see the best places to get together with others and have economically helpful areas with good returns. Look at what the Duchy of Cornwall has done with that: you can look down a street and you cannot distinguish which is social housing and which is non-subsidised housing. That also is part of the way in which we treat people with respect.

I look forward to hearing from the Minister. I hope that the Government will undertake to work right across the sector of landholders, so there will be good mixed development that brings people together and sets us up for a better future—and that, as part of that, it is done in the deliberate building of communities before we talk about individual houses.

My Lords, I am hugely grateful to have been here. You remain in my prayers and in my deep affection and profound respect for the huge contribution made by this House to our nation, which it usually does not recognise. I am hugely grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, for allowing this debate to happen.

14:11

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a real privilege to have the opportunity to follow the most reverend Primate. We first met in Durham cathedral. It was a great civic occasion, where I was the appointed preacher and he was the recently arrived—merely, at that time—right reverend Prelate. I preached at him and he blessed me, and it has been like that ever since.

A month or two later, in May 2012, the most reverend Primate made his maiden speech in this House. On that occasion, he was still the Bishop of Durham and he toured the heights of his experience, drawing massively on his secular as well as his religious experiences. He has played a large part in the banking and financial sector themes that we have pursued in this House and in Parliament generally. Indeed, he is a towering figure in many other ways. After all, he officiated at the funeral of Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth and crowned the brand-new King and Queen in his turn.

He has been a great campaigner for women’s consecration to the episcopacy and to see that happen. We cannot divorce him from the achievement of that great step, which has greatly enriched this House. Another of his great themes is on investment that crosses between morality and ethics, on the one hand, and finance performance, on the other.

In a sense, I could pursue a tour d’horizon of the great themes that he has taken some part in, but it would not really get to where I want to be. In his maiden speech, as well as proclaiming the virtues and qualities of the north-east—we remember that Newcastle drew last evening with Manchester City; a very good thing—he also championed the issue of loan sharks and people with payday loans at extortionate rates of interest. They were gone within two or three years of him striking that note. From then until now—choosing to speak on housing and homelessness in his valedictory address—that for me is the theme that runs right through this particular Primate’s life and witness, like the word “Blackpool” through a stick of seaside rock.

Somewhere along the way, he has espoused the marginalised, the oppressed, the poor people of the land, and internationally too. He has travelled to every province of the Anglican Communion. We can only honour him for his stamina as far as that is concerned; stamina to get there, but holding it together is an entirely different challenge. Somewhere on that parabola he quoted a line from Nelson Mandela which is the hallmark for his particular ministry—that overcoming poverty is a matter of justice, not charity. That is a pretty high bar to set. I honour him for his work.

I am reading an enlightening book, which I am enjoying, that traces the history of John Milton’s Paradise Lost through its various iterations and its usefulness around the world. It is truly insightful, but it is called What in Me is Dark. There is not a Member of this House, not one noble Lord or Baroness, who has not had to face the dark at some stage in their lives. We can only feel with the most reverend Primate as he gazes into his, none of us feeling superior as we do so. However, it is a good thing to follow to the end John Milton’s quotation,

“What in me is dark

Illumine, what is low raise and support;

That to the highth of this great Argument

I may assert th’ Eternal Providence,

And justifie the wayes of God to men”.

That is nobler than the cut-off title of the book that I am reading at the moment.

One last word, if I may, as I have some indulgence on these occasions—it is very dangerous to give such an indulgence to a Welshman, but I will do my best. It allows me to give vent to a long-nurtured secret desire of mine to quote some Latin, as an alumnus of Llanelli Boys Grammar School, to an old Etonian. It is from the Aeneid. In Carthage, Aeneas is looking at a mural of Juno at the fall of Troy and all his friends who died there. He weeps to see them fallen:

“sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangent”—

there are tears at the heart of things and the mind is affected by ideas of our mortality.

There are tears at the heart of things. I would guess that the most reverend Primate knows that as well as anybody. However, they can be tears of joy. We must hope that the future that he will enjoy with Caroline and the family will be full of joy, that joy will invade the darkness and dispel it, so that the man whom we know will have a chance to be himself again, breathe his own air and stand in his own dignity. Justin, I am going to miss you, and I think we are going to miss your family too. God bless you.

[Noble Lords]

Hear, hear!

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

And so to the business of the day.

I start with the most reverend Primate again. He says somewhere that his beginning—the opening chapter of his life—was messy, and I can say that mine was messy, too. For him, he was three; for me, I was five and a half when everything broke down and darkness descended upon us. I still have the letter from my father’s solicitor to my mother, indicating that she was to take her two boys out of his client’s home within a week—so, my mother, with two little boys, was on the street. For days we were on the street, and a kind neighbour in the little two-up, two-down houses would put us up, but the pressure on their space was great. In the end, my grandparents, who had two rooms as caretakers in a factory, decided they could live in one room so that we could live in the other. I grew up in one room in a brickyard. That was at five or six.

What can I say about homelessness? I have decided I want to say a word about the homeless—let others talk about construction, targets and all of that. What can I remember? I will tell you what I remember. I remember my mother’s face, tear-struck. I remember her despair. I smelled her panic. Before the welfare state, how was she going to put food on the table? How could she cope with life and its demands? How would her boys have a chance to wear shoes and underwear? I remember homelessness, and I have refused to call it homelessness ever since; I call it the plight of homeless people, in order to remind ourselves that homelessness is about people, their needs must be paramount, and we must find ways of forging policies that hold them and their well-being in mind.

Fast forward 40 years and I have inherited a programme of social work that was begun by Donald Soper, of beloved memory. One of his institutions was a homelessness centre, open 365 days in the year, a brilliant piece of work. The work I did in those few years enabled me to become friends to homeless people. One of them, called Tom, would take me around with him. He spoke Hungarian. He had a PhD. His life had fallen apart. He had resorted to alcohol. All of them have stories. Tom took me to where the IMAX cinema is now, on the Waterloo roundabout—I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Bird, knows what I am talking about—where the homeless would gather, often with a fire. They would send scouts from among their own community to the railway stations to see if any children were running away from home and before predators got hold of them. There was an advice centre in the Royal Festival Hall that helped people who were newly homeless to cope.

One night—just one—I spent a night in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Tom told me how to wrap my legs and my lower body in newspaper. He told me where to find the best cardboard, outside McDonald’s: there was not so much grease in it, and therefore the rodents would not bother me in the night. In the middle of the night, we were woken up by a soup kitchen that wanted to feed us with sustainable food. I have to say that, when the rain started at 3 am, I was a coward and went home, but I have never forgotten the comradeship of the people in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the jokes and the banter.

Homelessness is about people. This debate is about finding ways to solve the needs of people. If we do not do that, then all the statistics, trends, budgets and hopes are for nothing. I am so glad that I am being followed by the noble Lord, Lord Bird, who is a more authentic voice than I on these matters.

14:24

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I thank the noble Lord very much for that wonderful introduction. My family are Irish, and I think they are even more verbose than the Welsh, but we will not have an argument over that.

I should explain why I am not going to bamboozle your Lordships with loads of statistics and why I can probably make very little contribution to what we have been talking about. Ten years after I started the Big Issue, I was asked by the Times what I was going to do for the next 10 or 20 years. I said, “For the last 10 years I’ve been mending broken clocks, and for the next 10 or 20 years I’m going to try to prevent the clocks breaking”.

In 1991 when we started the Big Issue, 501 homeless organisations were with us. They supplied every conceivable thing for a homeless person, from a condom—not a girlfriend, a condom—all the way through to a place where you could clean yourself, sleep and all that. But not one of those organisations ever asked the question that I wanted to ask: when is somebody going to turn the tap off?

Why do we often see homeless people as homeless? I have never met a homeless person whose problem was homelessness. I met someone who, like a social iceberg, had homelessness just above the water where you could see it, but underneath I could see all sorts of things—abuse, social isolation, mental health problems. I saw 90% of the people I have worked with, who I come from, inheriting poverty.

I was with Prince Charles once, as he then was, at a meeting in our building. He said that anybody could fall homeless. I thought to myself, “That’s not quite right”; I could not imagine him homeless. He was trying to create the idea, as so many people do, that anybody can fall homeless. The noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, mentioned a PhD student who could read Hungarian. Brilliant—I could bring you dozens of them, but I could bring you thousands upon thousands of people who have inherited poverty. Because those people inherited poverty, there is a predictability of failure that none of us has ever really addressed.

We tried to address it 75 years ago when we created the welfare state. We tried to address the fact that there were people who were unwell, ill educated, doing jobs that destroyed their bodies and caught in poverty. But did we ever really put the effort, the energy, the drive and the wonderfulness of our intellectual ability into saying, “Why is there no science for breaking people from poverty or a government department especially looking to prevent poverty”, so that we do not have a situation where the only inheritance people get is that they are poor? I believe we live in an age of dunces. Unfortunately, the dunces are the people making the decisions.

I am astonished that poverty costs us so much. I reckon that, of every £1 paid by the taxpayer, about 40p goes into poverty. We, in a sense, leave poverty. The Conservatives are great believers in leaving poverty to work itself out because there are so many examples of people two or three generations away from the coalface, or even one generation, so they think poverty should just be sorted out by leaving the system. Then Labour believed in inventing a methodology that created social housing but did not answer the problem. Only 2% of people whose children are brought up in social housing ever get out of poverty. Only 2% ever get to university or even finish their A-levels. In my opinion, we have these big contradictions. Until this House and that House embrace the idea of finding a way of turning the tap off, we will just have a lack of social housing as a forerunner for getting out of poverty.

14:31

[Lord Hollick (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Warwick on initiating this debate and making such a powerful speech, ranging across the complex issues that we have heard about. The noble Lord, Lord Bird, reminded me of the terrible situation that homeless families are in and how difficult it is to recover from that. I also thank the most reverend Primate for his powerful speech. His words will be much missed in this House.

I turn to a rather more prosaic matter, which is the supply of housing. We have failed over the past 15 years to build enough houses. In fact, as the statistics explained earlier show, it goes back many decades. The Government’s commitment to build 1.5 million houses over the next five years has been widely welcomed, but is it achievable? Within that commitment, can the downward trend in homes available for social rent be reversed to help the less well-off and the homeless? In 2016, the Economic Affairs Committee of this House’s report Building More Homes proposed that 300,000 homes be built each year, with the majority being available for social housing. It was a cross-party committee including the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, and others. It also recommended that a combination of local authorities, housing associations and private developers should finance and develop those houses.

The report highlighted the challenges in achieving that target. The first was the need for significant improvement in the planning resources of local authorities, which had become seriously depleted. The second barrier was the marked reduction in capacity of the housebuilding industry over the previous five years. Large firms continued to thrive, but medium-sized and smaller firms were much thinner on the ground, reduced by retirement, financing problems and a reduction in the supply of skilled labour. In the seven years since that report, housebuilding fell well short of that 300,000 target and, although the data is patchy, the numbers of new homes built for social rent show that there has been a marked downward trend. In 2022-23, only 700 new social rent homes were built. Private providers added around 5,200, which was offset by the loss of 4,500 to the right-to-buy scheme. During those seven years, planning resources have continued to shrivel, and finance, particularly for SME builders, has become much less available.

The Financial Services Regulation Committee recently heard that the risk weighting on capital imposed by regulators on lenders wishing to provide to SME housebuilders is far higher than that required for mortgage lending. Unsurprisingly, the provision of mortgage finance has grown apace, benefiting from strong competition, but 60% of the supply for SME housebuilders now has to be found from private resources. That is clear evidence of market failure; the banks are unable to provide it. The supply of skilled labour has reduced, with a failure to boost training and the return of many eastern European tradespeople to their homelands.

In her recent Mansion House speech, the Chancellor made it clear that she wanted to see regulators adopting a more pro-growth culture. If that call is to be heeded, it would enable us to reduce the risk weighting for those smaller SME builders, which obviously would increase the supply of affordable finance and housing.

Planning departments remain seriously underresourced and are unable to progress applications of all kinds in a timely way. The Government recently set up a new expert delivery group to accelerate the building of homes stuck in the planning system. The expert group should consider setting up regional task forces, comprising experienced planners to support local planning authorities to expedite planning approvals. Housebuilders and developers would, I feel sure, provide funding and help to find professionals to support these task forces.

A key responsibility in strengthening the planning system will be to achieve a significant increase in the supply of homes available at social rents. Planning departments must be firm in their resolve to use their powers to ensure that planning consents for home developments include the highest possible number of homes for social rent. This will be helped by the Chancellor’s announcement of £500 million in new funding for the affordable homes programme, increasing it to over £3.1 billion. This Government’s actions to date and their decision to set up mandatory local housing targets and introduce reforms to right to buy to protect the social housing stock, taken together, give confidence that the ambitious target may be realistic and achievable.

14:37

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, for securing this debate, which has been so well attended by noble Lords.

When we talk about housing policy, what is really noticeable is that the Government’s focus is on supply. For the Green Party, the focus is on what kind of homes the homeless need and how they will get them. We can all agree that fixing the current crisis of homelessness is a crucial priority for our society. It not just the people we see right here on our doorstep, on the streets of Westminster and in the Tube stations, sleeping increasingly uncomfortably and at danger to themselves, as winter draws in. There are also—and what damage is this doing?—the families in temporary accommodation. For England, the numbers are at the highest level since records began 22 years ago, with a 15% increase in the year to June. There are also the young—and not so young—people forced to rent a room in overcrowded shared housing. They are inadequately housed, with no realistic hope of future improvement, as reluctantly tolerated couch-surfers or in homes with several households squeezed in to them.

Yet when we hear the Government talk about housing, the focus is always on housebuilding. The milestone that Sir Keir Starmer set out with much fanfare this morning was “building 1.5 million homes”. The talk was about foisting homes on unwilling communities, with planning “reform”, despite the fact that a third of homes receiving planning consent are not being built. That means that more than a million approvals handed out since 2015 have not resulted in homes. Had all those homes which were granted planning permission been built, the previous Government would have hit the target of 300,000 new homes a year in eight out of the past 10 years.

So why are these homes not being built? They are mostly large-scale schemes of a handful of mass-market developers, whose entire aim and whose legal responsibility to their directors is to maximise profit. Their responsibility is not to build homes. What generally makes the most profit? It is so-called executive homes, often free-standing and wasteful of the scarce resource of land, built to poor energy-efficiency standards on greenfield sites without public transport provision, and feeding into already congested roads. What will those do for the homeless people on our streets, for the families crowded horribly into B&Bs without housing facilities, and for young people who have moved back home with the family, for want of a rental deposit?

The Government are applying the theory that suitable housing will eventually trickle down to those who need a decent, secure and affordable place to live. But, just as trickle-down economics has been a total failure, so has trickle-down housing policy. We need to build, or repurpose and refurbish, genuinely affordable and high-quality homes close to transport and other facilities, that meet the needs of people rather than focus on the profit for the market.

Of course, relying on an underregulated and non-competitive monopoly in the private sector to supply housing has not resulted just in a failure of housing numbers. The Grenfell tragedy exposed, in a huge disaster, the deadly failure of quality and safety. The campaign group End Our Cladding Scandal estimates that 600,000 people in Britain still live in homes at a heightened risk of a fatal fire, and 3 million own homes that they cannot sell, for fire safety reasons. Since Grenfell, more than 15,000 people have been forced to move out of their homes indefinitely.

What is the story behind that? I go to an account from James Meek in the London Review of Books of the now infamous Skyline Chambers in Manchester. The building was completed in 2007 by a company called Space Developments UK, which was bought by the multinational Ireland-based housebuilder McInerney. When it went down in the financial crash, Skyline was picked up from the creditors by Wallace, a company owned by an Italian investor sometimes styled “Count di Vighignolo” in official documents. It is a Cambridge-based network of companies owned by a Gibraltar-registered company, Perseverance Ltd, which in turn is owned by the Guernsey-registered Hauteville Trustees. That is what is supposed to supply housing.

What do we need to do to tackle homelessness to reshape our housing policy and our society, so that they work for people and the planet, rather than human needs and planetary essentials being ground down by the demand for profit? We need to shift our understanding to housing primarily as homes—affordable, secure and quality places for people to live—rather than simply as financial assets. We need to tackle the financialisation of our housing supply, just as we need to tackle the financialisation of our public services and our whole economy.

The Government are starting to demonstrate, just a little, that they realise that these old 20th-century economic models are not working. In Sir Keir’s speech this morning, we saw something of a shift, as previewed by Politico’s London Playbook, starting to realise that just talking about growth provokes the question: who is it for and who benefits from it? The same question must be asked about our housing supply.

14:43

[Baroness Winterton of Doncaster (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Warwick of Undercliffe on securing this debate and on her powerful opening speech. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, and to have been here for the valedictory speech of the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, with his brilliant description of why housing is so important to society. It was also a pleasure to hear the tribute from the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port. I am a newbie to this House, but, having heard the most reverend Primate’s speech, I can absolutely see how much his contributions will be missed.

I will focus on the plight of young people facing homelessness or struggling to get on the housing ladder and, in doing so, I pay tribute to the work of the organisation Doncaster Housing for Young People. I was patron of the organisation when I was an MP and saw at first hand many of the challenges faced by young people in Doncaster, which were exacerbated by cuts to local authority budgets and a shameful lack of social housing, not just in Doncaster but nationwide. That is why I particularly welcome this Government’s strong focus on a cross-government homelessness strategy and commitment to build 1.5 million homes in England, which was reiterated by the Prime Minister this morning, with a focus on building new social homes for rent and protecting existing social housing, driven through by the Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner.

A cross-government approach is so important because the experience of people such as Stuart Shore and Michéle Beck from Doncaster Housing for Young People is that so many problems for young people start if they grow up in poverty and have little family support around them. Growing up in poverty, as the noble Lord, Lord Bird, said, does not necessarily mean that people will inevitably become homeless, but virtually all the young people who Doncaster Housing for Young People supports come from disadvantaged backgrounds. That is why the Sure Start programme of the last Labour Government was so valuable and why the emphasis on pre-school support to families under this Government is going to be so important, bringing in with it the Department for Education.

Doing poorly at school and lacking skills has long-term consequences. It reduces employment prospects, which inevitably leads to difficulties in getting affordable and stable accommodation. Access to breakfast clubs, mental health support, mentoring support to equip young people —as the Government have promised through the Departments for Education, Health and Business, through the newly created Skills England agency—are absolutely crucial. The DWP goal of “earning or learning” might seem a tough message but is, in my view, essential.

As we follow the journey of a young person, we then come to the world of work. Too many young people are employed in low-paid jobs, often part-time, on zero-hour contracts with fluctuating incomes, which leads to them facing huge challenges not only in gaining tenancies but in maintaining them. The problems they face with instability of this sort are compounded when it comes to accessing universal credit, for example, which leads to further insecurity. That is why I welcome the changes to zero-hour contracts and increasing job security, as these will be vital to giving young people security at work and helping them get into rented accommodation or on to the housing ladder.

For many young people, navigating systems such as the jobcentre can be particularly daunting due to the reliance on online platforms. A young person who loses access to the internet can lose access to their universal credit portal, leading to sanctions, delayed payments and mounting rent arrears. That is where I think an enhanced role for jobcentres, as proposed by Secretary of State Liz Kendall, is absolutely right. There has been some very good work done in Doncaster to give wraparound support to young people, tailored to their individual needs. Again, that is incredibly important, so, if that role of jobcentres can be expanded, it would be very welcome.

We have to recognise that single individuals under 35 face significant housing challenges with the capping of the housing benefit for under-35s. I know that this is a matter for the Treasury, but I hope the Minister will consider this in developing the homelessness strategy. My noble friend Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, in his tribute, gave some erudite quotations. My quotation is from a musical that I think might well have been written by some Member of your Lordships’ House:

“All I want is a room somewhere


Far away from the cold night air”.

I fear that, for too many young people at the moment, this is out of their reach. But I firmly believe that, if the Government work across departments, they can, and should, make a difference that will benefit not just young people but all of society.

14:50

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests in the register and my membership of the previous Government’s London housing task force and the Older People’s Housing Taskforce. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, for securing this very important debate on the genuine housing crisis that we face. I also thank the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury for the great work he has done in this area. I really appreciated his speech.

There have been many statistics, and normally I throw out lots of statistics, but I am going to try to curtail that today. Homelessness is a genuine scourge for this country. For most people, that is perceived as rough sleeping, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Bird, mentioned, is a very complex issue. But I want to deal with the rest of the iceberg that people do not see—the temporary accommodation, the sofa surfing, the overcrowding and the cost to families and their budgets, limiting their ability to pay for their energy bills and food bills and support their children. This is a genuine housing crisis and it is simple: we are not building enough houses in this country.

I shall compare us to, say, France. Between 1983 and 2021, the UK built 7.3 million homes. France built 13.5 million homes. It is no surprise then that the real increase in house prices in the UK since 1970 has been 400%, whereas in France it has been 170%, and elsewhere in Europe prices are now substantially lower. Build more houses and houses will cost less. It is relatively simple. This is exacerbated in the UK by our very uneven demand. Demand is very much focused on the south, particularly in London. London is the issue I want to focus on. It is where we have the biggest housing crisis, with 300,000 people on the housing waiting list, 70,000 children living in temporary accommodation, local authorities spending more than £1 billion a year on temporary accommodation and rents representing more than 50% of average gross earnings. House prices are approaching £20,000 per square metre in central London. In my authority or the authority of the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor—Stevenage—the figure is more in the region of £3,000. That has a massive impact on availability. The ripple effect of London is impacting homelessness and the cost of housing outside.

London is not doing well on delivering houses. It is down at 32,000 in the last 12 months, 30% below the figure of a few years earlier. The rest of the country is also down, but only by around 10%. The risk is that, this year, London will deliver even fewer houses. The London Plan suggests that we should build 52,000 homes. The latest government figures suggest it should be 80,000. The previous Government suggested 100,000. Whatever the figure, it is genuinely far more homes than are being delivered today. And it is not because of a lack of opportunity. The GLA identifies that there are sites for more than 1 million homes in London. Anecdotally, this could be increased significantly through regeneration of housing association and council housing estates, densification and the use of industrial land. It is not unreasonable to suggest that we could build 2 million homes in London.

Why is this not happening? As I speak to developers, they constantly tell me that it has got harder and harder to build in London. There is more and more regulation, more and more legislation, more and more consents: it is just too difficult and the planning system is incoherent. Many housebuilders are no longer prepared to build in London unless they have the full co-operation of a local council.

The London Plan is one example of this, and while there are many admirable aims in that local plan, its 133 clauses were described to me by one developer as “133 reasons not to build”. There is not one clause in the London Plan that actually makes it easier, faster or quicker to build a home.

That is why, when I was on the taskforce, we recommended that there should be a strong presumption in favour of granting planning permission on brownfield land where the local authority in question is not meeting its housing targets. This was adopted by the previous Government. Will the Minister also commit her Government to this?

14:55

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, for securing this important debate. I declare my interests as president of the Rural Coalition and vice-president of the LGA. I offer my thanks to the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury for his valedictory speech. During his tenure, he has been a champion of housing, and we have already referred to the Coming Home report, which is pertinent both to today’s debate and to His Majesty’s Government, with their very good and ambitious targets to build more housing. I hope we can assist the Government in achieving that.

Homelessness and rough sleeping are on the rise. Government statutory homelessness figures, released last week, reveal that 159,380 children are now homeless and living in temporary accommodation, a 15% increase in a year and the highest figure since records began in 2004. More particularly, the November 2023 CPRE report on the state of rural housing showed that rural homelessness has increased by 20% since 2021 and 40% since 2018-19.

There are a number of particular challenges around the housing crisis in rural areas which are often overlooked in national policy, and that is where I want to focus my remarks. There is an acute shortage of affordable housing, particularly in smaller rural communities. Only 9% of the housing stock in parishes with a population of under 300 is social housing, compared with 17% of the housing stock in urban areas. Between 2019 and 2022, rural local authority affordable housing waiting lists were up by 31%, compared with an increase of 3% in urban areas. There are still not enough affordable housing developments being delivered on rural exception sites. Very few affordable houses are being provided in settlements with a population of under 3,000. The impact on rural communities is immense and often overlooked.

I turn to the difficulties in planning policy that are holding back the development of rural affordable housing. In 66% of smaller rural communities, the National Planning Policy Framework prevents local authorities taking an affordable housing contribution from small sites. Will His Majesty’s Government respond favourably to the calls from many rural organisations to allow local planning authorities to seek affordable housing contributions from sites of fewer than 10 dwellings in communities with a population of 3,000 or fewer?

There is also the untapped potential of rural exception sites. The rural exception site policy, as it stands, is poorly implemented. There is a lack of consistency in its application and a number of risks and costs associated with its development. Between 2021 and 2022, only 17% of local planning authorities used the rural exception site policy. In 2023-24, 56% of rural exception site completions were in only two local authorities. There is a really great opportunity here, and we need to work out how we can develop it. Can the Minister say whether the Government will introduce a national development management policy for rural exception sites, as well as a bespoke planning passport, so we can speed up delivery?

Defra’s evaluation of the Rural Housing Enablers programme has allowed people to return to their communities, maintain support networks, provide care and support for the elderly and vulnerable, and help with childcare. RHE programmes have been supporting community engagement on housing developments, funded by Defra, for the past two years at a cost of just over £2 million annually. This was a great initiative by the previous Government, and I commend them for the work that was done. Such work has led to an increase in schemes in the pipeline, with the potential to deliver over 2,000 new affordable homes, but this is in jeopardy as the funding is due to end in March 2025. Can the Minister update us on whether there are any plans to renew that funding?

I have just one more request of the Minister. Developing rural affordable housing involves a number of challenges specific to the rural context. Will she therefore commit to ensuring that the housing strategy contains a positive rural element—rural proofing—so that we can include delivering more affordable rural housing in order to increase the level of sustainability in the countryside?

15:00

[Baroness Grender (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, on leading us in this debate. It is an absolute honour to speak along with so many noble Lords who have dedicated their lives to this issue. In a way, my disappointment is that we are still here making the same case. For me, it is reminiscent of when I first started working at the charity Shelter in the 1990s. Our aim, and that of all who had tirelessly campaigned in this area before us, was simple: to create the circumstances in which we were no longer needed.

So it is with a slightly heavy heart that I see this noble group of housing warriors getting the band back together again. In the past, we have been tantalisingly close to making some forms of homelessness a distant memory—once under the stewardship of the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, and once during Covid. Of course, both times the Government of the day had the not-so-secret weapon of the noble Baroness, Lady Casey of Blackstock. Both these experiences, though, tell us that solving this is possible, so we have to believe that the aim—to end homelessness—can be achieved.

As many noble Lords have said, the current situation could not be more shocking for a G7 nation. Right now, today, each night, just under 160,000 children go to bed in often appalling circumstances in temporary accommodation. Again, this was brought down before, so we know it can be done, and at relative speed.

Select Committees at both ends of this building have been clear and have reported again and again that one of the primary causes of homelessness is the severe shortage of social homes for rent. Social homes for rent are the absolute, healthy bedrock of our mixed-tenure system. The rest of the system cannot exist without them, as was explained so eloquently by my noble friend Lord Shipley. That is why we put in our Liberal Democrat manifesto a target to build 150,000 social homes a year for rent, some delivered through garden cities but above all, through thousands of small-scale community-led developments.

Like others, we worry that setting a target and imposing it without engaging communities and bringing them with you will mean that these laudable aims to build will inevitably fall short. In councils that we run, such as Eastleigh, Cambridge and Portsmouth, we have shown that it is possible to work with communities to deliver, at scale, social housing for rent. In Kingston last year we celebrated the first council flats being built in over 30 years. That is the case across the country—council flats being just a badly remembered thing of the past. That was overseen by the council’s housing lead, Councillor Emily Davey, working with the community and delivering sustainable housing—and not a retrofit needed in sight.

Housing associations have expressed their concern about reaching the Government’s new target. Peabody, for instance, has welcomed the extra £500 million for the current affordable homes programme in the Budget but makes clear that this will not allow the sector to deliver large-scale new homes at the pace required. Last year, Peabody alone spent £500 million on new homes. That gives a little perspective on the current allocation.

When it comes to homelessness, the policy platform we fought on at the last general election was to set and agree long-term measures that cross-cut Whitehall, and we welcome that initiative now. We want to include exempting homeless people from the shared accommodation rate, which makes housing unaffordable for many. We also want to see local authorities given proper funding so that they are better able to deliver the Homelessness Reduction Act. We would introduce a new “somewhere safe to stay” legal duty, which would give people emergency accommodation with an assessment of their needs.

So many of the briefings we received for this debate have identified the lack of social housing stock as the critical problem. Right to buy has played its part in the diminution of stock. That is why the Liberal Democrats would give local authorities the power to end right to buy in their area based on their local need and their local knowledge.

Above all, we called for, welcome and look forward to the ban on forced evictions under Section 21, which all research suggests is a major underlying cause of homelessness today. The woeful snail’s pace of delivery of this change in the law, first promised in 2019, has left in its wake countless individual stories of eviction and homelessness. Crisis estimates that there have been as many as 110,000 evictions since that promise was made.

As well as long-term and lasting solutions, there are some quick fixes that organisations such as Crisis have suggested. I particularly ask the Minister to respond to some of the proposals that have come forward to bring empty homes back into use and to take a look at the Welsh Government’s experience of having delivered that using enforcement officers.

I again congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, on securing this debate. I am very hopeful that when we next meet, progress will have been made.

15:07

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, for calling this important debate. There is a crisis, and we need a national discussion.

I will speak about land for housing. In March 2016, in a debate on the Housing and Planning Bill, I set out the case for the purchase of land at agricultural prices for housing development. When we want to build public infrastructure, we can use powers under the Land Compensation Acts. Compulsory purchase orders are issued and signed off by the Secretary of State. Land is acquired at market rates plus uplift to cover an occupant’s losses and possible land replacement. Added to that is an allowance for fees and taxes, disturbance costs and adjacent development effect losses. These costs are marginal compared with the CPO land costs—the CPO justification being set out in the legislation where a CPO is justified only if it promotes the

“improvement of the economic well-being of their area”

and the

“improvement of the social well-being of their area”.

Denning went on to opine that:

“Parliament only grants it, or should only grant it, when it is necessary in the public interest”.

The truth is that in the public interest we need more land for development at the right price for the millions in need. The latest Valuation Office Agency estimates the average arable land in 2023 at £11,000 an acre. The same land with permission can fetch anything between £300,000 and £1 million an acre, and much more in the Home Counties. But there is another way. Why not look at developments in Nijmegen in Holland, where 11,000 houses are being built on agricultural priced land? Similar developments are happening in Hammarby in Sweden? Why not do the same here in the United Kingdom?

I fully recognise the implications for existing house prices. The answer is: sell under a new title, such as crownhold or covenanted freehold. Under such arrangements, the local authority identifies land for housing, purchases the land under my described formula, designates the land for housing and enters into a joint venture with the developer. Post development, the joint venture sells the housing under the new title. The housing is subject to a form of ground rent—10-year renewable, perhaps—payable to the original land vendor. However, the home owner is free to buy the freehold under a simplified enfranchisement arrangement. Equally, the home owner is free to sell their title, whether it be the acquired or the enfranchised title.

Of course, depending on the scale of implementation, there are implications for wider house prices. House price deflation in an area could be detailed against a background of the distinction entitled. The question is: how can we lock in the reduced price advantage on subsequent sales? Under crownhold or covenanted freehold, in areas of housing stress or high traditional land prices, large margins might exist between the new titled property and the traditional freehold title. I believe that in those circumstances we could justifiably introduce a restriction on sale prices so as to avoid unreasonable speculative gains and to lock in price advantage. It could be based on a locally determined price cap based on the area’s average price inflation, with specified house improvements compensated for. We already have restrictions in planning law concerning age qualification, agricultural employment, national park residency and disability—no doubt there are other areas of which I am unaware. They all influence price. There has to be a way of locking in the price advantage; I am open to ideas.

I have given a much-abbreviated description of my proposal. We have a real problem in national housing provision, with a massive deficit in supply and a generation of people, many of them in hardship, struggling under excessive housing costs and too often bearing exorbitant rents or mortgage payments. Many people do not want to rent; they want to buy. Our task is to make house purchase affordable and stress free.

Finally, can I say how much I enjoyed the contribution today from the noble Lord, Lord Best? I found it most interesting.

15:13

[Baroness Smith of Llanfaes (PC)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, for bringing forward this important debate. My experiences, and those of people I know, of social housing, the private rental sector and the housing crisis in Wales drive my interest in this debate.

YouGov polling shows that young adults see housing as one of the most important issues facing the UK. This rings true, as housing is also a top concern raised by young people in schools and colleges time after time when I run sessions with them. They tell me that they fear they will never own their own home. Some also fear that they will not be able to move out of their family home due to soaring rents in the private rented sector. The situation for private renters is no cause for optimism either. According to the ONS, average rents in Wales rose by 8.5% in the past 12 months, and the median monthly rent in Wales for 2021-22 represented 23% of the median gross income of private renting households. However, for people on the lowest income, even the cheapest houses represented 31% of their income.

Most young people I know who have been able to move into rented accommodation cannot afford to save for a deposit to get on the housing ladder. The idea of owning a home is becoming increasingly unrealistic. According to analysis from the ONS, a full-time employee in Wales can expect to spend 6.1 times their earnings on purchasing a home in the local authority area in which they work. This is the reality of many young people across the UK, and it is not good enough.

I raised the issue in my maiden speech when I joined this House—that although housing is a devolved subject area, social security is not. The interplay of these two dimensions is of critical importance to the people of Wales. I share the view expressed earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Bird, that solving the housing crisis has to be achieved through poverty prevention. I also echo the words of the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, that “homelessness is about people” and that we must not let people down.

The most recent statistics show that more than 11,000 people in Wales are in temporary accommodation —poor-quality accommodation, as was noted earlier. More than 2,000 of them are aged under 16, and there are more than 139,000 people on social housing waiting lists.

Plaid Cymru campaigned to end the scandal of the housing revenue account subsidy scheme, which saw local authorities send council house tenant rental income to Westminster rather than reinvesting within local housing. As a result, 11 local authorities now have the opportunity to build their own council housing once again, and they and housing associations should be supported to develop further housing as quickly as possible. These statistics and lived experiences speak for themselves. Therefore, how can His Majesty’s Government address this housing crisis?

Plaid Cymru believes that everybody has the right to a safe and affordable home in their community and that this should be the purpose of the housing system. We believe that introducing a right to adequate housing will underpin this. This right should be more than aspirational; it should be enforceable, providing citizens with a legally backed guarantee that their homes will meet acceptable standards for health and safety. Such a transformative approach is needed to truly address the needs of low-income households and struggling communities. This would reinforce the belief that housing is a fundamental human right.

To address the issue of soaring rents in the private rental sector, His Majesty’s Government could introduce rent controls, which could safeguard against unjustified rent increases and housing insecurity. Rent controls should be progressive and based on the residual income measure, ensuring that no rent leaves tenants unable to meet essential needs. This measure should apply to the cheapest 30% of rental properties, capping rents at local housing allowance rates; for the remaining 70% of rental properties, rent controls could be linked to housing quality, encouraging landlords to improve property standards. This could be modelled on systems in the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark. I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, also pointed to those countries as examples.

I add my support to the calls made by the noble Baroness, Lady Winterton, on changes to eligibility for housing allowance for under-35s. We could have a whole other debate on the impact that the current housing crisis will have in the long term, especially on declining birth rates. It will impact future generations.

To close, I ask the Minister to address in her remarks at the end of the debate her views on enshrining a right to adequate housing into law and on introducing rent controls. Have His Majesty’s Government looked outward to see what we can learn from other countries that have them in place? Our communities deserve real solutions that deliver safe, affordable homes. Diolch yn fawr.

15:19

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a real pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Llanfaes, who speaks with real eloquence. Her voice is important in this Chamber. I say of the right reverend Primate that whenever I have him speak in this House, he has done so with passion, conviction and authority on some of the great social inequalities and issues of our day, and he will be missed.

For far too long, Governments have left it to the market to tackle Britain’s housing crisis, and it has not worked, leaving a chronic housing shortage which has been pushing up house prices and making private rents unaffordable, creating mammoth waiting lists for social housing and driving up the annual housing benefit bill, as the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, pointed out earlier.

The 2010-15 Conservative-Lib Dem coalition Government committed to spend only £10 on building new homes for every £100 on housing benefit—virtually a reversal of 40 years ago, when, of every £100 we spent on housing, £80 was invested in bricks and mortar and £20 was spent on housing benefit.

Even Labour’s ambitious and admirable commitment to raise housebuilding to 300,000 homes a year during this Parliament still leaves a gap, with millions of families on council waiting lists and millions more adult children staying with their parents because they cannot find or afford a home of their own. The average home cost 3.5 times average earnings in 1997. By 2023, it cost more than eight times. How can young couples be expected to climb the housing ladder when it is impossibly expensive for them to find a place on its lowest rung?

Oxford University Professor John Muellbauer has found that in the UK, on average over 70% of the value of homes is in the value of the land on which they are built. He urges central government and local authorities to work together in using public funds to buy development plots, in effect to establish a national land bank, for subsequent sale with planning permission to private developers at a profit to the community. He argues that such a radical move could transform housing supply and that similar initiatives have succeeded in South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong in accelerating urban development and in making housing more affordable.

It is important to recognise that the state—much derided and denigrated by right-wing think tanks—has played a major role in promoting economic growth ever since the Industrial Revolution, fulfilling basic functions such as promoting public health, housing the homeless, educating the young, supporting the old, caring for social casualties of all kinds, enforcing the law, defending the nation against threats from abroad—and periodically saving the banking system from itself and protecting the real economy from a slide into slump. Increasingly since the Second World War, and especially in capitalist economies such as the US, South Korea, Singapore, Israel, Taiwan, Germany and Brazil, the state has done more than just fix market failure by funding the basic research that leads to discovery and invention, educating young people and providing the infrastructure on which the market economy depends, including housing.

The Conservative vision of individual empowerment through private markets and private property ownership simply has not worked. It was given a strong run from 2010 to 2024, with savage public spending cuts and economic incompetence typified by Liz Truss’s disaster, provoking a massive public backlash which ejected them from power. Remember also Margaret Thatcher’s popular capitalism, which in the 1980s seemed to capture the mood and was electorally successful, especially through selling council properties—but the fatal flaw was not reinvesting the revenues in building new council homes. The result has been a chronic shortage of affordable housing for both rent and purchase.

Through heavily discounted council home sales and cut-price share offers in privatised utilities, Conservative rhetoric promised each individual a stake in capitalism. Despite the fact that home ownership was more widespread for a time, it has since declined to a modern low. Official statistics showed that the proportion of homes lived in by owner occupiers in the year 2023–24, last year, had dropped to 65%, down from 71% under Labour in 2003 and its lowest level for 35 years. New social housebuilding has also plummeted, leaving calamitous shortages of affordable housing for rent or sale.

The neoliberal mantra has not worked. As a mechanism for delivering adequate housing, the free market has failed abysmally, which is why public investment is now more vital than ever before to clear up this appalling housing mess.

15:24

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to take part in this debate and I congratulate my noble friend on securing it. There have been so many really interesting proposals and ideas to come out of this long debate.

I come to this from a building and engineering background. I am stuck on that figure, which the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, also told us, that one in 20 houses in this country are empty. Where are they, who owns them, and should they be empty? Of course, the reasons are very varied. Spending a lot of time in Cornwall, I see all of the second homes and wonder, well, people like second homes, and some of them may be unsuitable for owner-occupiers, some of them may be totally unsuitable for being what we like to call affordable, but on the other hand, they could be rented out for half the year when the owners are not there, so people who live in these villages—of whom I know many—would have somewhere to live. There needs to be some financial incentive to achieve that.

There is another issue that worries me. My next-door neighbour when I live in London had a flat but, sadly, died two or three years ago. The flat is owned by the council and has been empty ever since. It is damp and it could do with a refurb, but it is a flat, and it could be made affordable but is not because the council is doing nothing about it.

My worst example is from spending a lot of time in the Isles of Scilly, where I see a number of people who do not have proper accommodation. They are there because they are working; they have jobs to keep the economy going. They quite often try and rent their accommodation from the Duchy of Cornwall, and I pay tribute to Prince William—or the Duke of Cornwall—for what he is trying to do to improve housing, particularly in Cornwall. However, he is not doing so well in Scilly, because there are, I think, seven empty houses on one island which are waiting for builders to come in. Unsurprisingly, you cannot get builders on islands. You can get a few of them on the mainland, but you have to accommodate them, because they cannot commute by sea every day. The obvious thing is for some of these empty houses to be allocated for builders to come there, certainly in winter. But it is not done, so these houses remain empty, and you cannot even get builders in there to do whatever has to be done. I do not know what the answer to that is. The Duchy of Cornwall makes a profit of £22 million every year, and you would think that they could invest some of that into the houses that the workers there need.

The other problem which one comes across is the lack of tradespeople to do this work. It is very easy to say that we have not got any carpenters, bricklayers or anything else, but unless we train them—through our education system, particularly in the countryside, as mentioned by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans—we cannot use them. It is really important that we have a good stock of tradespeople in all parts of the country, so they can do this work and hopefully improve the stock of housing.

To conclude, I congratulate my noble friend on her wonderful introduction to this debate. With all the ideas we have heard, let us hope that the Government, in the next year or two, can develop some of them, so that we can deliver affordable housing to those who want it. You meet many of them and they are all on the council list, but we need to do something for them.

15:29

[Lord Hardie (CB)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, for initiating the debate.

I also acknowledge the Library staff’s briefing paper explaining the obligations of local authorities towards those seeking help with homelessness, including tables of statistics about the number of people in England seeking such help. It is clear from these tables that, between 2020 and 2024, there has been a steady increase in the total number of applicants assessed by local authorities, which owe a duty to prevent homelessness for households threatened with it or to provide relief for those households which are already homeless. In 2020-21, the total number was 270,560; it has been increasing each year, culminating in 324,900 in 2023-24. In considering these figures, one must bear in mind that they reflect households which have sought help from their local authority and which have received a positive assessment.

The scale of homelessness is much worse than these figures suggest, because they do not include what homelessness charities define as “core homelessness”. Core homelessness includes people sleeping rough, living in homeless hostels, placed in unsuitable temporary accommodation, sofa surfing and living in other, non-conventional accommodation, such as cars, tents or boats. The number of people in this category is also increasing. In 2012, the estimated number was 206,000, and it rose to about 242,000 in 2022.

It is obviously unsatisfactory that we do not know the full extent of the problem, and I invite the Minister to consider what arrangements could be made for the inclusion in local authority quarterly returns of the number of people in its area identified by charities as being in the category of core homelessness. However, even without the inclusion of this additional group of homeless people, there is an urgent need to increase the supply of affordable housing to address the issue of homelessness.

The National Audit Office’s report The Effectiveness of Government in Tackling Homelessness identified that there was no overarching government strategy or targets for reducing statutory homelessness. It also highlighted that the then Government were falling behind on key programmes to improve housing supply. The promise in the Labour Party manifesto to develop a cross-government homelessness strategy, and to deliver the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation, was a welcome response to the NAO’s report. The scale of the need was identified in reports in 2020 and 2024 by the then House of Commons Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee, which advocated for the construction of 90,000 new social rent homes per year. It is now for the Government to deliver on these manifesto promises. I acknowledge the steps taken by the Government already include the measures in the Budget to increase the supply of social and affordable homes and to create the cross-government task force to tackle homelessness.

I also recognise that it is intended to facilitate the granting of planning permission for housebuilding, without the delays that have hitherto blighted development. However, I counsel Ministers to take steps to ensure that housebuilders in receipt of such planning permission deliver houses without delay and do not simply add the consented land to their land banks, to be developed when it suits the housebuilder to maximise the return on investment when property prices increase. Such steps might include the need to alter the definition of the commencement of development to keep alive a planning consent.

At present, the digging of a trench might be sufficient to establish that development has commenced and does not guarantee the delivery of any homes for many years, because the five-year period of the consent has been extended indefinitely. Consideration should also be given to including agreements linked to the planning consent that stipulate the development programme that must be achieved, failing which the consent will be revoked. Such agreements should also ensure that the affordable homes are constructed towards the beginning of the site development, instead of the practice of many developers leaving their construction to the end and seeking to vary the planning consent by reducing their number or excluding them altogether.

It is also essential that the newly constructed affordable homes are available as such for future generations of lower-income families. They should remain as part of the public sector housing stock and should be excluded from the right-to-buy legislation. Otherwise, the public sector housing stock will be depleted of its most modern and attractive houses and the issue of homelessness will once again be exacerbated.

15:36

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

My Lords, I too congratulate my noble friend Lady Warwick on tabling this debate and on her speech, which was so relevant and comprehensive that I feared there would be nothing left for anyone else to say once she had sat down. This is certainly a subject which has involved both sides of the Chamber and which plays an important role in the lives of people in this country.

I shall refer to a report published last week by the Home Builders Federation, Close Brothers Property Finance and Travis Perkins, all of which will be well known to noble Lords in this House. Under the heading “Planning Delays, a Lack of Providers to Take on Affordable Homes and NIMBYs Top Concerns for SME Home Builders”, the introduction stated:

“Delays in the planning process, the Conservative government’s anti-development approach to housing and planning policy, and difficult economic conditions have made it harder to be a small developer today than it was five years ago, say two thirds of the nation’s SME home builders”.


It went on to say:

“For the fifth consecutive year, planning continues to be the largest obstacle to delivery, with delays in the system and under-resourced local authority teams cited as the major barrier by 94% and 90% of respondents respectively. Rising to third position this year is ‘Local and/or political opposition to new development’ which is now seen as a major barrier by three-quarters (78%) of respondents, up from 69% in the last report”—


which was a year ago.

The average person stopped in the street and asked about the housing shortage is apt to agree that something must be done and that it is unfair, particularly on the younger generation, that house ownership has become so difficult. Stop the same person 10 minutes later and ask them whether they would be in favour of a development close to them, and you might get a slightly different answer. We seem to have moved in this country from nimbys, with whom we are all familiar, to people I call bananas—“build anything near anybody not allowed”. The fact that there is so much local opposition to developments in the housing field is a worry and a concern for all of us.

During my time in this House and the other place, I think I have sat on around five different committees on five different hybrid Bills, where people can come and give evidence to Members of one or both Houses about developments that directly affect them, and we have moved from that sort of person coming to give evidence to a much wider area. During my recent time on hybrid Bills, I have learned that every copse is a wildlife refuge and that, although creatures such as natterjack toads are supposedly very rarely found in this country, they are always around when a development is applied for. It is a similar story with great crested newts—over the years, I have become an expert on their mating habits. To be honest, I have never actually seen one, but I guarantee that, in every hybrid Bill committee I have served on, someone has come to say that the development cannot go ahead because of this unusual wildlife.

Here is my worry. The right to buy in the 1970s was referred to by my noble friend Lord Hain, who said the fatal flaw was that the receipts from the right to buy were not used to build social housing. Well, it was a fatal flaw indeed, but it was a matter of policy of course by the Conservative Government at the time. Mrs Thatcher believed, rightly or wrongly, that council estates were a hotbed of socialism and that the sooner people became owner-occupiers, usually by a massive discount, the sooner they would cease to vote for a political party: the party I belong to. Whether she was right or not, I will leave to posterity, but it certainly meant that not replacing those sold houses has led directly to the shortage that we have at the present time.

After the Second World War, the Attlee Government, despite all the problems facing this country, built 1.2 million largely social houses between 1946 and 1951. The policy was continued, to their credit, by the two successive Conservative Prime Ministers. Only in recent years, with the disbandment of the direct works departments of most local authorities and the policies to which I have already referred, has public housing fallen by the dramatic amounts that it has.

I conclude by saying this: two-thirds of the houses sold under the right to buy are, of course, now in the hands of private landlords. As a former council tenant myself in the 1960s, I occasionally visit the area that I represented in my local authority where I lived. The decline in the overall standard of public provision is obvious since two-thirds of those houses fell into the hands of private landlords. I conclude by asking my noble friend the Minister to give us a guarantee that we can at least try to emulate our forebears so far as the building of social housing is concerned—and, even if we cannot make it to 1.2 million, we will do our best to get it up from the pathetic figure that it is at the present time.

15:43

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as yet another vice-president of the Local Government Association. I begin by acknowledging the very personal valedictory speech of the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury. His wise but often challenging contributions will be missed.

As ever, it has been a stimulating, knowledgeable and important debate, but I confess that it has left me feeling a bit depressed. Noble Lords’ excellent contributions have shown that, yes, there is a consensus that we have a housing crisis—no surprise there—and, yes, there are lots of reasons why it has come to pass: noble Lords have cantered knowledgeably around the course, covering almost all of them. We also seem to agree that this is not new: it has been brewing for decades and the many and various attempts to build more homes have been, by and large, unsuccessful—hence my depression. But I am looking forward to the Minister’s response and I hope she can lift my gloom, because this is one area where we all want to see change, and radical change at that. It is a sign of the quality of the debate today that noble Lords have given the Minister many suggested solutions that give us hope.

As a result of the many and varied barriers to building more homes outlined in this debate, homelessness has risen, along with the number of families in temporary accommodation. It is also evident that the private rented sector is not coping with the increased demand, so in times of scarcity rents rise and tenants get evicted. All these points were amplified by many noble Lords, but I particularly enjoyed the contributions from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson.

This vicious circle was clearly outlined by the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, in her thorough, informed and compelling introduction. The contributions from the noble Lords, Lord Griffiths and Lord Bird, highlighted the very human consequences of people living without a home. It is about people and about poverty.

The causes of homelessness were very well outlined, particularly by the noble Baroness, Lady Winterton, when she turned her attention to the young. That is where our attention should be too. These causes include restrictions to benefit entitlement, rising living costs, mental health issues, relationship breakdown and, of course, the number one: eviction from the private rented sector due to increasing rent prices, which have risen by almost 9% in the past year alone. We look forward to working with the Minister on the forthcoming Renters’ Rights Bill to ameliorate some of these issues.

One of the inevitable consequences of an undersupply of homes is indeed increasing rents, but the reason for this is irrefutably the significant decline in the availability of social housing, which to these Benches is the big lever to pull to unlock the logjam, as analysed by my noble friends Lord Shipley and Lady Grender. That social housing has declined to the massive extent it has was well outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Best. I loved his “bricks not benefits” slogan, which we should adopt. It is inescapable that this decline has contributed significantly to the problems we have now. The figures speak for themselves: a net loss of over 11,000 homes in 2022-23 and a quarter of a million over a decade. You cannot remove that amount of supply without it having a significant impact, and it has.

That is why these Benches see a substantial increase in the building of homes for social rent as the key route out of the vicious circle. This must and should be subsidised, and all builders—particularly local SME builders, who have been squeezed out of the market—should be incentivised to build homes for social rent. I seek reassurances from the Minister that Homes England is being directed to fund homes for social rent and in places of greatest need. How can we incentivise more SME builders back into building more? Is it too much to hope that the new planning Bill and attendant National Planning Policy Framework will set clear expectations that local planning authorities must assess their need for social housing, and state their targets for all tenures according to local need? This would send a very strong signal to developers that this is not negotiable. We have had a decade of it being negotiable.

Local planning authorities have to give greater priority not just to the numbers and targets but to providing more social housing. Perhaps we also need to seriously incentivise private investors to invest in social housing schemes in those areas. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Young, about getting financial stability into the private rented sector.

Noble Lords may notice that I have not used the term affordable housing. I believe it is a misnomer that has come to be meaningless in so many contexts. If our friend Lord Stunell were still with us, he would certainly be holding forth on this whole issue of affordability and how we should address the problem. He would probably have agreed with much of what the noble Lord, Lord Hain, proposed.

As the noble Lord, Lord Hollick, outlined, we also have ample evidence of a declining and ageing workforce to build the homes we need. Where is the workforce strategy to deliver this number of homes? Targets and tough talk will come to naught if we do not have the capacity to actually build the homes, regardless of who builds them.

Among our many excellent briefings, one that jumped out at me concerned the number of empty homes, which was also mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and my noble friend Lord Shipley. Nearly 700,000 homes in England are unfurnished and empty, and 265,000 are classified as long term. From experience, I know how difficult it is to gain possession of an empty home, and I hope that this Government will make it easier for councils to do so and will consider incentivising sellers by exempting them from a percentage of capital gains tax.

I am deeply concerned about councils’ ability to find suitable temporary accommodation. Anecdotally, I know they are really struggling. Councils spent £1.74 billion last year supporting 104,000 households in temporary accommodation. Worryingly, there is growing evidence that some landlords are leaving the long-term private rented sector in order to supply this much sought after temporary accommodation at—guess what—much higher rents. We also know that it is stretching some district councils’ finances to breaking point, and there are fears of Section 104 notices being served.

The planning system is often cited as a barrier to building. In my view, this is overstated, usually by developers. They would say that, wouldn’t they? Councils are required to identify a five-year land supply, and 1 million planning permissions have been granted but not built out. Councils have no power to compel developers to come forward to develop these sites or to build out sites to which permission has already been given, yet they are judged and punished by the Government’s housing delivery test. Perhaps this Government might consider more powers for councils, such as being able to charge developers full council tax for every development that is not built out on the agreed time scale.

However, what certainly does deter developers is our NIMBY culture, as forcefully raised by the noble Lord, Lord Snape. Politicians of all stripes have pandered to this, to the detriment of more and quicker housing delivery. This is not new. The 1947 Act gave rise to the notion that development needed to be restrained and resisted as an antidote to urban sprawl. I note that, even back in those days, when the Minister with responsibility for housing visited existing residents on the site for the new town of Stevenage, he was driven from the meeting with shouts of “Dictator!” ringing in his ears, only to find his car tyres slashed and sugar in his petrol tank. I have received only online abuse, which lets me off lightly.

I hope the Government have a genuine new take on how to overcome this visible and negative impediment to development. We need to somehow change the narrative to “YIMBY” at both national and local level, and that takes real leadership. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, that we support a long-term cross-party strategy because we know this is a complex issue. It will take years, following the impact of decades of failure, to change the market significantly, yet the reality of people’s lives is that change cannot come quickly enough.

15:53

[The Earl of Effingham (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, for her success in the ballot to obtain this debate. It is also an honour and a privilege to be closing after the valedictory speech of the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury. The fact that he chose this debate to be his last tells us a great deal about his values and his care for those in need. I believe I speak for these Benches and the whole House when I say that we wish him well for the future.

Home is where the heart is. A home is something we all need, and we should have grave concerns that we are a nation where not everyone has their own home. Homelessness should have no place in this country, and we must do everything we can to help those in need. But homelessness is a complex issue with a wide range of underlying causes and contributing factors. There is no one silver bullet. The causes and contributing factors are numerous, including affordability and population growth pressure, but there are also more personal and tangential causes of homelessness, including mental health crisis, domestic abuse and relationship breakdown. It is therefore crucial that any policy proposed to tackle homelessness targets its multiple root causes if it is to have any chance of success.

Supporting people through a mental health crisis is an immensely challenging task and we pay tribute to our phenomenal NHS staff, who care for people when they need it the most. In their times of crisis, our NHS steps up and delivers to the absolute best of its ability. The NHS Long Term Workforce Plan from 2023 set out an ambition to increase training places for mental health nursing by 93% to over 11,000 places by 2032, starting with an increase of 38% by 2029. Furthermore, the NHS Long Term Plan included targets to expand NHS talking therapies, perinatal mental health support and 24/7 crisis services.

Unfortunately, veterans of our amazing Armed Forces are particularly vulnerable to mental health issues. It is a cruel price that they pay for keeping us all safe during times of geopolitical unrest and danger. In March 2021, we announced the Op Courage service, creating a single point to access mental health services and support for veterans. This includes support to recognise and treat early to advanced mental health problems and substance misuse and addictions. Op Courage also liaises with other organisations to address wider well-being needs and support Armed Forces families affected by mental health problems. As of June 2024, Op Courage was actively supporting 2,700 veterans.

Nobody should have to choose between facing abuse and sleeping on the streets. In government, we allocated an additional £2 million to help people fleeing domestic abuse. This includes a one-off payment of up to £500 to give those without the means the ability to leave their abusers. This payment is to help cover the cost of essentials, such as groceries or baby care, or be put towards new accommodation for themselves and their children.

Victims can also apply for a further one-off payment of up to £2,500 to help secure a sustainable independent future, such as by putting down a deposit for rental accommodation. This helps people move on with their lives and goes some way to preventing homelessness or the pressure to return to abusers because of financial strain. We very much hope that His Majesty’s Government will continue this support along with universal credit, the simplified system that we introduced through which people can claim assistance for a range of challenges, including support with housing costs due to relationship breakdown and related issues, which are unfortunately another cause of homelessness.

We understood that building more quality housing in the places where it was needed most was one of the best ways to reduce homelessness. Indeed, 2.5 million homes have been built by Conservative Governments since 2010; over a million were built in the last Parliament. We appreciated that putting more money in people’s pockets was another essential way to prevent that homelessness. Almost half of the homes in England are now in energy efficiency band C, up from just one in seven in 2010. This has the direct result that people need to spend less of their hard-earned money on heating and utility bills.

Reducing barriers to entry into the property market is another step that we took. Stamp duty was reduced to zero for properties under £250,000 or up to £425,000 for first-time buyers. This move saved aspiring homeowners thousands of pounds, helping them to buy a house and create their own home. We also brought forward Awaab’s law, ensuring that social housing tenants are not forced to reside in properties which are dangerous to their health to avoid homelessness.

Going forward, new homes must be affordable, must not do unreasonable damage to the local environment, must be built where they are most needed, must be adequately looked after by public services and must have proper means of transportation. None of this is easy, but all these requirements are essential. According to Nationwide, the price of a typical UK home rose by 3.7% last month versus the previous year. As house prices continue to rise, the Government must take urgent steps to ensure that the most vulnerable and in need are not excluded from the dream of owning their own home.

Council leaders say that the cost of temporary accommodation is now the greatest threat to district and borough councils’ budgets, and indeed to their very existence. The Government must build thousands more social or affordable housing units. Is the Minister still committing to building 1.5 million new homes by 2029? Can she inform the House—she should have the data—how many homes have been completed this year and how many will be started this year? Do we have enough electricians, plumbers, bricklayers and roofers to build 300,000 new homes every year? Research suggests that we do not.

Everyone wants to end homelessness, and His Majesty’s Official Opposition will work tirelessly with the Government to bring this about. But achieving such an incredibly important goal will require policy that is sensible and well thought out. We need action, we need to start building yesterday and we need to address the other root causes of homelessness as a top priority.

16:01

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to respond for the Government on such an important issue. I grew up in social housing and I was very proud of my new-town pioneer parents who allowed me to do so—that was the housing of the 1950s and 1960s, referred to by my noble friend Lord Snape. I have campaigned on housing in general and social housing in particular for over 30 years, and this is the first Government I have known, in all that time, to show the level of ambition that we need. I thank my noble friend Lady Warwick for her ongoing work on housing and homelessness and for leading this debate today with her extremely powerful and thorough speech. One thing she said was that the facts are truly shocking, and shocking they really are.

It has been a great privilege to listen and respond to a debate in which the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury gave his valedictory speech. He was present at one of the most terrifying experiences I have had since I joined this House. He has been a great champion of housing, as many noble Lords have said, and introduced the Homes for All report, which had a good launch in your Lordships’ House. I thought I was just going to attend, but I arrived to find my noble friend Lady Warwick asking me whether I would speak. As I walked into the room, he was already speaking and I had to quickly gather my thoughts together and make a speech there and then.

The most reverend Primate has done such fantastic work. His deep and thorough knowledge of the banking system from his earlier career enabled him to speak out powerfully in 2013 against payday lending, which was a great passion of mine as well. He launched a campaign in favour of credit unions as an alternative. The annual Archbishop’s debate, under his watchful eye, has seen him raise the following areas: banking standards, soft power, reconciliation, education, British values, housing, freedom of speech, migration and families. His book Reimagining Britain, published in 2018, set out his thoughts on areas for specific social change and reform, including social care, housing and families—issues on which he and the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York founded policy commissions.

The most reverend Primate also has extensive knowledge of overseas issues through his travel around different countries and has made informed contributions in debates on foreign policy, including on Sudan, Afghanistan and Israel and Gaza.

Of course, in the 12 years that the most reverend Primate has been the Archbishop of Canterbury, he has offered spiritual counsel to six Prime Ministers and overseen many significant royal events, presiding at the Coronation of His Majesty King Charles III and delivering the sermon at the funeral of the late Queen Elizabeth II. He has also baptised Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis, and married Prince Harry and Meghan at Windsor in 2018.

During his great speech on housing this afternoon, the most reverend Primate spoke about affordability, which I will come to later. He also spoke about community and building places for people, a topic that is very close to my heart in terms of planning. I thank him for the way that he has steered the Church Commissioners, if it is possible to steer them—he says no; I thought that was probably the case—because I believe there are extraordinary opportunities now regarding Church land. The Government welcome the opportunity to have that dialogue with the Church Commissioners.

There is no doubt in my mind that in my parish, as elsewhere in the Church, safeguarding is infinitely better than it was before his time as Archbishop. While we understand his very honourable reasons for resignation, I know that this House and the Church will miss him greatly. I can do no better than to quote his own words back to him:

“People of loving service are rare in any walk of life. Leaders of loving service are still rarer. But in all cases those who serve will be loved and remembered when those who cling to power and privileges are long forgotten”.


I thank him.

I turn back now to the important issues of our debate. The causes of England’s housing crisis are multiple, as so many noble Lords have pointed out, but among the most important is our failure to build enough homes for decades. We see the impact of this in rising rents and housing costs, with 35% of private renters and 43% of social renters living in poverty after they have met their housing costs. There are, as many noble Lords mentioned, 1.3 million people languishing on social housing waiting lists, while millions of low-income households are forced into insecure, unaffordable and, far too often, substandard private rented housing. We know that homelessness can have a devastating impact on those affected. At the sharpest end of the crisis are the 123,000 households, including a record 159,000 children, in temporary accommodation. This is unacceptable. Everyone should have access to a safe, decent, affordable and secure home.

The sheer scale of the housing crisis demands a radical response. That is why this Government have committed to delivering 1.5 million homes in this Parliament, including the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation. It is why we are committed to a new generation of new towns, and it is why we will get back on track in Britain by ending homelessness. Both my noble friend Lady Warwick and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, spoke about homelessness. I will speak in more detail on homelessness later on, but it is why we will produce a long-term housing strategy in spring 2025. We know that addressing these issues will take some time, but we have taken the first decisive steps and are committed to taking the long-term action needed to tackle the scale of the challenge we face and to get Britain building.

I assure the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, of both my and the Secretary of State’s intention to create a revolution in social housing. The noble Baroness made the point that I often make: we must stop conflating the terms “affordable” and “social” housing. They are different things. We will be asking local planning authorities to consider the tenure of the homes that they are allocating as part of their planning processes.

I am grateful for the support of the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, for the work we are doing, but the housing crisis we inherited has given us an enormous task to tackle. He raised the issue of capacity for building in the system. I answered that in my response to an Oral Question earlier today, but there is a great deal of work going on to build that capacity and we are very grateful that the industry itself has produced £140 million to help start tackling the skills crisis.

I thank my noble friends Lady Warwick and Lord Hain, the noble Lords, Lord Best, Lord Young, Lord Shipley and Lord Hollick, and the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, for comments and questions on housebuilding and housing supply. We know that our commitment to building 1.5 million homes is an ambitious one, but we are already taking action to ensure we can deliver it. Only historic levels of housebuilding can begin to drive the changes we need to see. We have already announced the new homes accelerator to unblock stalled housing sites and have committed to a new generation of new towns.

A critical part of that building is reforming our planning system, which too often holds back development. We have already taken steps towards reversing the damaging changes to the National Planning Policy Framework that had undermined our growth ambitions. We aim to publish the new framework by the end of this year. I am told that that will be before the Christmas Recess, so let us keep our fingers crossed. It will include updating the standard method, reintroducing mandatory targets, releasing more green and grey belt land, where it meets our golden rules, and seeking views on a “brownfield passport” to ensure development on brownfield sites is straightforward to approve.

We are also giving local authorities the capacity support they need to drive forward the delivery of new homes. At the recent Budget, we announced over £50 million of new spending to expedite the planning process by recruiting an additional 300 planners and boosting local planning authority capacity to deliver the Government’s wider planning reform agenda. Next year, we will introduce a planning and infrastructure Bill, which will play a key role in promoting economic growth, unlocking a new scale of delivery for both housing and infrastructure across the country.

Alongside reform of the planning system, we must also see reform in the market. The current speculative development model, referred to by many noble Lords, dominated by a few big builders, has led to slow build-out and lack of competition. We will support SMEs, work with industry to grow mixed tenure models and ensure we have the right skills and supply chains. I know the Secretary of State has already spoken to Homes England to request that it breaks down some of its developments into smaller packages that are suitable for SMEs. At the Budget, we provided an additional £3 billion of support for SMEs and the build-to-rent sector in the form of housing guarantee schemes, allowing developers to access lower-cost loans and support the delivery of tens of thousands of new homes.

Our commitment to delivering the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation is a critical part of our housebuilding strategy. At the Budget, we made a down payment of £500 million to the affordable homes programme in 2025-26, increasing the annual budget to £3.1 billion, the biggest annual budget for affordable housing in over a decade. We will go further, with details of new investment to succeed the 2021-26 affordable homes programme to be provided at the spending review.

Alongside our direct investment to build new homes, the Government have launched a consultation on a new long-term social housing rent settlement of CPI plus 1% for five years. That will give the sector the confidence to build tens of thousands of new social homes. We are reducing maximum right-to-buy cash discounts to pre-2012 levels, allowing councils to keep 100% of the receipts generated by right-to-buy sales. That should ensure that we are investing in new supply to replace the stock sold—something that, in my humble opinion, should have been done right from the start of the right-to-buy programme.

I am afraid I just do not agree with the assertion of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, that we intend to put quantity before quality, that we are ignoring the importance of community and place making or that we are not providing for diverse needs. This Government’s reform of the planning system, reforms to private renting and leasehold, remediation acceleration action plans, the future homes standard, et cetera, are part of what we are doing to just get on with the job.

I turn now to some of the specific points made by noble Lords. I am sure I will not get to all of them in the few minutes I have left, but I will try to cover as many as I can. I think I have covered the points on housing supply. Key points were made by my noble friend Lady Warwick, the noble Lords, Lord Shipley, Lord Young, Lord Best and Lord Jamieson. The Government have already taken swift action to kick-start the delivery of the 1.5 million homes, including the NPPF consultation, the accelerator and the new towns task force. We are seeking views now on a “brownfield passport” to ensure that suitable projects get swift and straightforward approval for development. We are working together with industry, including housing associations, local authorities and developers, to unlock economic growth and give the country the homes it needs. Working with mayors and councils across the country, we have set up a dedicated interministerial group, which the Deputy Prime Minister chairs, bringing together Ministers from across government to develop a long-term strategy that will put us back on track to end homelessness.

The most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury spoke powerfully about the affordability of homes, and that is a key issue for us. Our work in tackling the housing needs of the country includes making housing more affordable for all. The most sustainable long-term method of achieving that is to help people into home ownership and increase the supply of housing generally; that is why we will deliver the biggest increase in social and affordable housing. However, we recognise that new supply alone will not address the issues of affordability that face us today, and that is why we are strengthening rights for those in the private rented sector. In addition to increasing the supply of new homes of all tenures, the Government are committed to helping more people into home ownership by introducing a permanent, comprehensive mortgage guarantee scheme, and to giving first-time buyers the first chance at new home developments.

My noble friend Lady Warwick and the noble Lord, Lord Young, raised the issue of the planning reforms that are taking place. Local plans will have to identify specific housing for special needs, such as supported housing, and the package announced in the Autumn Budget is the next step. To meet these planning requirements, we will provide billions in government support and certainty for investors. I am hopeful that the new National Planning Policy Framework, which will be published shortly, will have the potential to deliver the uplift in housebuilding that we need.

On social and affordable housing, points were raised by my noble friends Lord Hain and Lady Warwick, and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, who gave out the killer fact of 2 million homes being sold under right-to-buy, which is a shocker—it would not have been, of course, if they had been replaced, and that is the point. The Government want everyone to have a place to call home and are taking the necessary steps to fix the economy so we can get on with building. We have introduced the changes to planning policy and have set out the details of an immediate one-year cash injection of £500 million to top up the affordable homes programme, which will deliver up to 5,000 new social and affordable homes.

On social housing targets, the noble Lord, Lord Hollick, referred to the commission on social housing. Many of the points raised by the commission have already been considered by the Government and steps are being put in place to tackle the issues it raised, and we are very grateful for the commission’s work.

My noble friend Lord Hain and the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, made points on the right to buy. I have already set out the Government’s plans to change right-to-buy. It is an integral way for social tenants to get on the property ladder, but the point is that councils are losing homes to right-to-buy more quickly than they can be replaced. We are also looking at removing discounts for new homes, so, when a new home is built, there has to be a period of time before it qualifies for right-to-buy.

There were some very powerful contributions to this debate on homelessness, and I am very grateful to all those who made them: my noble friend Lady Warwick; my noble friend Lord Griffiths, who gave a powerful personal testimony on homelessness; the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, who spoke about rural homelessness; and the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, and the noble Lord, Lord Hardie. I say to the right reverend Prelate that we do want to encourage rural exception sites and we will be looking more closely at that. The housing strategy is not in draft yet, but it will come out in the new year. I am sure that the point that he made about it having specific issues in it on rural housing will be taken on board, so I thank him very much for making that point.

There is no doubt that homeless levels are far too high, and that this has a devastating impact on all those affected. We want to take a long-term approach to this, working with mayors and councils across the country. That interministerial group which the Deputy Prime Minister chairs will bring together Ministers from across government to put us on track to ending homelessness. We have put in additional funding of £233 million for this for next year, and that increased spending will help prevent rises in the number of families in temporary accommodation. Not only is it a tragedy for those families in terms of their family life, but it puts a huge burden on local authorities, as we have heard.

We are also tackling the root causes of homelessness, which is the delivery of further housing. With the introduction of the Renters’ Rights Bill to Parliament, we will abolish Section 21 no-fault evictions, preventing private renters being exploited and discriminated against. In my experience as a councillor, Section 21 was one of the biggest causes of homelessness, so we need to get rid of it as quickly as possible.

The noble Earl, Lord Effingham, mentioned the fact that mental health services are very important in dealing with people who find themselves homeless, and I agree. In my own town, we put together a housing-first package which includes support for complex needs. We need to look at areas of good practice and encourage others to participate in those. The noble Earl also spoke about veterans, and I was very pleased to hear the Prime Minister’s announcement on veterans recently.

I knew I would not get through all the points. Great points were made on temporary accommodation, on older people and homelessness and on youth homelessness, and particularly on rough sleeping and poverty from the noble Lord, Lord Bird. I will write to all noble Lords who I have not been able to respond to in the debate. But that is an indication of just what a wide-ranging and thorough debate we have had this afternoon, and I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part.

I ask noble Lords to please be assured that our Government are committed to tackling this issue. We have made huge strides since we assumed office, but we will not be able to solve the housing crisis overnight. In the long-term housing strategy and the homelessness strategy, both to be published next year, we will set out our vision for a housing market that works for all, and how we will get back on track to ending homelessness. Together, we will ensure that everyone has a place they can call home. I thank all noble Lords for their support in doing that, and particularly thank my noble friend Lady Warwick for instigating this debate this afternoon.

16:23

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that very comprehensive and indeed very encouraging response. I will not attempt to summarise the debate—indeed, my noble friend did it rather splendidly. But I do not think the Government can be in any doubt that there is support on all sides of this House for speedy action, as well as for a long-term strategy. I simply join in the tribute that she made to the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury for the work he has done, and I think that was reflected in all the comments made around the House.

I must say that I was very impressed: I almost wondered whether I should come up with a quote. But, having been given them from as wide a range as Aeneas, Nelson Mandela and Eliza Doolittle, I felt that would be inappropriate.

We have had a passionate and very committed debate today, with some extraordinary personal contributions. They root us in the reality of people’s lives and what we are really trying to deliver here, which is homes and communities. I thank everybody who has made a contribution in this debate and I beg to move.

Motion agreed.

Physician and Anaesthetist Associate Roles: Review

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

Question for Short Debate

16:25

Asked by

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what the review, announced by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care on 20 November, of the physician associate and anaesthetist associate roles will cover; and what actions they plan to take in advance of the outcome.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for staying with us late on a Thursday for this debate. I know there are many noble Lords, among them the noble Baronesses, Lady Finlay and Lady Brinton, who moved regret Motions about the statutory instrument passed under the previous Government that is behind the mess we are discussing today and who would have very much liked to take part.

I will not go over the same ground as I did in February, when I begged the then Government to pause their action, but the concerns expressed then have only grown, reflecting many of the reasons why Professor Gillian Leng has been asked to conduct the review of PA and AA roles. In the words of consultant Partha Kar, the Government’s national adviser on diabetes, we have seen

“months of heated debates, social media uproar, royal colleges in turmoil, and the reputation of many national organisations being questioned”.

Professor Kar has described this as

“the worst example of a policy implementation in the NHS I’ve seen”.

I note that just this week the Irish Medical Council concluded that it was not the appropriate body to regulate PAs, and referred to

“the potential for emerging patient safety risks arising … as observed recently because of regulation of PAs by the GMC in the UK”.

I shall ask a large number of questions. To be fair to the Minister, and to ensure that this debate is as constructive as possible, I have shared my questions with her in advance. I begin with the first part of my question, about the review itself. I have heard only respect and hopeful feelings about Professor Leng being appointed as lead, but many concerns have been expressed to me about the level of co-operation that the review will receive and the quality of information available to it. Just yesterday, the GMC wrote to medical bodies, nine days before it is due to begin registering PAs and AAs, saying that it would

“soon publish a report on the outcome of the consultation and the research; along with the final drafts of the rules, standards, and guidance”.

That report was published just two hours ago, before this debate started.

Does the Minister consider that to be an appropriate timetable and level of transparency? Is the Minister happy with the response of the GMC to requests for information over this difficult year? Can the Minister assure me that Professor Leng will have the necessary resources and that the Government will do everything necessary to ensure that she receives full co-operation and transparency?

We have seen many different, often disturbing, localised reports about the ways in which PAs in both hospital settings and general practice have been deployed. Knowledge and concern about the deployment of PAs and AAs is growing among patients and the general population. I note that the Fire Brigades Union conference in May voted to oppose the growing use of PAs. Will Professor Leng have the resources to access those public views?

The review’s remit seems quite narrow. An obvious omission is the ask from the Royal College of Physicians that it should consider the impact of the PA role on training opportunities for resident doctors. Will the review do that? Further, will it consider the fundamental issue that the “taskification” of medicine is a massive change from previous practice and a reversal of the recent growing understanding of the need to consider the whole human, and their environment, in supporting health and tackling disease?

Our debate in February heard considerable concerns about the impact of PAs on doctors’ training. There were suggestions from all sides of the House that a major revamp of training arrangements for doctors needs to be put in place. Can the Minister write to me about what plans the Government might have in that area? I want mostly to focus what interim measures the Government plan to deal with what is clearly an untenable current situation. In February, the then Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Markham, said that PAs and AAs are

“very much a supplemental role rather than a substitute”.—[Official Report, 26/2/24; col. 912.]

Of course, that is not what has been happening, as demonstrated by a letter sent in March from NHS England to ICBs and trusts. It said that PAs

“should not be used as replacements for doctors”

on rotas, yet a detailed investigation by “Channel 4 News” in October found widespread subsequent use of such substitutions. A number of trusts indicated that they did not even keep any records of such substitutions. Does the Minister stand by that NHS England guidance? What will the Government do to ensure that it is implemented?

The Government’s announcement of the review said that it is to report in spring 2025. Your Lordships’ House knows that government definitions of seasons means that that could extend well into the year. By the time report is absorbed and action decided, realistically, we are talking about a year of a clearly untenable situation. Does the Minister agree that interim action is surely needed?

In September, the governing council of the Royal College of General Practitioners voted to oppose a role for physician associates working in general practice. Reports suggest that, as a result, PAs are being made redundant—they have my sympathy—and general practices face the risk of legal action. How will the Government deal with this situation and prevent it escalating, at great cost to NHS services?

The council of the Royal College of Physicians has agreed that there is a limited role for physician associates working in secondary care in the medical specialties, as long as they are supported by clear supervision arrangements, professional regulation and a nationally agreed scope of practice. Do the Government agree? Will they take action immediately to deliver this, at least in an interim way? Do they agree that such supervision urgently needs to be defined?

I turn to caring for our children, and highly vulnerable patients at risk of rapid deterioration in condition, an area of particular concern. The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has called for an immediate pause in the recruitment of PAs. Given the very disturbing situation that arose at Alder Hey hospital, does the Minister agree that there should be such a pause?

The House may well ask where guidelines across disciplines for national scope—a ceiling of practice—for PAs and AAs might come from. I was at the launch of a detailed, carefully prepared British Medical Association outline of a PA/AA scope document. I did not hear anyone express serious concerns about the activities of PAs and AAs being safe, if they were working to that outline. Does the Minister agree?

Later this month—very soon, I think—it is expected that the Royal College of Physicians will publish draft “safe and effective practice” guidance on the supervision of PAs, alongside a definition of the PA role drafted by the RCP resident doctor committee and agreed by both the PA oversight group and the RCP council. Does the Minister agree that this should be applied?

To back to our debate in February, I suggest that the Minister misspoke in saying that the GMC is regulating. What is due to come into practice on 13 December is a registration process for which there is a two-year lead-in period, so it will in effect remain voluntary until December 2026. I respectfully suggest that, without a national scope and clear guidelines for supervision, this cannot in any way be described as “regulation”. It is purely registration. Does the Minister agree?

I turn to AAs specifically, and an issue of grave concern—including legal concern—that was recently raised with me. In the current regulations, AAs and PAs are not allowed to prescribe or order ionising radiation. How can someone acting as an anaesthetist not do so? Expert advice that I have received suggests that the tool of patient-specific directive, which are meant to allow a doctor to direct another professional in making a limited choice of drugs under very specific circumstances, is being used and possibly misused. I am told that PSDs are being used to provide an extensive list of drugs for AAs to choose from; in essence, that means that they are prescribing. Can the Minister comment on that?

Finally, I turn to a couple of broader “What now?” questions. The NHS careers website’s PA/AA page, which I consulted yesterday, lists 39 universities offering courses for these roles. I have heard that several are pausing these courses. Does the Minister think it is fair to encourage students to start new PA and AA courses, given the uncertainty while the review is conducted?

I conclude by stressing that my questions to the Minister, my concerns and the mess that we are in now are not the fault of PAs and AAs who, in good faith, have signed up for service, studied and got the debt to show for it. Can the Minister assure me that the Government are committed to ensuring that a way forward will be found for them, whatever the review’s conclusions and future steps?

16:35

[Baroness Keeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to speak in this short debate on the review of the physician associate and anaesthetist associate roles and what actions the Government plan. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, on the debate and her opening speech. I will start by focusing on the way in which physician associates are used in the NHS and some of the consequences this has had.

In July 2023 I led an Adjournment debate in the Commons on the use of physician associates in the NHS. I did so to raise issues in the case of Emily Chesterton, the daughter of my former constituents Marion and Brendan Chesterton. Emily tragically died of a pulmonary embolism, aged 30, after seeing the same physician associate twice at her GP practice and being misdiagnosed.

The circumstances of Emily’s death were investigated by a coroner in March 2023. Messages from Emily examined at the inquest evidence Emily’s belief that she was seeing a doctor, that the appointments with the physician associate were short and that Emily was not examined fully. The conclusion of the coroner was:

“Emily Chesterton … attended her general practitioner surgery … with calf pain and shortness of breath, and was seen by the same physician associate on both occasions. She should have been immediately referred to a hospital emergency unit. If she had been on either occasion, the likelihood is that she would have been treated for pulmonary embolism and would have survived”.


Crucially, the physician associate did not seek medical advice after seeing a patient who had presented twice in one week with significant risk factors for pulmonary embolism, and she sent Emily home without consulting a doctor about her symptoms.

I said in that Commons debate that Emily’s case raises serious questions about the wider use of physician associates in the NHS. In particular, it raises questions about allowing physician associates to carry out unsupervised one-to-one consultations with undifferentiated patients in general practice. PAs are a dependent role; they are meant to be under the supervision of a designated medical practitioner, but that does not appear to have been the case with the lack of supervision that occurred in the case of Emily Chesterton.

The GP practice later raised concerns about the physician associate’s knowledge and understanding of what investigations she should perform on a patient presenting with those symptoms, about her ability to recognise an unwell patient and escalate those concerns to a doctor, and about her overconfidence and lack of insight into the limitations of her own clinical knowledge and practice.

Since I raised Emily Chesterton’s case, my fears about these roles have increased. There have been other deaths involving PAs. Susan Pollitt died after a drain was mistakenly left in her abdomen for 21 hours by a PA. The inquest concluded that her death in Royal Oldham Hospital in July 2023 had been caused by an

“unnecessary medical procedure contributed to by neglect”.

The Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust, which runs the Royal Oldham, found that Mrs Pollitt would have survived had the drain been removed earlier.

As we have heard, there are also examples of PAs taking on roles that are far too complex for their experience and knowledge. Alder Hey Children’s Hospital has now admitted that, from 2019 to 2023, a PA worked in a role that involved child sexual abuse medicals. Alder Hey had originally denied that PAs were being used in its paediatric sexual referral centre, which is for children under 16 who have experienced sexual abuse.

Dr Matt Kneale, former chair of the Doctors’ Association, said

“This is flagrantly unsafe. I have no confidence that those cases have been assessed to the same competence of a senior paediatric doctor. Children deserve better”.


Alder Hey later admitted that it stopped deploying a PA within its safeguarding team after concerns were raised by the Crown Prosecution Service and the police about relying on the evidence of a PA in court cases.

The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has just published a survey of the experience of paediatricians working with PAs, with 2,200 responses. The survey reported the following safety issues in the work of PAs: misdiagnosis, 63%; miscommunication, 58%; failure to escalate deterioration, 48%; undetected deterioration, 23%; and ordering ionising radiation—which PAs are not allowed to do—9%. The RCPCH survey also reported that 72% of paediatricians with experience of working with a PA believe that their recruitment should be halted.

There are many more examples where patient safety is seen to be endangered by the way in which PAs and AAs are being used in the NHS. This is not helped by seeing a number of posts on social media with PAs videoing themselves, their patients and their clinical settings just to make posts on TikTok or other social media. Concerned consultants who highlighted these inappropriate videos to the press have said that PAs are coming very close to the line of professional misconduct by making these videos.

The new Government have inherited what is effectively a Wild West in medical care, because a new medical role was brought in without regulation, with only voluntary registration and no national scope of practice for PAs and AAs. GP members of the BMA have voted in favour of stopping hiring PAs in general practice and phasing out the PA role. They also stated that the role of PA is inadequately trained to manage undifferentiated patients and that there should be an immediate moratorium on such consultations. The medical royal colleges, as we have heard in this debate, are making their strength of feeling heard on these safety issues. This was recently summarised by Professor Martin McKee in an article in the BMJ.

As I mentioned, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health found substantial safety concerns with PAs working in paediatric settings. The Royal College of GPs has agreed to oppose the role of PAs working in general practice, following a consultation of its members.

The Royal College of Physicians of London is now advocating for a limit to the rollout of the PA role, following a survey of its members. Its sister royal college in Edinburgh has called for a delay in implementation

“until clear nationally agreed scope and ceiling of practice protocols are in place and clear plans regarding post-registration training and assessment of PAs are defined”.

The Royal College of Surgeons has also expressed concerns, including the risk that the expansion of these roles could undermine the roles of surgical care practitioners, surgical first assistants and advanced nurse practitioners. As we have heard, the Royal College of Anaesthetists, after noting concerns about the current use of AAs, has called for a pause in their recruitment.

The Royal College of Radiologists says it has

“no plans to bring PAs into the College and we do not anticipate a significant expansion of the role within our specialties”.

The Royal College of Emergency Medicine also

“does not currently support the expansion of the Physician Associate workforce in Emergency Medicine”,

again supported by a member survey expressing widespread concern. Now, as we have heard, the Universities of Chester and Portsmouth have halted recruitment to their PA courses for 2025, and the University of Leeds no longer lists the course on its website.

On announcing the Leng review, Secretary of State Wes Streeting said that

“there are legitimate concerns over transparency for patients, scope of practice and the substituting of doctors”.

I agree.

I believe the issues that need to be tackled are these. We need to focus on the unsafe substitution of physician associates in what should be doctor-only roles and rotas, and we should put a stop to that substitution while the Leng review is in progress. We need to accept that it is time to pause the recruitment of PA and AA roles and to halt the expansion of their numbers, particularly until after the Leng review reports, and we should take action, as we have heard, so that PAs and AAs in existing roles are now given the opportunity to retrain into other roles.

In the interim, I hope we can accept that there must be proper regulation of PAs and AAs. They must work within a national scope of practice agreed with the royal colleges. As a first step, as we have heard, the BMA’s safe scope of practice could be adopted.

After the tragic deaths, such as those of Emily Chesterton and Susan Pollitt, we must also hear the voices of patients and the public. Do people want these roles, or would they rather see a doctor?

I end with a quote that Emily’s mother, Marion Chesterton, sent to me. She said:

“We hope that, for all our sakes, precise, thorough and true regulation of PAs will end the chaos, confusion, vagueness and potential danger to patients. We pray for clarity, honesty and co-operation. If our daughter’s life means anything, please, sort out this sorry mess. No more Emilys”.

16:44

[The Lord Bishop of London]

My Lords, it is good to participate in this important debate and I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for having secured it. I declare my entry in the register of interests, specifically that I was formerly the Government’s Chief Nursing Officer.

This is clearly a complex issue, and I join other noble Lords in welcoming the Government’s recently announced review of the physician associates and anaesthetist associates. In building an NHS fit for the future, it is right that the right people with the right training and the right competence undertake the right roles. Over the last 20 years, we have seen an expanding of roles to release medical staff to do what only they can do; for example, the development of nurse-led assessment, advanced nurse practitioners and nurse prescribing, and the expansion of the role of pharmacists. In some sense, the development of physician associates and anaesthetist associates is part of this change. However, any change in role and the healthcare workforce needs to be carefully implemented and regulated. Therefore, I welcome the regulation of physician associates and anaesthetist associates, but I too question whether their regulation should take into account the outcome of this review, rather than moving ahead at present.

The main points I will make are around clarity and trust. Noble Lords will often hear me speak in this place about the essential commodity of trust in healthcare and the health of the nation. Research carried out by Healthwatch found that the public awareness of physician associate roles is mixed, particularly among older people, who are less likely to know the difference between a PA and a GP. Clear information needs to be given to people about the healthcare worker they are seeing, and they need to be reassured that they are competent and working to clear standards.

I am encouraged to hear that both roles and standards will be examined in the review, but can the Minister tell us whether what and how information is given to the public will be part of the scope? I also wonder whether we can learn from past changes, such as the introduction of nurse prescribing, to help us understand how we bring about this type of change.

Giving clarity is a vital step towards ensuring trust, particularly in primary care. We must ensure that we are transparent and that we focus on building trust as a priority. I also speak from a London perspective, where the memory is fresh of the great losses during Covid that were disproportionate in some communities, especially those that still struggle to reach the health service—their trust in primary care is low. Will the Government assess the distribution of physician associates as part of the review and examine how patients might have greater clarity about who they are seeing at an appointment? This is especially important where communication might be difficult, such as when English is a second language. According to the Royal College of General Practitioners, GPs in more deprived areas are responsible for caring for more patients than those in affluent areas. It would be helpful to know how physician associates fit into that picture.

Looking more generally at the workforce and the long-term workforce plan, which accelerates the expansion of physician associate and anaesthetist associate roles, do the Government plan to change the projections of this expansion based on the outcome of the review? What impact will this have not just on the plan but on the wider workforce?

The issue of supervision has already been raised in the debate. While I welcome the diversification of roles in the multidisciplinary team to ease pressure where it is appropriate, it is absolutely clear that the supervision of those roles is important. Who is supervising them? Who are they accountable to? That is particularly the case when there is pressure already on our health service.

When the long-term workforce plan was first published, I am not sure that it answered the question related to supervision. On apprenticeship schemes for roles such as this, what progress has been made to ensure that in hospital settings and primary care, funding is given for backfilling? When apprentices are paid and have time for study, is the hospital or the primary care setting able to backfill with staff? If the Minister has any insight into how this has progressed since the plan was published, I would be grateful to know.

The role of the physician associate is a controversial topic, as has been highlighted in this debate. It is having a very clear impact on team dynamics. Within some of those teams, staff are reporting bullying. Staff morale is low, including that of the physician associates and anaesthetist associates. I wonder whether this should be a high priority for the Government and a dimension of the review.

Finally, I hope that the Government will learn from this review and that the learning they undertake will be transferred to other areas of health. As the Government shift from sickness to prevention, from hospital to community, as part of their 10-year plan, it is likely that diversification—in primary care but also elsewhere—will be required and will need to grow. Therefore, there is an opportunity to learn from this review and to roll that learning out. I look forward to hearing from other noble Lords on this important issue and from the Minister when she responds.

16:51

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, this has been a short but useful debate introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. The Question that she laid before the House underlines the lack of balance that she opened with. She asked

“what the review, announced by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care on 20 November, of the physician associate and anaesthetist associate roles will cover, and what actions they plan to take in advance of the outcome”.

I would hope that if a review of this controversial issue was taking place, it would be considered wise to wait for the evidence and recommendations, not just do something on instinct or limited evidence. Therefore, it is welcome that the Government have opened the Leng review into how physician associates and anaesthetic associates are deployed as part of a team to improve patient outcomes working under the supervision of doctors to support the delivery of medical care.

I thank the approximately 5,000 physician associates and 300 anaesthetist associates who are registered or practising for the professional and dedicated work they do, and the thousands of doctors, nurses and other allied medical professionals of all levels who quietly but professionally and supportively work alongside PAs and AAs as part of the medical team to improve the health of patients.

If I were to think back to when other health professional roles were introduced into healthcare settings when I was managing in the NHS, the issues raised about the work that these healthcare professionals do, and the potential issues that arise, are no different. This is not anything new. What is new is the level of unprofessionalism and hostility that has been shown to these roles.

The lack of respect and the bullying behaviour that some medical leaders within the BMA have decided to adopt when dealing with the issues around the use and deployment of these professionals are not only unacceptable but go against the very GMC regulations that govern you as a doctor. On collaborative working, the regulations say:

“Work effectively … with colleagues in the multidisciplinary team”


and

“respect the skills and contributions”

of all healthcare professionals. Some of the examples of ostracisation, making false claims and bullying at work fall far below what doctors are expected to do and the standards that they are expected to uphold. To that small minority of doctors, I say, “Stop”.

It is clear that PAs and AAs have not had the introduction or supervision that has led to some care being optimal. However, to quote individual cases and then equate the lack of patient safety with all PAs or AAs is neither useful nor correct. The very nature of healthcare is that risk is there and can and does lead to problems. This happens across all professional groups involved in healthcare provision. The issue at hand is whether PAs and AAs have more never events or near misses than other medical and healthcare professionals. Surely, that should be a key line of inquiry to work out the safety of these professions.

Physician associates are mid-level healthcare professionals trained under a medical model to support doctors in diagnosis, treatment planning and patient care. They have a science degree, predominantly, and two years of postgraduate training. PAs can enter the workforce sooner than fully qualified doctors, and, as some evidence suggests, they can make a real difference in relieving pressure on overstretched health services.

The NHS has been using a model of PAs since 2003, and their role has expanded over the years. Yet, despite 20 years of valuable contributions, their integration remains controversial. Some doctors have rightly voiced concerns about their short training period, lack of regulatory authority and potential competition for roles. These concerns deserve thoughtful consideration, which is why the investigation will take place, but they should not overshadow the evidence demonstrating the benefits that PAs and AAs can bring to our healthcare system.

Research led by Professor Vari Drennan and colleagues has provided compelling insights into the effectiveness of PAs across various settings. For instance, an observational study comparing PAs and GPs in primary care found that consultations with PAs resulted in no significant differences in re-consultation rates, diagnostic testing, referrals or patient satisfaction, while maintaining comparable patient outcomes. In secondary care, a BMJ Open study evaluated PAs working in emergency departments alongside doctors in training. It concluded that PAs were equally effective and safe, with no significant differences in clinical adequacy or unplanned re-attendances. What is more, PAs were praised for improving team continuity and efficiency, allowing doctors to focus on more complex cases. These findings demonstrate that PAs can provide high-quality care while addressing staffing mix issues in primary and secondary care settings.

To address the concerns, the new GMC regulation regime will help to deal with some of the genuine issues raised around the scope of practice. I need to be clear, as people keep talking about a national scope of practice. The scope of practice—that people are working within their competence—is down to the individual. That is exactly what the GMC does now with individual doctors. Individuals have to work within their scope of practice, and standards will be laid down by the GMC, which then allows the scope of practice and revalidation to take place. We need to be clear what we are talking about. Along with this new regulatory scheme, there will be professional accountability for education, training and conduct, and it will ensure that individuals undertaking these roles are safe to practise.

Secondly, it would be useful for the NHS to undertake a refreshed national public campaign to raise awareness of PAs and what they do. Some patients still mistake PAs for doctors or nurses, which can lead to confusion and undermine trust and satisfaction. Research conducted in 2021 revealed that a simple information leaflet, co-designed with patients, significantly improved patient understanding of and confidence in PAs. Expanding such initiatives across the NHS would enhance public confidence and empower patients to make informed decisions about their care.

As we move forward, and when the Leng review reports, we must ensure that PAs and AAs are regulated to the highest standards and adequately equipped to perform their roles. Furthermore, improving public understanding of PAs will help their role to be understood more widely by the public.

With these measures in place and other recommendations that will emanate from the review, PAs and AAs will not only help, as part of a modern medical team, to address the future demands of patients but, if the review identifies the key changes required and the Government act on them, become a vital part of a resilient NHS. I hope we can all embrace the opportunity to support our health service and improve patient care.

16:59

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

My Lords, I refer noble Lords to my interests as set out in the register. As a precaution, I will say that I work for a university that has just applied to open a medical school. I also used to be a research director at a think tank that wrote about medical issues, including physician associates.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for securing this important debate, and other noble Lords who spoke. I am also grateful to the House of Lords Library and others who sent their briefings, the health professionals I spoke to, and the journalists who wrote the articles I read in preparing for the debate.

From this reading and from listening to the arguments, it is sad to see that the debate on physician associates and anaesthetist associates has descended into one that is polarised. Some have described it as toxic. We now read about lawyers being consulted and legal cases being launched. On one side, we hear from some doctors and their trade union, the BMA, that PAs and AAs are performing tasks for which they are not trained, that there is mission creep—indeed, that they are sometimes substituted for doctors—that patients are not always told that they are seeing a PA or an AA, not a fully qualified doctor or nurse, and that having PAs and AAs affects the training of some doctors. We also hear that PAs and AAs are blamed for poor medical treatment and even patient deaths. We heard about the sad case of Emily Chesterton from the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley.

On the other hand, I have heard and read about doctors praising these associates; PAs and AAs being bullied or shunned by doctors and health professionals, as the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, referred to; and, in some cases of medical accidents or deaths, that it is not always clear who is at fault and that it is unfair to pick on PAs and AAs when qualified nurses and doctors have also caused deaths and put patients at risk. Others have called for a no-blame culture if we really want to get to the bottom of these incidents.

I have also heard from managers who agree that PAs and AAs should perform only tasks for which they are trained, but who feel that opposition to PAs and AAs is based on doctors and nurses protecting their interests. After all, maybe that is their job. I read a letter from a retired doctor who wrote:

“Physician associates can be a huge asset to the NHS if trained, regulated and supervised appropriately … some of the antagonism from the medical establishment seems protectionist rather than in the best interests of patients”.


In another letter, a cardiac consultant wrote:

“The dispute about the role of physician associates in the NHS is rooted in dogma. Whether the person delivering treatment is a medical doctor is not the issue. What matters is that anyone delivering healthcare is trained and qualified to do so, practises within the correct guidelines and has access to support and guidance whenever a situation arises that falls outside the routine. This should apply to PAs, resident doctors and experienced consultants alike”.


At the same time, though, another consultant wrote that he was

“puzzled by the need for physician associates”

when there are already

“well-trained nurses in speciality roles”.

With that great British understatement, I acknowledge that opinion is divided. But on delving deeper into this debate, there is some hope and some consensus. After all, it seems common sense that physician associates and anaesthetist associates should perform only tasks for which they are trained, but our system of health and care has to continue to evolve, as it has done since the founding of the NHS in 1948. Where appropriate, we may see more tasks delegated from doctors to other medical professionals, but with clear regulations and delineation, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London said.

When I went to a GP surgery as a child, I always saw a GP, but these days, as a patient, I do not always need to see a GP. I may sometimes see a nurse, a physiotherapist or a pharmacist at the surgery instead. It seems reasonable for PAs and AAs to be trained to perform more tasks on the job, under the supervision of qualified doctors.

I am also sure that there is consensus on the need for total transparency when patients see PAs and AAs, and on what they are qualified to do. I have heard from former hospital employees who stress the importance of a clear delineation of what PAs and AAs can and should be allowed to do in a clinical setting. One gave the example of an ECG. A nurse or a healthcare support worker will perform the ECG, but they then need sign-off from a clinician. I was told by that former employee that not all nurses or healthcare support workers know who is authorised to sign that off. So there must be absolute clarity of responsibility for clinical duties, such as the guidance issued by the Royal College of General Practitioners, which states that PAs should explain that they are not doctors when they introduce themselves to patients, and wear clear name badges.

In some ways, what noble Lords have said today will be superseded by the independent review announced by the Government last month to be led by Professor Gillian Leng. We acknowledge that she is a respected expert in evidence-based healthcare, something the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, called for, and a former chief executive of NICE.

I hope the Minister will acknowledge that, since I was appointed as a Lords shadow Health Minister, I have sought to get away from point-scoring on health and social care. I hope to build some sort of consensus on modernising our system of health and care. In this spirit, these Benches welcome the independent review. In fact, I worked with Professor Leng when I was a Health Minister and look forward to her report. I understand it will be published in the spring. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, said, we may need some definition of “spring”, but, as I said in a debate last night, at least it is better than “in due course”.

While it is reassuring to have a definite timeframe for the publication of the report, in the spirit of co-operation, I have a few questions about what happens between now and then. What interim measures have the NHS or the Government announced to address the concerns of the BMA and its supporters over the use of AAs and PAs, as well as the concerns of United Medical Associate Professionals, which represents PAs and AAs, about the treatment and bullying that some of them have faced from doctors, nurses and other medical professionals? What guidance will the NHS give on the responsibilities of PAs and AAs?

I understand that the Minister cannot comment on legal cases, but does she know whether there are any discussions with the various plaintiffs about suspending legal action until after the publication of Professor Leng’s review? Will these legal cases be complete by the time of its publication in spring next year? How do the Government plan to take account of any legal cases that may be resolved after Professor Leng’s report? Will the NHS and the Government have to wait for the legal cases to be resolved before issuing any clear guidance that might be recommended by the report? I acknowledge that there are a lot of questions there. I hope that the Minister can answer them, either today or in writing to all noble Lords who took part in this debate.

Whatever our view on PAs and AAs and the toxicity of the debate, I am sure that we all want to see a system of healthcare that continues to modernise and evolve, in which associates, doctors and nurses offer the best medical care and in which patients feel safe.

17:07

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Baroness Merron) (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, on securing this debate. This is an important issue, as we have heard today. I thank all noble Lords for their invaluable and varied contributions.

I shall start with the toxicity of the debate. I emphasise this Government’s support of and gratitude to all staff. That absolutely includes physician and anaesthetist associates who work hard to treat and care for patients in the NHS. As the noble Lord, Lord Kamall, said, the debate has been not just toxic but polarised. As the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, acknowledged, we have seen bullying, which is unacceptable; as the noble Lord, Lord Kamall, said, we need to look at the toxic culture as well as the toxic debate. I absolutely associate myself with the comments made by the noble Lords from their respective Front Benches. At times, not just the debate but the activity around the subject has been deeply abusive, not just in words or on social media, and has been aimed at PAs and AAs. There is no excuse for this and it will not be tolerated. They are valued team members, as is everybody who works in the National Health Service, and deserve our respect and support.

Let me assure noble Lords that this review—I am glad that it has been welcomed—will be an independent, end-to-end review. It will cover training, recruitment, day-to-day work, oversight, supervision and professional regulation. It will assess the safety of the PA and AA roles relative to existing professions, the contribution that the roles can make to more productive use of professional time in multidisciplinary teams and whether the roles deliver good-quality and efficient patient care in a range of settings. All these matters, among others that noble Lords have rightly flagged today, will be considered.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, asked about resources, support and co-operation for the review. I can assure her that this review is properly resourced and, importantly, that stakeholders across the health and social care system have already indicated that they will actively support its work. I agree that this is vital to Professor Leng’s work. As the noble Lord, Lord Kamall, identified, Professor Leng is a champion for patient safety who brings a thorough understanding of healthcare in this country. She is one of the UK’s most experienced leaders in it and I am most grateful to her for her work. I will draw key points from this debate to her attention, including the matter that the right reverend Prelate and the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, raised about getting information to the public. I take that point and will draw these aspects of the debate to the attention of my ministerial colleagues and Professor Leng.

As the Secretary of State highlighted when he announced it on 20 November, the review will gather available evidence and data on the PA and AA professions. It will also engage with relevant professions, the public, employers and researchers. In response to a number of questions raised today, I am committed to ensuring that noble Lords are kept informed as the review progresses. As has been identified, it will report in spring 2025 and we will publish our findings and update your Lordships’ House on the next steps.

I will address the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and other noble Lords on interim action. NHS guidance remains in place on PA and AA deployment while the review is ongoing. Furthermore, NHS England continues to engage with NHS organisations to ensure that this guidance is adhered to. On the pace of the review, we are committed to it moving quickly to provide clarity, while ensuring that it has sufficient time to consider all available evidence.

The right reverend Prelate spoke of the value of a skills mix and the need for it in providing the kind of healthcare that we need into the future. My belief is that it is recognised—the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, also spoke to this—that the mix of professions required to deliver the right kind of care has evolved continually since the birth of the NHS. As the right reverend Prelate said, on previous occasions there have been many other criticisms and concerns; it is the nature of change. However, I want to be clear that the premise behind the use of PAs and AAs as part of the multidisciplinary team is absolutely sound. To give some context, PAs and AAs have been practising in the NHS for over 20 years, as the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, said. It is not a recent development.

The numbers we are speaking about are small. I will give some context to your Lordships’ House. There are 14,000 full-time equivalent doctors in anaesthetics in England and 170 AAs in the whole of the UK. There are 146,000 full-time equivalent doctors in England and 1,600 PAs. There are 38,420 full-time equivalent GPs and 2,105 PAs. I would not want your Lordships’ House to labour under any misunderstandings.

PAs support doctors to diagnose and manage patients —“support” is the operative word. They are not and should never be used to replace doctors. Similarly, AAs are qualified to administer anaesthesia but only under the supervision of a medically qualified anaesthetist. These roles always have to work under the right supervision. Concerns have been raised by medical professionals about blurred lines of responsibility and whether, in some cases, PAs and AAs are being used to replace doctors. So I understand the need for a comprehensive view of how these roles are being deployed and how effectively. I am confident that the review will address this.

I am acutely aware of the rare but deeply tragic incidences where patients have lost their lives following treatment by an associate. I offer sincere condolences—I know other noble Lords will too—to family and friends. They deserve answers and the assurance that we are listening—and indeed we are. My noble friend Lady Keeley spoke so movingly about the cases of Emily Chesterton and Susan Pollitt, which are deeply tragic. As the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, said, it is so important not to lump every PA and AA together, just as it is not right to do that for any other group. The noble Lord, Lord Kamall, rightly observed that tragic death happens when care is provided by other health professionals. Our job is to reduce that as far as we possibly can, which is what we are working to do.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, highlighted a reference to legal action and redundancies, as well as the systematic impact that uncertainty has created for employers, GP practices, NHS services and individuals. That is why this review is so vital. It enables us to take stock of the evidence, establish the facts and provide absolute clarity for patients, professionals and employers.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, acknowledged, there has been significant debate on the scope of practice, especially for PAs. The review will cover all aspects of PA and AA roles, including their deployment and scope of practice. The issue will therefore be considered as part of the review, and I will not pre-empt its outcome on this or any other aspect. Many questions were rightly asked about what happens in the meantime. NHS England’s guidance on the deployment of PAs and AAs should continue to be followed.

On the important points about patient confusion, the GMC has published interim standards for AAs and PAs in advance of regulation. That will make clear that professionals should always introduce their roles to patients and set out their responsibilities in the team. The Faculty of Physician Associates has produced guidance, which includes an example of what a good initial introduction should look like. The review will also consider the professional regulation of these roles, which, as was set out, the GMC will commence next week.

The noble Lord, Lord Kamall, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, asked about the action that will be taken in advance of the review concluding. It is important to note, as the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, did, that regulation by the GMC will begin in a very short while. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, set out, I am aware that concerns have been raised about the GMC as the regulatory body for the roles. But we can be assured of the benefit of statutory regulation in helping to ensure that all PAs and AAs meet the very high standards expected of—and I emphasise this—every healthcare professional. Where these standards are not met, action can be taken.

This has been a challenging period for the PA and AA workforce, and it is vital that, like all NHS staff, they are treated with respect. It is therefore incumbent on all to do this. I look forward to the review, and I wish Professor Leng well. I thank noble Lords for their valued contributions to this debate. I look forward to PAs and AAs playing their part in providing improved healthcare in this country.

Retail Crime: Effects

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

Motion to Take Note

17:20

Moved by

[Lord Hannett of Everton]

That this House takes note of retail crime and its effect on workers, the community and local economies.

[Lord Hannett of Everton (Lab)]

My Lords, before I really begin this debate, let me say how impressed I have been today with some of the contributions on subjects such as stalking and homelessness.

To turn to my debate, I am so pleased to have the opportunity to debate what I believe is an extremely important issue. This is a welcome opportunity to draw attention to the important issue of retail crime. When I talk of retail crime, I am talking about the individuals who are on the receiving end of it. It is an issue that blights our high streets, towns and cities, right across the country. It affects all of us and our communities. Above all, it affects the people who work in retail—often low-paid workers, who are left feeling vulnerable and unsafe in the workplace.

USDAW’S Freedom From Fear campaign has been running since 2003. In my previous role, I introduced this campaign. It sounds a very stark title; after all, we are not in a war zone. However, I tell noble Lords that many of our members said that, on occasions, as a result of the verbal and physical abuse, it felt like it. The campaign has gathered support from across the retail industry and there have been calls for action from the Co-operative Party and the British Retail Consortium. It is not an “us and them” campaign. Employers do not want their employees abused and have therefore worked very closely with my union over many years. The campaign has made huge strides over the past three years. I place on record the work that my successor, Paddy Lillis, and the executive have done. Just as important are those union representatives who are at the coalface dealing with this issue on a daily basis.

In August 2021, a new ground-breaking law was introduced in Scotland to protect shopworkers from violence, threats and abuse. The abuse can be extremely cutting if you are on the receiving end of some of the comments made over many years. It is testament to the importance of this debate that the campaign was launched in 2003, and I have spoken on it in many countries as UNI commerce president, because retail crime does not recognise international borders.

Changes to sentencing guidelines were also introduced in England and Wales, but these did not get anywhere near what was needed or the measures introduced in Scotland. The situation on the ground has continued to go from bad to worse. We have seen a huge increase in retail crime from organised gangs driving incidents of abuse, threats and violence against retail staff. We must remember that we are talking about a workplace—not a town centre or a public house. This is inside stores. It is obviously right that they welcome people in but, sometimes, they also attract those who feel that they have a right to speak to retail staff in a completely unacceptable way.

According to figures from the ONS, in the year to October 2024, nearly 470,000 offences were recorded by police forces across England and Wales, a 29% increase and the highest figure since records started in March 2003. However, the reality is that under-reporting hides an even worse situation. We know that many retail workers do not report incidents, because they simply do not believe that anything will happen when they do. The British Retail Consortium survey showed that there were more than 1,300 incidents of violence and abuse against retail workers every day in 2022 and 2023. Only one-third of those incidents were reported to police and less than 8% resulted in a prosecution. USDAW’s latest survey of its members found that seven out of 10 have been verbally abused in the past year; 46% were threatened, and 18% were physically assaulted during the year. Theft was the trigger for 61% of incidents in 2023, and this, coupled with record levels of retail crime, is now driving a huge number of incidents.

Of course, numbers roll off a page very easily, but we should remember that behind the statistics are real people. Their responsibility is to go to work and feel safe, and abuse should never be part of the job. Some of the comments that USDAW members made in response to the survey told stories that are harrowing. In fact, I know from my past experience that we have had people who have been physically abused not once or twice but on a number of occasions and have never returned to their employment, because they could not face the idea that the situation might occur again. One said, “A shoplifter grabbed my arm, bruised it”. Another said, “As I was leaving work, I was confronted by a man who came straight to me and physically hit me without any reason or motive”. That person lived in the same community as the shop worker. Another told of homophobic comments and “Threats to hurt me because I refused a sale”. One retail worker said she had been threatened and faced attempted assault just for note-checking, when there was a disagreement over what had been said.

I believe that this is the tip of the iceberg. It is unacceptable that retail workers, who do such essential jobs in our communities, are having to face this on a daily basis. I remember their work and the contribution that they, like all front-facing staff, made during the pandemic to support us as consumers. The anxiety caused by having to return to the workplace where you were actually attacked, threatened or abused, and wondering whether it will happen again, is absolutely horrendous. Many retail workers live in the communities they serve, so they can feel unsafe in their homes and local area. This is an important point. We have had examples of people being followed home and threatened. This fear and anxiety can ruin workers’ lives, and it needs to be challenged and stopped. That is why it is very encouraging that the Government are going to introduce a new stand-alone offence of assaulting a retail worker. I want to place on record my thanks to my noble friend Lord Hanson, not just for the work he has done here on this matter but for his work in the other House, where he supported our campaigns—it goes back many years.

Legislation to make this a special offence will send a strong message that violence against retail workers will not be tolerated. It will help police forces to target resources and improve reporting and recording procedures. It is important that the Government bring this legislation forward and that it is comprehensive in its coverage. We have to start somewhere. The situation in Scotland is different, but I am so pleased that this Government have taken this matter seriously. Where they could go further, of course, is looking at the Scottish law to see whether they can move towards the same outcome. A key step forward will be the removal of the £200 threshold for prosecuting shoplifters. That threshold has effectively become an open invitation to retail criminals, and it is vital that is removed as soon as possible.

Additional funding in relation to retail crime was announced in the Autumn Budget, including £5 million over three years to continue funding the national policing intelligence unit, Opal, to combat organised gangs targeting retailers; £2 million over three years to the National Business Crime Centre, to support police and businesses in preventing and tackling crime; £100,000 in 2025-2026 to the National Police Chiefs’ Council, for further training on crime prevention. All this is very welcome and a sign of the importance that the Government are placing on tackling retail crime.

The inquiry by the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee is also very timely and welcome. Its report makes 15 recommendations, all of which are carefully considered and are useful contributions to the policy debate on this important issue. Its recommendations acknowledge the work that the Government are already doing in this area, including the stand-alone offence and the removal of the £200 threshold. The report also, of course, focuses on rehabilitation. We know that many of those stealing from shops and attacking retail workers are repeat offenders. Often, drugs and alcohol are involved, and the cost of living crisis has, to some extent, made the situation even more of problem. These are different reasons, but nevertheless important.

It is essential that there is proper investment in treatment and prevention measures to tackle this problem effectively. The importance of good data collection and sharing is also highlighted in the report, which calls for a retail flag system to be set up. It highlights the need for legislation to ensure that crime prevention technologies, such as facial recognition, are used ethically. It also recommends regulations are introduced to prevent the selling of stolen goods online. Another key recommendation is that a public information campaign should highlight the impact of shop theft.

It also talks about the importance of the language used on the issue. The term “shoplifting” does not reflect the serious nature of these incidents—after all, these are real people going to work. Sometimes the image of retail is that it is not as important as many other industries; it is, and these people do real, valued work, on which we all depend. The new Government have already shown that they take retail jobs seriously, value retail work and stand with retail workers. That proves that the long campaign since 2003 is now beginning to deliver outcomes.

We need to ensure that the legislation is passed as quickly as possible, with the most comprehensive application, and that the right policing resources are put in place to enforce it. I am impressed that there are going to be more police on the streets, which I hope will turn the view that retail crime is not really as important as some other crimes, because it is. We need better co-ordination between the police and retailers, ensuring that these hardened career criminals can no longer leave retail workers living in fear. We will not be able to fix the issue overnight, but we need to act urgently. The recommendation in the committee’s report recognised the scale of the problem and the need for serious action. The introduction of the stand-alone offence is a huge milestone and, alongside the other recommendations, it will make a real difference in keeping retail workers safe. Violence and abuse are not parts of the job.

I hope that all the speakers who put their names down will contribute in a positive way to the debate. More importantly, to have this on the record gives a real boost to retail workers, allowing them to see that this is taken seriously in both Houses.

17:34

[Lord Kirkham (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by declaring an interest as a retailer. I started work at 16 as a shop assistant, in 1969 founded the business that would become DFS furniture, and more recently served for a time as director of the retailer Iceland Foods.

DFS is fortunate that it is quite difficult to steal a sofa from a store display. However, it is a very different story at Iceland Foods and at every other retailer operating in our high streets, out-of-town retail parks and shopping centres. Shop theft has become a plague affecting every shopkeeper in the land—and I am not alluding here to hungry individuals stealing food for the family or children cheekily pocketing a bag of sweets. I mean organised and violent criminals who go into stores equipped to clear their shelves of high-value items and will not hesitate to use threats and violence against anyone who gets in their way.

We know from the excellent Justice and Home Affairs Committee letter last month that there are currently nearly 17 million incidents a year of shop theft across the country. In its last financial year alone, Iceland Foods—the smallest of our national food retailers—recorded 1,000 violent incidents involving store staff who were threatened and attacked with weapons, including hammers, screwdrivers, knives, hypodermic needles and even firearms. No one should have to go to work feeling frightened, knowing that they might face abuse and assault in the course of their day.

The police are overstretched, and too often they are unable to attend stores when they are called. Security guards are legally constrained: they are shackled in their inability to search or detain offenders before the police arrive, and thieves always seem well informed of their legal rights. Where prosecutions ensue, the punishments handed down seem to offer little deterrent.

Even more bizarrely, the state seems determined to obstruct efforts by retailers to protect themselves. The Information Commissioner’s Office “condemns” the sharing of photos of known shoplifters among retailers on WhatsApp groups, apparently placing the “criminal’s right to privacy” above the safety of store workers. As retailers look to take advantage of new technology to deploy live facial recognition to identify and deter thieves, they are warned that they are moving into an “Orwellian dystopia” where Big Brother is watching you. While it is simplistic to declare, “If you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear”, retailers are entirely correct to prioritise the safety of their staff and customers above the right to privacy of the criminals, as indeed the chairman of Iceland Foods, Richard Walker, has pledged to do—because this is a crime, not a minor misdemeanour, and it is certainly not a victimless offence.

Ultimately, we all pay for retail theft, do we not? We pay in the higher prices that shops have to charge to cover the cost, not just of the goods that are stolen but of the CCTV systems, the alarms and the security guards. We pay for the NHS treatment of shop workers who have been physically injured by thieves, or of those whose mental health has been damaged by the trauma they have suffered. We pay too in the degradation of the retail environment. Who wants to shop in stores where legs of lamb or bottles of spirit have to be tagged, security boxed or locked in cabinets or refrigerators that can then be accessed only with the help of staff, or to run the risk of becoming collateral damage as a gang runs amok clearing goods off shelves? Shopping should be a safe and pleasurable experience whether you are looking to buy luxury goods, gifts from Mayfair galleries or something for the family’s tea on the high street of a northern town.

Organised, aggressive and violent threat theft is intimidating customers, deterring shoppers, destroying community cohesion and making some of our high streets no-go zones for law-abiding families. There can be no hope of high street revival and the associated opportunities for economic growth unless and until the crime wave is decisively addressed. As the Justice and Home Affairs Committee recommended and the noble Lord, Lord Hannett, commented, we should sweep away what is in effect the decriminalisation of thefts valued at less than £200.

The promise to make assaults on shop workers a specific criminal offence is a welcome gesture, and I am glad that the Government have pledged to enact this measure that was proposed by the Conservatives in April. But until that is done, it is important to recognise that assault is already a crime, and we should ensure that the existing law is enforced with rigour.

We should give the police the resources to respond to the thefts from shops and give the criminal justice system the resources to prosecute offenders and punish them appropriately. We should reinforce the teaching of citizenship in our schools so that children develop an appropriate respect for the property of others and for civility at all times. We should teach them that crime does not and cannot pay.

We should crack down on the social media companies that make it all too easy for professional thieves to resell stolen goods and on the venues that facilitate it. With a couple of clicks of a mouse, stolen property can appear on offer to millions through Facebook Marketplace within minutes of its theft.

Let us please stop putting regulatory hurdles in the way of retailers who want only to protect their store, staff and customers, keep prices down, and ensure that they are not driven out of business. Give retailers’ security guards the legal powers they need to be effective. Most definitely lift the ban on sharing images of known thieves and ensure that facial recognition technology is permitted—with safeguards, of course. Let us not rule it out on the basis that it is an affront to criminals’ right to privacy.

Talk of retailers potentially being driven out of business is certainly not overdramatic. I know at first hand British retail businesses whose losses from shop theft and the cost of trying to prevent it considerably exceed their annual profits.

We evidently have a Government of change and the October Budget clearly indicated that we can act quickly and decisively when we want to. It would not be premature on this occasion to act quickly to halt this horrific wave of criminality that is undermining our town centres and threatening our society. I thank noble Lords for their tolerance.

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

My Lords, there is limited time in the debate. There is a set time of two hours, so I ask noble Lords to please stick to the time limit.

17:42

[Lord Tope (LD)]

My Lords, I hope that does not come off my time. I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Hannett, for introducing this important and timely debate. I declare my interest as a member of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee, chaired by my noble friend Lord Foster of Bath, who is very sorry that he cannot be here tonight. I am not in any way his substitute, as he will be pleased to know I have made clear.

Immediately after the general election, the committee conducted a short inquiry into what was initially termed “shoplifting”. In November, the committee wrote to the Minister for Policing, Fire and Crime Prevention with our conclusions and some recommendations. The Minister’s reply to the committee was received last week.

This debate is not specifically about the committee’s report and I do not speak on behalf of the committee in it. I shall leave the Minister to give the Government’s response as he sees fit when he responds to this debate. However, my comments today inevitably are based largely on what I learned during that inquiry, to which reference has so far been made by both previous speakers. I will try not to repeat too much of what they have already said.

The first point that particularly hit us in the inquiry was after our first evidence session, when it was the immediate and unanimous view of the committee that it must change the title to “shop theft”. We felt that was more important than might perhaps first be believed. The term “shoplifting” seemed to trivialise the crime and give the impression that it was relatively harmless and victimless. As the noble Lord, Lord Hannett, has rightly made very clear to us, it is anything but victimless. The victims are on the front lines in the shops. Whether it is fair or not, the widely held belief that the police do not take this issue too seriously simply enhances that impression.

The committee’s first recommendation, which I strongly endorse, is that “shop theft” should replace “shoplifting” wherever possible. Its regular use in everyday language by local and national government, the police and the media—and, not least, the retail trade itself—will go some way to reinforcing its serious nature. Over what I believe will be a surprisingly short time, everyday language will start to change, and with it will come the recognition that we are talking about something very serious indeed—not just kids nicking a few sweets from the local sweet shop. We can make a start on that in this debate. In her response to the committee, the Minister committed to using the expression “shop theft” when appropriate. When the Minister replies, can he give us an indication of what the Government consider “appropriate” and, rather more particularly, when its use would be inappropriate?

This morning, I spoke to one of our local Members of Parliament. He told me that, in his south London suburban constituency, shop theft is the issue most often raised with him, after housing. It is widely accepted that shop theft is greatly underreported, often because victims do not believe that the police will be able to do anything about it. My MP colleague told me that there are two large, well-known supermarkets next to each other on the main shopping street in his constituency. One reports all incidents of shop theft to the police, while the one next door reports such incidents only to its head office.

Reliably accurate figures are hard to agree, and I suspect that we will hear a number of different figures today. The figures reported to our committee are that, in the year to March 2024, 443,995 incidents of shop theft were recorded by the police, a 30% increase on the previous year. However, evidence to the committee suggested that that was a “drop in the ocean” compared to the likely real figures. We were told that the real figure was more in the region of 17 million incidents a year, with a cost to the retailer of around £2 billion—and rising fast. Can the Minister tell us what steps are being taken to achieve better and more accurate reporting and recording of shop theft incidents?

Clearly, we are not talking about petty pilfering—nicking from the local sweet shop, for instance; this is serious organised crime and needs to be dealt with as such. The committee learned about Pegasus, a new partnership between retailers and the police aimed at building up a better picture of the organised criminal networks involved in retail crime. I very much welcome this partnership working and would like to see it extended to include local authorities. But Pegasus is seriously inhibited by its definition of “organised crime” as that

“which operates across two or more police force areas”,

meaning that it excludes all activity and information at a more local level. As a former local authority council leader, I believe that it is at the local level where we begin to start tackling these issues. Perhaps the Minister can tell us who is responsible for that definition. I do not know whether it is the Government or the police, as I suspect it is. More particularly, who can get it changed?

Clearly, there must be a market to dispose of such a volume of stolen goods, and much of that is in online sales. The committee recommended that the Government introduce regulations to make it more difficult to sell goods anonymously in an online marketplace. Can the Minister tell us what steps the Government are taking to crack down on that? Shop theft is clearly now a very serious problem that is hugely damaging to retailers, shop workers, the general public and the economy. All the evidence shows that it is increasing rapidly. We all look forward to hearing from the Minister how the Government are tackling it.

17:49

[Baroness Hazarika (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my good friend the noble Lord, Lord Hannett of Everton, for organising this important debate. He brings great wisdom and experience, having represented shop workers over many decades, and is one of our most respected trade union leaders at USDAW. I also look forward to hearing from my noble friend Lord Monks.

The timing of this debate is highly apt and very personal to me because, on Monday evening, I popped into my local shop in Lambeth, south London, to pick up some groceries. A very aggressive man barged in, pushed past a queue of customers, marched up to the alcohol aisle by the till and grabbed two bottles of spirits. The poor security guard tried to stop him. The shoplifter then turned very aggressive and threatened not only the member of staff but everyone around him. The whole shop froze with fear and the guy simply walked out. It was genuinely incredible to witness. Everyone in the shop was very shaken up by this, and I spoke to the security guard and asked if he was okay. He told me that this happens all the time. He fears for his safety and that of the customers, especially when there are mums with young kids in doing their shopping. He also told me that this guy was a serial offender; he comes in a couple of times a week, sometimes even a couple of times a day. He is a violent menace, and yet nobody does anything.

The shocking thing is that everybody knows who this person is. The evidence is there, and yet nothing happens. The police do not take it seriously and employers do not know what to do. The security guard cares deeply, but he does not want to risk life and limb. The worst thing is that this is the new normal. Let that sink in: we now live in a society where we teach our children about rules and laws, yet they see people saunter into a shop, fill their boots, threaten violence and walk out scot free. In what world is that okay?

There will be some who argue that this kind of crime is just low level. I could not disagree more. Shoplifting is not trivial in any way; it is theft. It is often the canary down the coal mine, which tells us an interesting story about where society is. We all know that sky-high shoplifting goes hand in hand with anti-social behaviour—litter, street harassment, aggressive begging, mugging, phone theft, drug dealing, violence, particularly against women and girls on the street, and the rest. Anti-social behaviour is blighting so many of our communities and causing so much misery.

I am part of a local community group in the Brixton area where I live called Action on ASB!, and I can tell you that local residents are distressed and fed up with it. Not only is it horrible to live in an area where you and your kids feel frightened; it causes huge damage to the local economy. I will quote the Brixton business improvement district, known as BID, which represents more than 500 local members. It says that the Brixton economy is worth £2 billion annually, which is a third of the whole Lambeth economy, so it is important. Movement data shows a considerable fall in footfall—in some cases as much as 25% compared to the previous year. The BID argues that personal safety, crime and anti-social behaviour is a key reason why people are staying away from the local area, and cites shoplifting and verbal and physical abuse against workers as a major problem.

Retail crime, along with anti-social behaviour, has reached an unsustainable level in Brixton and it is affecting people’s quality of life. But this is not just in Brixton and Lambeth; it is happening all over the country, and it can have devastating consequences.

A much-loved local business owner and good friend of mine, who owns a second-hand shop, had a terrible experience recently. As he was closing up one night, he was attacked and beaten so badly that he has now lost his sight in one eye. His life was saved only by a passer-by who made an intervention. So I say again to anyone who challenges me: retail crime is not low-level crime. It is intrinsically connected to more serious crime, and it is time we took it seriously.

We need more police, and I strongly welcome the announcement today of 13,000 more officers, but we need those police to take this more seriously and actually turn up. We also need to prosecute and punish this crime. There are often a small number of hardened criminals who are responsible for terrorising local shops and are known in the area. As the noble Lord, Lord Kirkham, argued, let us target them using technology such as facial recognition.

We also need to acknowledge that alcohol and drug addiction, homelessness, prostitution and mental health issues contribute to this kind of behaviour, so we need a joined-up approach that brings together local authorities and police, along with other key agencies from public health and housing.

Above all, we need real leadership on this from our politicians, national and local, and from our police. We should not just surrender our local high streets to a Wild West where shop workers, residents and customers are subjected to theft, intimidation and violence on a daily, sometimes even an hourly, basis. The toll on them is not just physically but psychologically immense, and it is harming the wider economy.

There is also a moral question here: what kind of society do we want to live in? We once prided ourselves as a nation of shopkeepers. The local shop and convenience store make up the fabric of our communities —it is where we see our friends and our neighbours—but their owners and workers should not feel like they are living in a war zone, as the noble Lord, Lord Hannett, so eloquently describes. It is time to get tough on retail crime and make our shops and streets safer for everyone.

17:56

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

I add my congratulations to my noble and long-standing friend Lord Hannett of Everton on securing this important debate. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hazarika, has just said, my noble friend Lord Hannett was a distinguished and highly effective general secretary of USDAW, the shop and other workers’ union. USDAW has long been engaged in this campaign to secure more protection for retail workers, and I am very pleased that this campaign is now coming to fruition and success. It is evident that my noble friend Lord Hannett will continue henceforth to be a champion of retail workers in this House, and we look forward to that.

That will be really needed because, as others have said, violence in the retail sector and in some communities is increasingly endemic. My noble friend Lord Hannett quoted some of the terrifying statistics, and I will just pick out two that shocked me when I prepared for this debate. In the year before the election, street theft soared by 40% and shop theft by 29%. Anti-social behaviour reached new heights in our towns and cities.

What kind of country are we living in? It is a country where too often, I am afraid, gangs rule the roost, drugs are a major feature of local communities and the economy, and there is an avalanche of shop theft, with vulnerable staff being subject to intolerable levels of abuse and violence. Even people living in comfortable neighbourhoods are aware of the problem: 36% of people in England and Wales have experienced or witnessed some anti-social behaviour in their communities. Rural communities are also affected, not just the urban areas. Farmers did not used to lock up their machinery in Cambridgeshire. When I was a young man staying at a farm where my uncle worked, you could just go out, get the key off a hook, put it in the tractor and off you went. I bet they do not do that now; I bet they are all well locked up. This is not a country at ease with itself while all this kind of thing is going on. I suspect that there is much general angst about the state of Great Britain among our people today.

It is linked to the fact that our economy is stagnating, public services are struggling—you can point to very few of them and say that they are doing well; they are all hard pressed—the international outlook is grim and the scars of Brexit persist, holding back the economy in particular. There is much to do; the challenges for the Government are many and complex.

It was good to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Hanson, the other day, outlining the Government’s plans in this area. In his contribution, he brought verve and energy to the debate on the problem of crime in our communities. He also recognised that it will take more than a crackdown to tackle anti-social behaviour. Youth services and clubs, community centres, libraries and education centres—all of which help with socialising young people —have been badly cut in many areas. I take this opportunity to congratulate all those who have helped rescue the iconic Salford Lads and Girls Club, which was announced this week. Unfortunately, not every youth club has the same range of patrons willing to give generous donations as was the case in Salford.

A distinguished former Labour Prime Minister famously said:

“Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”.


That should always be the maxim of a UK Government. While I welcome the Government’s proposals—a new law to protect retail workers, introducing respect orders, tackling low-value shoplifting and increasing the number of police—they need to be accompanied by a recognition that economic growth nationally, and new vitality in our town centres, are very important. Poverty and crime walk arm in arm—one feeds the other.

The Government handled the summer riots very well—they were tough—and I hope they do as well with the criminality in our communities. If the objectives of growth, growth and growth are met, we will have every chance to make a huge difference to the problem that we now face and to create a happier country.

18:01

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I very much welcome this debate and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hannett of Everton, whom I regard as a noble friend—not in the sense used in our House but in the sense used outside it. We worked together at Tesco for many years. In that time, Tesco grew rapidly. That helped me as an executive, but it also helped the noble Lord, who often topped the table in new trade union membership as a result. He and Sir Terry Leahy had a shared love of Everton’s premier football team. Few people know that the packaging for Tesco value lines were blue and white because of that love.

I will talk about two things this afternoon: first, and very positively, the need to deal much better with retail crime and my support for that; and secondly, but only briefly as it is a wider issue, my concern about the negative impact of the Budget on retail.

Retail crime was a major concern when I worked in the retail sector—now 10 years ago—and the work we did together in the British Retail Consortium and with the police made a huge social contribution. We invested a lot in security measures and our security suppliers built up export-earning businesses overseas. At that time a lot of the theft was by individuals stealing to feed their drug habit. I remember the sadness of arresting such people when I started my Tesco life in a store in Brixton, which was cited by the noble Baroness, Lady Hazarika. Then, it was bottles of Nescafé down women’s trousers and cuts of meat smuggled out with the help of a blind eye at the check-out, but now the position is much worse. Organised crime groups are increasingly involved in systemic, large-scale retail theft, amply justifying a major initiative to tackle this.

I welcome the £7 million in the Budget for funding both the national policing intelligence unit, Opal, to combat organised gangs that target retail, and the National Business Crime Centre on prevention and the tackling of crime. However, this is funding over three years. It does not feel enough, given not only the ever-growing risk and the way gangs in one area use the proceeds of crime to expand into other areas but their growing use of knives and violence. My noble friend Lord Kirkham described this extremely graphically.

The truth is that retail crime in the UK has risen sharply, as the noble Lord, Lord Monks, explained. The graph in the excellent Library note shows how seriously the number of offences has increased, and we know that even that is an underestimate. According to the BRC, retail crime cost businesses £1.8 billion in 2023, which was double the previous year’s figure. Thefts rose to 16.7 million, up from 8 million. That is 45,000 theft incidents every day. Equally concerning is the incidence of violence against retail workers. It has skyrocketed, rising by 50% to 1,300 incidents a day. The noble Lord, Lord Hannett, explained the compelling numbers in this area.

I could see this coming during the passage of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill in 2021 and although I worked well from the Back Benches with the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, and secured some changes to sentencing guidelines, I would have liked Labour support for an actual offence of the kind that we introduced at that time for health workers. It was a missed opportunity, so I am delighted by the Government’s promise to create a new offence for assaulting retail workers. Please can they advance this quickly and introduce the necessary Bill? I believe that they will also expand electronic tagging and the use of facial technology.

The House of Commons is crying out for meaty Bills that contribute to growth rather than devoting so much time to debates, so I look forward to hearing the Minister’s plans for legislation and enforcement, and the £200 threshold. Will he agree to look at deterrent tariffs for this new assault offence and for retail crime more generally? These need to be tough enough to attract police time and police priority. One of my sons works for the Met, although not in retail, so I know how these things work. Moreover, we need dedicated resources for the police to address retail crime and capture the gangs. We are crying out for much-improved police response times to show that the damaging criminal behaviour seen in retail is taken seriously. I will strongly support tough measures.

This brings me on to the negative. Noble Lords will know that retail is vital to the UK economy and our high streets. It employs 3 million hard-working people and 2.7 million in the supply chain, contributing over £100 billion annually to GDP. What is so disappointing is that the Budget has created unmanageable costs for a sector which employs millions of people and yet runs on very low margins. The new policies are estimated by the BRC to add costs of £7 billion a year by 2025, threatening jobs, insolvencies and more inflation. That is £2.2 million on national insurance, £2.7 million on the national living wage increase and—another slap in the face—a packaging levy of £2 billion. Of course, retailers’ rates bills are also expected to increase in April. This does not leave much for the security measures that the industry needs to tackle crime, which cost it £1.2 billion in 2023—up from £720 million the previous year.

This is a very important and timely debate. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hannett, for his eloquence, his passion and his work on “freedom from fear” and for bringing us all together today. I trust that it will lead to early action.

18:08

[Baroness Crawley (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Hannett for introducing this vital debate. There can surely be no doubt that the scale of shop theft in the United Kingdom represents a national crisis. We seem, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hazarika, has said, to be no longer a nation of shopkeeping but a nation of shop-thieving, as the most recent set of statistics makes all too clear. It was good to see that a distinct offence of assaults on retail workers was heralded by the Government in the King’s Speech a few months ago and updated this week. I hope that USDAW’s “freedom from fear” campaign can move forward on that basis, and I thank my noble friend Lord Hannett for the part he has played in that over many years.

In the town closest to where I live, there are increasingly signs in shops asking people to be respectful to staff. In some ways, this is a good thing, but shoppers should require no reminder to be civil. I know people who, however financially challenged they may be in life, would never dream of stealing so much as a chocolate bar from a store. I also know people who take hourly paid jobs in shops, largely out of family financial necessity and certainly not out of a craving for that kind of work. Both sets of people deserve to be protected from rising prices, the inevitable consequence of so much shop theft, and from abuse, violence and anti-social behaviour, whatever its genesis, be it drugs, drink, organised crime or, as the noble Lord, Lord Monks, said, economic poverty.

We cannot rejuvenate the high street and put a stop to physical dereliction with such an epidemic of tawdry crime hanging in the air, nor grow our local economies or create new opportunities for the new independents who want to get going locally. Shopping malls and high streets should collectively be a space for comfort and quality, not a venue waiting to be exploited by thugs, vandals and, increasingly, gangs stealing on demand. In every sense of the term, shops are a place where decent people try to make a living. The scale of intimidation, as we have heard from many noble Lords, that they face in too many parts of the country is socially unacceptable and economically damaging. The courts and the police must really start playing their part. As we know, shop theft is not a victimless crime. Somebody pays for it in the end—you and me—as the noble Lord, Lord Kirkham, said. Meanwhile, staff and small business owners should not be fearful about going to work and that they will be abused, threatened or worse, as we have heard.

USDAW has welcomed the announcement from the Government that they will introduce new respect orders as part of the crime and policing Bill. They give the police and councils powers to crack down on repeated anti-social behaviour, ensuring that repeat offenders face the consequences of their actions. These new powers, announced this week, come alongside a commitment to fund thousands more neighbourhood officers and PCSOs. New legislation will also remove the threshold of so-called low-value shoplifting offences—I am afraid those days are long gone. Paddy Lillis, USDAW’s general secretary, has said:

“After years of the Conservatives effectively decriminalising retail crime, leading to a more than doubling in shoplifting since the pandemic, we now have a Government that is delivering on its promise to bring town centre crime under control”.


The impact of retail crime on businesses, workers and communities has been horrific. Customer theft is the biggest source of financial loss for businesses. In 2022-23, businesses spent £1.2 billion on increasing their security systems. This represented an astounding 65% increase on the previous year. The Retail Trust’s 2024 survey of over 1,000 retail workers found that 47% of them really feared for their safety at work. That is a dreadful statistic, but the retailers have become fatalistic about whether reporting crime will produce any results.

This is where the Government’s recent announcements bring us some hope, finally. The Government recognise the scale of the issue and are determined to do something about it—the sooner the better. We cannot continue where we are. The old ways are just not working.

18:15

[Baroness Donaghy (Lab)]

I congratulate my noble friend Lord Hannett on initiating this debate and pay tribute to his years of campaigning for the rights of shop workers. I have worked with many women activists from USDAW over the years, particularly when I was a member of the women’s committee of the TUC. Of course, I worked with a predecessor of his, Lord Davies of Coity. When he was simply Garfield Davies, we were both members of the executive of the European TUC. More importantly, some would say, he roped me in to be a member of the TUC cricket team—a role he took extremely seriously while I stayed as close to the boundary as I could to avoid that leather ball.

I always admired USDAW’s work because my mother was a shop worker in the Scotch Wool Shop, in Woodward’s, the department store in Leamington, where I also worked for a while, and in Scholl’s Foot Care. None of those shops exist now. For years, the union has campaigned for more protection for its workers, and I welcome the Government’s announcement that there is to be the stand-alone offence that has already been referred to. I assume, by the way, that that also includes warehouses associated with retail. Perhaps the Minister could confirm that they will still be regarded as covered by that protection.

I had the privilege to move the Private Member’s Bill in this House that successfully provided for legislation on assaults against emergency workers. Of course, we all know that this does not solve all the problems. The level of violence some shop workers have had to face has already been described, and it is frightening. A few hundred yards from where I live in Peckham, a small bookmaker’s was invaded by a gunman not once, but twice. The second time, barely over £100 was taken and a gun was put to the head of the female assistant. Needless to say, that bookmakers never reopened. I wonder what Mr Chris Philp, with his bright idea of a citizen’s arrest, would have done in those circumstances.

I appreciate that the Government have made a number of announcements intended to tackle this issue. The additional money, which has already been referred to, to keep the National Business Crime Centre and the relevant national policing unit working will certainly help gather information over time and change the climate of crime left by the previous Government. If noble Lords opposite are a bit hurt by that remark, perhaps their Front Bench can explain why the Government left that increase of 30% in assaults and abuse of shop workers in one year, 2023.

Additional money to train the 13,000 extra neighbourhood police and PCSOs is also welcome. The noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, told us on Tuesday in questions on the Statement on respect orders and anti-social behaviour—a very useful trailer to this debate—that the Met website indicated a 15-minute wait for shopkeepers reporting incidents. This may explain why so many do not report incidents at all, and why thieves think they have a free pass. Will there be a concerted effort to tackle that response rate? Also, can the Minister say more about the neighbourhood policing guarantee, which intends to restore patrols in retail crime hotspots?

I have two other medium-term concerns. Can anything be done to clarify the current recorded crime data? The Office for National Statistics has stated that estimates from the Crime Survey for England and Wales should be designated as accredited official statistics, but apparently the police-recorded crime data has not been accredited, and we have been told that it should be used for illustration purposes only. Is that because the police have to record their data under so many different laws: the Theft Act, the Offences against the Person Act, the Criminal Justice Act, the Protection from Harassment Act and the Anti-social behaviour, Crime and Policing Act? Is there any way we can improve efficiency and effectiveness here?

My second medium-term concern is this: are the Government satisfied that Amazon is paying the same proportion of tax that shop owners have to pay to stay in business? It would be a pro-business move if the Government provided a level playing field for shop owners.

The USDAW survey indicates that 70% of staff experience verbal abuse, 41% of women experience sexism and 54% of non-white workers experience racial harassment. We are talking epidemic proportions here. Do we know whether supermarket owners are satisfied that their staffing levels provide a safer environment? Are they satisfied that the calibre and training of their security staff are sufficient for them to do a good job? I appreciate that small shops cannot necessarily make the same provisions.

Finally, I congratulate the Minister on his efforts to turn this lawless ship around. During the two hours of this debate, 109 shopworkers will have experienced incidents of violence and abuse. That is a shocking epitaph for the previous Government, but also a worrying statement about the kind of society we have become.

18:21

[Lord Godson (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hannett of Everton, for securing this important debate on retail crime, which, along with property crime more broadly, is a crimewave that, as has been described by noble Lords, is engulfing our streets and neighbourhoods. I also pay tribute to the authoritative remarks of my noble friends Lord Kirkham and Lady Neville-Rolfe, which I think prove amply the value of this House in bringing such important issues to the top of the national agenda.

We all know that the latest statistics show that police-recorded offences of shop theft—sorry, it is a bit difficult altering one’s vocabulary; it is a bit like the shift from QC to KC in respect of noble and learned Lords—have risen to a 20-year high. They are up 29% on last year, yet retail crime and the wider concept of property crime as a whole are too often not considered worthy of attention, regularly dismissed as they are as mere low-level crime. I will say more about that later.

I must declare an interest, in that Policy Exchange, the think tank for which I work, has long taken an interest in the impact of property crime, and retail crime in particular. In 2015, in the wake of the Tottenham riots, it published two reports by a then relatively obscure Back-Bencher, David Lammy, one of which was entitled Taking Its Toll: The Regressive Impact of Property Crime in Britain. He found that such crime is particularly insidious because it impacts, ultimately, upon the poorest in society. That shopworkers are being forced to endure all this in their working lives is intolerable, but the effects of this type of criminality upon the whole of society are broader and more subversive.

The British Retail Consortium estimates that £1.8 billion per year is lost to customer theft, costs which affect the poorest customers most when they are passed on through higher prices and rising insurance premiums, thus becoming unsustainable to retailers. Staff become too scared to go to work and choose to seek employment elsewhere. Without concerted action, we now risk scenes similar to those seen elsewhere in the world, most notoriously in San Francisco, where a permissive environment towards theft, violence and abuse has had a substantial knock-on effect, leading to widespread shop closures and the creation of economic wastelands across entire, mostly already poor, neighbourhoods, but not just the poor neighbourhoods.

It is a positive step that the Government are planning, through a crime and policing Bill, to reverse the catastrophic decision to downgrade the theft of goods worth less than £200 to a summary-only offence. I welcome also the decision to create a stand-alone offence of assaulting a shopworker and the associated intention to boost neighbourhood policing. However, I must ask: will all this be enough? It is unfortunately true that the forces of law and order have become increasingly absent when it comes to this form of offending. Of the estimated 16 million offences of shop theft committed last year, there were only 37,000 prosecutions—a rate of less than 0.25%. The Metropolitan Police commissioner is on record as describing shop theft as a “capacity challenge” for the police.

The THRIVE model is currently used by the police to prioritise their response to incidents. The acronym, as many noble Lords will know, stands for: threat, harm, risk, investigation, vulnerability and engagement. But the model, as currently constituted, fails to recognise sufficiently the broader impact of property crime. As a result, this type of criminality rarely meets the threshold for a robust police response. I fear that the Government will claim that police operational independence means that changes in this area are beyond their reach. If this is the case can the Minister now advise this House, and the public, exactly what policy the Government can and will implement to guarantee that police forces will deploy their resources to deal effectively with property crime? Prolific offenders must be subject to punishments which reflect the totality of their offending and their impact. If nothing else, the law-abiding public are surely entitled to a break from some of the worst of these offenders.

Earlier this year, we also saw the unedifying scenes where offenders were released early from their prison sentences; they ended up celebrating on the streets. Given that our prison capacity is already woefully insufficient, can the Minister advise what measure the Government will introduce to ensure that repeat offenders committing property and retail crime serve a suitable measure of justice, if not sentenced now to a term of imprisonment? I fear, however, that all of these good measures will count for little if the culture of the police and the courts does not change markedly in this regard.

I was much impressed by the testimony of the noble Baroness, Lady Hazarika, on her experiences in south London. If I may say to her, it was the most brilliant case that I have heard in either House of Parliament for that now unpopular doctrine from the United States of broken windows, pioneered by George Kelling and James Q. Wilson in their Atlantic article in the early 1980s and which, of course, had so marked an impact upon the thinking of Bill Bratton, one of the greatest police commissioners and officers of our time, in cleaning up New York during the 1990s and early 2000s. As noble Lords will know, the broken windows doctrine was about the sight of visible crime in terms of vandalism or shoplifting—low-level crime, as it is inaccurately described. If I can describe in a more popular way the import of what broken windows was all about, and what the noble Baroness was saying, it reminds me rather of the line in the musical “Oliver!”. When Fagin is speaking of Bill Sykes, he said:

“I recall, he started small


He had to pick-a-pocket or two”.


That is the essence of broken windows: what starts small ends up much bigger.

What struck me so much in the noble Baroness’s testimony, as it seems to apply to so much of the debate on law and order at the moment, is that she described how the security guard fears the thug much more than the thug fears the security guard. Perhaps we can get to a gameplan from the Minister. We should handle this in a non-partisan way. I know that one noble Baroness referred to Chris Philp. I am not going to endorse anything about have-a-go heroes—but what is the gameplan from the Minister and the Government to ensure that, even where police officers are not present, the totality of civil society feels able, with the support of the police, to take on this kind of threat at all levels of our society?

18:29

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

My Lords, I join in congratulating my noble friend Lord Hannett of Everton on initiating this debate and on his work on this subject over many years. I also serve on the Justice and Home Affairs Committee and, as the noble Lord, Lord Tope, indicated, we completed a short inquiry into shop theft last month. It may have been a short inquiry, but I found the evidence we had deeply shocking, as confirmed by the contributions today. So I welcome the chance to say a little, although most of my key points have already been used up by other Members.

I start with the expressions “shoplifting” and “shop theft”. We had a witness, Professor Emmeline Taylor, who said that shoplifting had

“connotations of being trivial, petty and somehow victimless”.

Years ago, “shoplifting” seemed to be an expression for schoolboys picking up a bag of sweets on their way home—not acceptable and quite wrong, but so different from what we are faced with today. We have already heard the statistics: in the year to March 2024, 443,995 incidents of shop theft were reported to the police, up 30% on the previous year. But it is very clear that any of the statistics we have are, as somebody said to us, a drop in the ocean. A vast amount of money has been taken from retailers—and, therefore, from us—through customer theft, which has doubled in the last year.

The first key point is that incidents of shop theft are seriously underreported, and a lot of the problems stem from the perception that it is not as big a problem as it really is. There is a further perception that shop theft is not treated seriously by the police—that may be unfair to them, but that is the perception. That inadequate response attributed to the police risks undermining confidence in them and indeed in the wider criminal justice system. If a retailer phones for help and nothing happens, confidence in the whole system has been lost. One thing that really shocked our committee was how highly organised some of the shoplifting is: there are whole groups of criminals who send people out to steal particular items, which they can resell all too easily elsewhere. It is a highly organised operation.

Some of the key points that came out to me represent for the Minister and the Government an agenda for action—not just ending the use of the term “shoplifting”. Of course, we all welcome the Government’s commitment to creating a new offence of assaulting a shop worker. It is intolerable that people who serve us when we do our shopping should be in fear of attacks that happen all too frequently. It is intolerable that that should be a way of life for them. As my noble friend said, it is a sign of how we, as a country, are sinking below the level where we used to be.

One other issue that came through to us was that, if an offence is committed within one police area, it seems to attract less attention than if the offence extends across more than one police area. Yet these thieves start small—or they start in one area—and then they move. So there should not be this limiting definition. We welcome that the Government will repeal the section in the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 that in practice decriminalises shop theft where the value of the goods is under £200. Again, that means that there is no reporting and that it is not treated seriously enough by the powers that be—all of which adds to this very serious situation.

It is clear that we need new regulations to make it harder to sell stolen goods anonymously on online marketplaces. When things are stolen, it is too easy for them to be marketed anonymously online, which is surely not acceptable. Of course, we need new technologies wherever we can have them. If we are going to use facial recognition, there have to be safeguards, but these do exist. Certainly, we need all possible new technologies to deal with this. We need the maximum co-operation between the retail sector, the police, local councils and local communities. Only if we have such co-operation can we tackle the problem with confidence.

The Minister has an interesting task because the agenda set by this House will give him quite a lot to think about. I hope he can convert it into action—that will make a difference, and it will make the lives of many of the retail workers in this country more tolerable than they are now. In fact, it will make us a more law-abiding country.

18:35

[Lord Razzall (LD)]

My Lords, there is clearly common ground on how important the issues are that the noble Lord, Lord Hannett of Everton, has raised, as demonstrated by a number of noble Lords’ speeches.

I think both the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, and my noble friend Lord Tope indicated the known figures, as reported to the relevant committee, which are that 443,995 incidents of shop theft—as I will call it—were reported in the year up to March 2024. That was up 30% on the previous year. Of course, as noble Lords have indicated, they are only incidents that were reported to the police. Other figures suggest that there may have been up to 17 million incidents not reported in the same period. Other noble Lords have indicated that there seems to have been a change in practice, with a lot of shop theft now by organised gangs rather than by individuals. Other noble Lords also said that there has been a significant increase in violence and abuse towards retail shop workers.

It is unusual to sum up on a debate in which everyone agrees. I do not think that anyone has said anything that I disagreed with, with the possible exception of one thing by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe. I did not entirely disagree with her, but she stands out as maybe saying something different. Everybody else has been completely unanimous in what they have said, so it is an unusual role to sum up today.

I therefore thought that I would pin down the Minister on the record and ask him to confirm the extent to which the Government accept the recommendations of the committee on which my noble friend Lord Tope and the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, have sat. The chair, my noble friend Lord Foster, unfortunately could not be here this evening. I would like the Government to confirm, if at all possible, whether they agree with the following major recommendations of that committee.

The first is to change the word “shoplifting” to “shop theft” in all circumstances, not just occasionally or where appropriate. Secondly, I think the Government have confirmed that they will create the offence of assaulting a retail worker, but perhaps the Minister can confirm the timing of that when he responds. Thirdly, do the Government support the repeal of Section 176 of the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act, which limited prosecution for theft under £200? If so, what is the timing of that? Fourthly, what are the Government’s proposals to improve treatment for people where there is drug and alcohol involvement? A number of noble Lords have indicated that this is a key factor in increases in shop theft and violence, so perhaps the Minister can confirm what plans the Government have to improve and invest in that area. Fifthly, do the Government agree on the need to improve reporting systems between retailers and the police, which was a key recommendation of the committee? Sixthly, do the Government agree to legislate to regulate the ethical use of new technologies, especially by private companies, for crime prevention, which again was a recommendation of the committee?

There may have been other recommendations by the relevant committee, but those seem to have been the key ones and from these Benches we urge their implementation. I will just float two other possibilities that have not been raised by any noble Lord. First, will the Government find a way to end two toxic practices that affect many retail workers? The first is being forced, typically in the run-up to Christmas, to break the law in order to meet delivery quotas. The second is people on zero-hours contracts receiving less than one week’s notice of their working hours. Are the Government prepared to look at that?

Secondly, and this may not command universal support among your Lordships, what do the Government think of the idea of a higher minimum wage for workers on zero-hours contracts as compensation for their irregular working hours, particularly in the retail sector? I am delighted to have wound up on this report, and I am delighted that we seem to have unanimity.

18:41

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hannett of Everton, for bringing this important debate to the House and for the work he has done and is doing in this important area. Indeed, I thank all noble Lords for their thoughtful and very sincere contributions this evening. I think we can all agree that the impact of retail crime on workers, the community and local economies is a real threat to businesses and people’s livelihoods. As a Conservative, I believe in being tough on crime and I welcome any attempt by the Government to stamp out retail crime where they see it.

We have heard a lot today about the record of the previous Government. Since 2010 neighbourhood crimes, including burglary, robbery and theft from the person, are down by 48% and overall violent crime is down by 44%, with more police officers on the streets than in 2010. The previous Government took a number of significant steps to reduce and prevent retail crime. Our plan, Fighting Retail Crime: More Action was launched on 10 April and highlighted five areas of work to tackle retail crime. We made it easier for retailers to report crime by allowing them to send CCTV footage of an incident to allow it to be processed as quickly as possible after an offence is committed. However, there has been a worrying rise in shoplifting and violence towards retail workers, which we need to address.

Police-recorded crime figures show that shoplifting offences—I will use that term just for the moment—increased by 37% in the 12 months to December 2023, although the number of people charged with shoplifting offences in the same period rose by 46%, which demonstrates that the previous Government took shoplifting and retail crime extremely seriously.

I want to address the issue of shop theft under £200, which has been referred to in this debate as “decriminalisation”. We did not change the law on shop theft; it has always been a criminal offence. However, under the previous Government it was made a summary offence in 2014. To stress this point, we did not decriminalise shop theft under the value of £200. It remains a punishable offence under the Theft Act but a summary-only offence, triable at a magistrates’ court. I assure noble Lords, given my background in policing, that it is a Section 1 offence, it has always been considered as a Section 1 offence by me, and I think “shoplifting” is a rather unfortunate term. When I think back to my own policing experience, I spent some years as a CID officer at Marylebone police station, which covered Oxford Street, one of the busiest streets in London.

The noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, raised a very important point about processing these people. One of the big challenges when you have a police station full of people who are perhaps of no fixed abode or have come to London on a shopping spree is dealing with them administratively, which is very difficult and takes time. It is all well and good talking about resources for police, but the question is how we deal with these people, and perhaps we have to streamline how we do so.

If I may, I have some questions for the Government. In our plan, the Conservatives included a presumption towards electronic monitoring as part of a sentence served in the community for those who repeatedly steal from shops. Can the Minister confirm whether His Majesty’s Government will be doing the same, building on this good work? This legislative change will provide that, on the third sentencing occasion, an offender would be electronically monitored as part of any community sentence, or post-release for the duration of any licence period. Will the Minister confirm whether the legislation will be changed as we intended?

Finally, in government, the Conservatives introduced the crime of assault specifically against retail workers. The previous Government pledged the use of facial recognition technology to help catch perpetrators and prevent shoplifting in the first place, backed by a £55.5 million investment. Can the Minister assure the House that this investment will continue to be provided at the same level, as a minimum, by the current Government?

We must take a moment to think of lone retail workers, often working late at night to serve their communities, who may be victims of opportunistic crime. It is imperative that we support those who work in this sector and seek the harshest possible penalties for those who seek to disrupt our social fabric by attacking retail workers. I feel sure that the Minister, together with the House, will agree with me on this point.

As a former police officer of 32 years, I know how important it is that the police are well-funded, supported and seen as integral to the community. I also know how important it is to tackle retail crime, and the deep harm it causes to local communities. I point to our good record in this area but note that there is always more to be done. I look forward to receiving answers from the Minister and to listening to what he has to say. I thank noble Lords for their attention.

18:47

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)]

I am grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to this debate. As the noble Lord, Lord Razzall, said, there is unanimity on the approach to the issue of shop theft, as has been eloquently outlined by my noble friend Lord Hannett. I thank him for securing this timely debate, and all who have spoken in it. My noble friend brings to his role in your Lordships’ House a wealth of experience in standing up for shop workers in his work for USDAW. He is continuing that work in conjunction with his colleague Paddy Lillis, who is the general secretary of USDAW. Most importantly, my noble friend brings the life experience of thousands of members in shops and stores across the United Kingdom, who have contributed to developing USDAW’s policy and, in doing so, the policy of the Labour Party and this Labour Government. They contributed too to the pressure that was put on the previous Conservative Government to take action.

I declare an interest: I have been a member of the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers for 44 years. I have stacked shelves, worked the tills and delivered to people’s doors, so I know the pressures in retail. The noble Baroness may be interested to know that I did this for Tesco, and later the Co-op.

The important thing is that there is unanimity here today. We need to change the tenor of the debate on shop theft and the protection of shop workers. We have seen today that there is unanimity in this debate: it is not acceptable in our society to steal from shops; it is not acceptable to attack shop workers in the course of their duty; and it is not acceptable to undertake ram raids or organise crime raids on shops and outlets. This is not a victimless crime; it adds money to everybody’s bills and to the cost of strengthening security for staff, and this Government are committed to taking action on it.

We do so for the reasons that have been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Hannett, the noble Lord, Lord Kirkham, in a very powerful speech, and my noble friends Lord Monks and Lady Crawley and many others, who indicated that there is an unacceptable rise in the level of shop theft.

I particularly welcome the committee report that was produced. The noble Lord, Lord Tope, was a key member of the committee, along with my noble friend Lord Dubs—who, I must say, on his 92nd birthday is arguing in this Chamber for protection for shop staff and against shop theft. That shows the commitment that he has to his party and his cause but also to the good of the country at large. I wish him a very happy birthday.

Shop theft is up 29% in the year to June 2024 compared with the previous year. The British Retail Consortium crime survey has shown that around 475,000 incidents of violence occur each year. My noble friends Lord Monks, Lady Crawley and Lady Hazarika all mentioned the importance of tackling that crime. Whether it is on Lambeth High Street, in Brixton or in north Wales, where I am heading back this evening, there will be a concerted effort to ensure that we reduce the number of crimes that occur in shops. However, it is not just about the shoplifting; it is unacceptable to have 1,300 incidents of violence against staff in our communities at large.

It is not easy for this Government, and it will never be easy. But the points that the noble Lord, Lord Godson, and other Members of this House made today are extremely important. That is why the Government have a plan for action to both mirror some of the recommendations made by the Home Affairs Committee and Justice Committee of this House, and to commit to a range of things.

On a personal basis, having campaigned for some of these things for the best part of 20 years, I am absolutely delighted to stand at this Dispatch Box and to be able to put action in place, because we have a Government who have committed to do that. Among the actions that we will bring forward and put in place is a specific offence of attacking shop workers, which USDAW—which I am a proud member of—has campaigned for since 2003. Freedom from fear is an absolutely important issue. Shop staff are not just serving us but are upholding the law on alcohol, knife, solvent and tobacco sales. When they find themselves facing threats because of that, they deserve our support and our encouragement. That is why the Government will in due course, as a manifesto commitment, bring forward a specific offence of assaulting shop workers.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Davies, that the £200 threshold did not change the law but it sent a signal to the police that shoplifting under £200 was not an important issue. I recognised that in 2014 and I led the opposition to that. We forced a vote on that clause then because we thought it would downgrade the importance of shop theft, which, as a whole, it did. We will repeal that in due course and will make sure that the police have proper guidance on those issues.

We will, as a number of my noble friends mentioned, increase the number of neighbourhood police and PCSOs to 13,000, to have a named officer in each community who will work with the local community and look at the very issues that the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, mentioned as well—community intelligence-gathering and community support. Through work we are doing now, which is a continuation of the previous Government’s work, we will look at Opal and Project Pegasus to co-ordinate action on gangs, tackling crime across borders and across police authorities.

There were points made in the debate which I will certainly reflect on, as well as the issue of drug and alcohol treatment orders and on technology, ensuring that we look at facial technology issues as a whole. We will reflect on those issues in due course, and when legislation on these issues comes before this House, which it will in relatively short order, we will be able to deal with those issues as a whole. We keep new technologies under review, and we will keep those technologies under review in the future.

I noticed a small frisson of concern from the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, about the Labour Government’s Budget, which I will return to briefly in a moment. As my noble friend Lord Hannett said, it provided £100,000 for the National Police Chiefs’ Council, £5 million over the next three years to develop Operation Opal and £2 million over the next three years to build the National Business Crime Centre. If the noble Baroness looks at the detail in the Budget, she will see that there are proposals on business rates and on strengthening and revitalising the high street. I have campaigned for these issues over the last 10 to 20 years and I am more than proud to stand here today and say that this Government will take action on shop theft and assaults on retail workers in due course.

The facial recognition technology mentioned by the noble Lords, Lord Kirkham and Lord Davies, is a very powerful tool and has huge potential to keep our streets safe. This gives us an opportunity to look at how we operate it. We particularly want to look at how we can put that on a firm footing to make our streets safe. In answer to their specific point, we want to ensure that we look at the legal framework and discuss that issue with the public over the coming months.

I am acutely aware that this House has been united today. There are no political differences. There may be differences over pressure, time and the things we have done, but there is unanimity that Parliament and Government should take action on these issues. A number of detailed issues were mentioned. I could go through them, but that would take time. I hope that the emphasis I have put on the measures the Government intend to bring forward give reassurance to all Members of this House that this Government are committed to the issue of shop theft.

The noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, summed up the importance of this issue and how we need to focus on the staff. Shop workers will be on the train with me tonight. They will be on the bus going home. They will be walking the streets around you. They are the people who serve you and they deserve our support. The customers are there to support the staff and we need to make a stand to say that, although we will never eradicate shop theft or violence, it is a priority for the Government, the police and Parliament that, between us, we will help reduce crime, shoplifting and violence over the course of this Parliament.

I commend the measures that my noble friend Lord Hannett has proposed. We will hopefully find widespread support in due course for the measures that this Parliament will face when the Government bring them forward.

[Lord Hacking (Lab)]

Does my noble friend agree that the most shocking account in this debate was given by our noble friend Lady Hazarika who was in a shop when a rogue came in and stole two bottles of alcohol? He was known as a repeat offender and his identity was known. Would my noble friend agree that that is a most shocking account for this framework to improve the law?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend for his intervention after I thought I had finished. Repeat offenders are part of a vicious cycle that needs to be broken. Part of that is due to alcohol or drug dependence and part of it is due to interventions in alcohol and drug dependence. That is part of the focus of the Ministry of Justice. The MoJ will look at many measures in relation to how we better tag, control and monitor offenders and what interventions we make to reduce their dependence on alcohol and drugs.

It is important that the revolving door of prison sentences—the cycle of people going into prison for six months, coming out, committing the offences that my noble friend Lady Hazarika mentioned, going back to prison, coming out again and then finding themselves homeless—needs to be broken. I know that my noble friend Lord Timpson, who is accountable to this House, is very exercised by those issues and will bring forward a number of measures to try to improve how we deal with offenders who have a persistent offending behaviour. Overall, the issues of tolerance are still there. We should not tolerate shoplifting, attacks on shop staff or organised crime gangs, and we should look collectively at what measures we can bring. I hope that I have given some indication to the House of how we can do that.

19:00

[Lord Hannett of Everton (Lab)]

My Lords, brevity is probably the call at this time of night. I thank all noble Lords for their contributions; all of them made excellent points—too many to repeat. Again, I thank the Minister for his consistent support on this issue, not just here in this House but, prior, in the other House.

My noble friend Lady Hazarika gave an example of her real-life experience. I wish that it was a one-off. It was a graphic example of what takes place on a regular basis.

I never wanted this to become a political debate, and nor was it—it would be hard to have any separation of support on resolving and challenging this important issue for shop workers. The noble Lord, Lord Razzall, made a point about unanimity. It was interesting to hear that every speaker, irrespective of which party they belong to or have been a member of, knows that this is a joint issue that needs a joint approach.

I thank everybody for their support. I hope that, if there is one thing noble Lords take from this debate, it is that the contributions made here today will be so important to retail workers in my union when they realise that, clearly, there are people in this place who care as they do and have articulated it.

On the £200 issue, I will finish by saying that I do not believe for one minute that it was intentional for the police not to respond, but the reality is that they were not responding. The real risk here is of retail crime being normalised. It was becoming not acceptable but normalised. It was no longer a shock to hear some of these stats.

The noble Lord, Lord Monks, said something that connected with me when he made reference to poverty and retail crime—not in terms of a justification or an explanation but in saying that, in reality, when there are major economic challenges, you have different extremes. There are the gangs, which are there to make money and do not care about the impact, and then there are other people who are more desperate. I do not say that as a justification; I just say that these are the realities.

Once again, I thank noble Lords for their contributions. USDAW fully appreciates this, and it has been well received.

Motion agreed.

House adjourned at 7.02 pm.