Grand Committee

Thursday 17th September 2026 Grand Committee

Thursday 17 September 2026

Arrangement of Business

Thursday 17th September 2026 Grand Committee

Announcement

12:15

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Hunt of Bethnal Green) (CB)]

My Lords, if there is a Division in the Chamber while we are sitting, this Committee will adjourn as soon as the Division Bells are rung and resume after 10 minutes.

National Empty Homes Strategy

Thursday 17th September 2026 Grand Committee

Question for Short Debate

12:16

Asked by

[Lord Bird]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the potential of a national empty homes strategy to help to end homelessness.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

As someone who lived in social housing and whose eldest daughter was a squatter in Brixton and who got into social housing through squatting empty buildings and being involved in the squatting movement in the 1970s, I am very interested in using resources that are never used correctly. In the early days of the Big Issue, when we set out on the road not only to get people off the streets but to get them into housing, we found that one of the big stumbling blocks, under every Government, including the wonderful Government in which the noble Lord, Lord Young, then Sir George Young, was Minister of Housing, was that there were so many legal reasons why we could not grab hold of the thousands of empty units of social housing that could be used for social good.

When we move forward 35 years—because it was our 35th anniversary last week—we come to the realisation that we have this absolutely brilliant means of helping the Government to meet their target of providing as many people as possible with social housing, but the stumbling block is planning, local authorities and ownership. There is a plethora of reasons why we cannot just say, “Here is a person in need”, or a family in need, “and here is a property in need”, in the sense that it is empty, it is vacant, it is not carrying out any social purpose, and melding them together. There are so many impediments to this actually happening.

When the Big Issue started, 35 years ago, we were very involved in the empty homes movement because we could see, not just from our own experience, that this was a completely wasted resource and that society should grasp it and do two things. One is to house people, and the other is to get rid of waste, get rid of redundant property, and get rid of the idea that there were people out there who, as much as they needed housing, could not use the opportunity to take over these properties. In the early days, the Big Issue was a pain in the rear. We were doing things and occupying places, we were shouting and we were demonstrating in Parliament Square and all sorts of things—but very little has changed, if you look at the problem. Whatever Government come in, they always tell you why they cannot achieve the simple thing of putting need with resources.

I will be campaigning at the various conferences at the end of the month and into next month to do something very simple around the problem of social housing. We know that, over the past 40 years, nearly 2 million houses have been removed from the social sector and sold on, because Margaret Thatcher and her acolytes wanted to spread middle-class values and property ownership into the working classes. I agree with that. I hate the idea that we still have a working class, 35 years after the Big Issue and 80 years after I was born in the slums of Notting Hill, where everybody seemed working class. I am disappointed that we have not dismantled our class system.

I can see why this Government and many others, including Tony Blair’s, have not done that. By the way, the idea of people buying their social homes was not a Conservative one. I had an argument with the present Lord Speaker, and he upbraided me when I said that this started in Callaghan’s Cabinet, which looked at the idea of buying social housing and was doing a big event—and we, as a Marxist-Engelist-Leninist-Trotskyist group, did our best to stop that Labour Government becoming too Conservative.

The point is that we have a problem, and I would love any help that we can get in bringing together need and resource. What can we do? Forgive me, but, while I love this Labour Government and Andy Burnham, who I have known on and off over the years, along with the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor—they are all brilliant, and we are all singing off the same hymn sheet—they all point to what happened to the last Government and the one before that and the one before that and say that there are imponderable reasons why we cannot just put need with resource.

I should say that, last night, I was out celebrating, and I did not get back to my hotel until about 5 am. I was celebrating that my son, who works with me, is going off to India, and celebrating my daughter. It was a wonderful opportunity, but I will not take up too much of our time with that. But here I am, to ask what we can sensibly do—and cut the blether and the impediments—to match need and resources. There are so many resources available in this country. I believe that one of the problems for every Government is that they have never been able to step back and do a social audit of the advantages and disadvantages in society, and grasp the opportunity. I am calling for us to get behind the idea that there is enormous resource, but every Government always put their hands in the air and say that they cannot do it, or can do only a limited amount about it. Let us end that and solve this problem. Need and resources—put them together.

12:25

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, this seems a strange, intimate place for us to have these formalities, but I am delighted to add my words to the debate on the Question before us. One of the first things I want to do is use this occasion to pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for the extraordinary work that he has done in his own extraordinary way over so many years. If that goes on the record as part of my contribution to the debate, I will be very pleased indeed.

The Library briefing gives all kinds of information; I will not repeat it here because others have read it too and we can see it for ourselves. One of the difficulties is defining exactly what we mean by an empty home—that is, a home with nobody in it. For how long and under what circumstances has it been empty? What factors are involved? They are not just all of a kind.

I did pick up from the briefing some words that the noble Lord, Lord Bird, may be comforted by. It suggests that the Government are

“setting out plans to ‘make it easier for empty homes to be brought back into use and expect[ed] councils to use the powers we’ve already given them to ensure that this happens’”.

It also said that the Government

“noted that local authorities can access funding associated with bringing empty homes back into use”.

As an opening statement, as often happens with this kind of issue, I feel the need to start from the other end of the spectrum, having been homeless. I have never owned a home. I live in a little two-up two-down terraced house provided by the Methodist Ministers’ Housing Society. That is the extent of any expertise I might bring on the question of home ownership.

I remember a key moment in my early life. When I was 10, my mother suffered domestic abuse of an awful kind, which I remember graphically to this day. She had been pursued through the divorce courts and declared the guilty party. She was evicted from the family home with her two small boys, and we were homeless for an indeterminate amount of time—I was too young to have counted or kept a record. Neighbours put the three of us up. Finally, my grandparents, who were caretakers in a factory and lived within its confines—they had two rooms plus a scullery, and they were very proud of their scullery—said, “Well, we’ve got two rooms. You’d better have one of them”. I was brought up in one room in a factory in Burry Port, so I inevitably come at the question of homelessness from my own experience of being homeless.

I spoke in a debate on another issue about the smell of panic. That was about school meals and my mother having to feed her two boys when the school holidays were on. I still associate those words with my memories when I remember, as I do, the smell of panic in my body and my jeans as my mother asked yet another neighbour if they could put us up for the night. These are not things you forget. In 1952, at 10 years of age, I faced stigmatisation, eviction and homelessness. We had been living in one room in a brickyard within a factory. All of that was part of my very being as I grew up, and I cannot for the life of me address this issue without that coming to the surface.

As the noble Lord, Lord Bird, noted, 35 years ago, the Big Issue first came out. It has been 40 years, just now, since I took charge of the west London homelessness mission at Seymour Place, which was open 365 days a year. I slept in Lincoln’s Inn Fields with the homeless. I tried to get as close to them as possible to see the range of issues that end with homelessness. Therefore, talking about how to bring assets into use makes most sense to me when I think of how far away they seemed from me in my day.

I passed the 11-plus and entered a bourgeois world—the bourgeoisie and I were now one. I visited so many of my friends’ homes in my teenage years, but never once could I invite any one of them to mine. Therefore, it seems such a natural thing to ask that a way be found to deal with the problem and crisis of the moment, especially if lazy and unused assets are in question. We must find a way to do that.

The matter has become a little complicated for me, because I have just had the most wonderful holiday in Burry Port, at 8 Silver Terrace, which is just round the corner from where I was brought up. It was the most bustling place; it was our Tiger Bay in those industrial days. But now, the whole of Silver Terrace—20 terraced houses—has been taken over by the Airbnb industry. We were there on that ticket and enjoyed it wonderfully, but it has become such an empty, ghost-like experience, at the hazard of whoever is living in houses there at the time. There was no community—and nor could there be a community—and so I became aware of 20 houses in a row that could be used in a different way, if we found a way to do it.

For all that, it is a human right for people to have a home—a roof over their heads. I have lived long enough in the company of homeless people to know what wretchedness casts them into the street. If it combines with personal failures of their own, it can be absolutely disastrous. So I am very happy to speak in this debate. I had hoped to speak a little lower down the list, so that those who know the facts and figures and the trends and policies could get in first, but here I am, having to be autobiographical right at the outset, to set the tone. For me, it is a matter of still being able to smell the panic that comes from not having a roof over your head and being desperate to do my little bit to make the world a better place where people do not have to endure that degree of degradation and destitution. Expecting the Committee’s kindness and forbearance for such a note to be struck, I now yield my place to others with facts and figures and with tendencies and policies.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Hunt of Bethnal Green) (CB)]

My Lords, despite my suggestion that the noble Lord, Lord Bird, could sit down at the beginning of proceedings and the informality of the Room, we are standing in this Room unless one cannot.

12:33

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, it is a real pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, with his very moving personal story of the impact that homelessness had on him as a child. It is worth placing on record that 175,000 children today are living in temporary accommodation and going through what the noble Lord described.

I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bird, on his choice of subject and share his frustration that so many homes lie empty when there are so many people in housing need. Like the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, I pay tribute to his work on tackling homelessness over 30 or 40 years.

The speech of the noble Lord, Lord Bird, took me back about 30 years to the first time I met him. I visited the new distribution centre for the Big Issue in inner London—I think it was legally occupied then—and made a speech, which probably lasted more than eight minutes, commending his initiative. After that, when I was Housing Minister, I always bought the Big Issue when I met a seller on the streets. In those days, it cost 35p; today, it is £5 and still a bargain. However, I did not always read the editorials because, when I did, I found some searing criticisms of the Government’s housing policies. As such, I tended to give the content a miss.

I will briefly mention three initiatives that I launched over 30 years ago to deal with empty homes. I do so not to seek commendation but to make the point that this issue has been with us a long time and many Ministers have had a go at tackling it. In 1992, I launched the Empty Homes Agency—now called Action on Empty Homes—in response to exactly the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Bird, including the sheer waste of homes lying empty. At that point, it was 700,000. That was driven forward by one Antony Fletcher, who launched me into a series of turf wars with my ministerial colleagues because it was the Department of Health, the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office that were the guilty parties. But we also worked with local authorities—they were in many ways easier to get on with—and we got their numbers of vacancies down by 40,000 over a five-year period. Action on Empty Homes is alive and well, doing valuable work under the leadership of Rebecca Moore and Chris Bailey. That was one initiative.

Another initiative that I launched in 1991 involved flats over shops. At that point, there were 100,000 empty flats over shops. We embarked on a three-year campaign to bring them into use, putting £25 million on the table for local authorities to adapt the schemes, in many cases providing separate entrances to the flats above the shops. Again, that had a big impact.

Many of the solutions either existing or suggested by noble Lords involve an element of compulsion—empty dwelling management orders, CPOs, works in lieu, enforced sale—or they involve public expenditure. Being a Conservative, cautious about increasing public expenditure and about more regulation, the third approach I tried was different: making the owners of empty properties a deal they could not refuse, but with no compulsion and no extra public expenditure. It was called Housing Associations as Managing Agent, or HAMA. The deal was that a local housing association would say to somebody who owned an empty property, who did not want the hassle of renting and did not want the risk of a tenant who did not pay or who might trash the property, “We will manage the property for you. We will find a tenant, we will guarantee the rent, we will return the property to you in the same condition as we found it, and we will remove the tenant at what point you want the property back”. If the property needed some work, and some of them did, the housing association would do the work then recoup the money from the rent. The rent that the owner received was below market rent because it was a fantastic deal, as there was no risk. The lower rent saved money for the housing association or the local authority, which might otherwise have had to pay a market rent for a similar property.

We launched five pilot schemes with housing associations, and I recall going to the first property in Paddington, in conjunction with the Notting Hill Housing Trust. I was then either sacked or promoted, and I lost sight of the scheme. I did some googling yesterday, and it seems to have sunk without any trace at all. The Minister, whose heart I know is in the right place on homelessness and empty properties, might just ask her office to look through the records and see whether this is something that might be resuscitated. If it is, I would like to go to the first launch of it.

12:39

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, it is great to be back speaking again. It has been some time since I have made a contribution in this House; I have had some challenges. It is wonderful to speak on a topic secured by the noble Lord, Lord Bird. I join the chorus of congratulations on his 35 years tackling homelessness, dealing with successive Governments and being frustrated. We are now at the beginning of a new Government, and the noble Lord is giving huge praise to them and the current Prime Minister—he sees huge opportunities. I am sure the noble Lord is drawn to the fact that this Prime Minister has made it his very first pledge to see the end of rough sleeping. He wants to ensure that everyone is in by Christmas, which is a very noble endeavour.

However, I hear echoes: I have heard this before. In January 2009, when I was council leader in Hammersmith and Fulham, the then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, summoned me to the Broadway centre in my borough, in Shepherd’s Bush, to launch his campaign to end rough sleeping. At the time, Boris set the ambitious target of ending rough sleeping in London by 2012. Some years later, that pledge has been met by neither him nor successive mayors. When he was Prime Minister, he made the same pledge to end rough sleeping in England. Unfortunately, we did not see the end of rough sleeping by 2024, and we are not going to see it by 2027, by which time Theresa May wanted to end it. These challenges are here for some time, and it is important to come up with concrete policies that address them.

This is a timely debate. I am interested in data and statistics, and the numbers are not good. The number of homeless people, whom we owe a duty to help, has increased from 269,000 in 2019 to a record 330,410. My noble friend Lord Young mentioned the number of children in temporary accommodation. The number of households in temporary accommodation has hiked from 95,000 to 135,000. The number of rough sleepers is now at a record level, at 4,793 in autumn on a single night, up from 2,443 in 2021. The numbers are going up, and it is not for lack of housing support. The amount of money going on direct housing benefit and the housing element of universal credit is ratcheting up all the time. It is now at £39 billion, up from £27 billion in 2018-19.

It is right to set challenges. It is right for the noble Lord, Lord Bird, to set the challenge of bringing need and resource together. It is right for the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, with his personal experience of homelessness and “smelling the panic”, as he put it, to ask how we bring in assets to find a way through this. I am delighted that my noble friend Lord Young went back into the far reaches of history to come up with specific policies that might make a difference. I would like to add a few to the three that he mentioned.

First, if we are to do something about addressing the challenge, we have to recognise the problem that we are dealing with. I would zero in on one number, not many numbers. Let us look at the number of homes that have remained empty for more than six months; I think we can all agree that bringing those homes back into use is the policy challenge. The number remained stable for five years from about 2012 to around 2017-18, but it has now risen from 248,000 in 2022 to 309,000, so it is up by about one-third since those stable years around a decade ago. Let us focus on that.

Why are those homes empty? Let us be clear: they are not all private homes; a number of homes in social housing remain empty for long periods of time, and there can be very good reasons for that. The problem of long-term vacancies is irrespective of tenure. We have only anecdotal data about this, but sometimes it is due to a lack of funding to refurbish and renovate a home. Sometimes people invest in and hold an asset and do not use it, just to see a return on investment—the so-called buy to leave. Other times, family members die and there is no clarity about who the beneficiary is, so a home remains empty.

Whatever the reasons, let us think of specific policies that can help. This is where I turn not to the 1980s and 1990s but to the coalition Government. They initiated the empty homes programme, which involved a direct amount of money, not a general housing grant, which was successful in bringing more empty homes back into use. So the first thing I would call for is a dedicated pot of money, recognising that we are all in favour of long-term empty homes being brought back into use.

Secondly, if we agree that that is a good thing, can we have a progressive, far-reaching and generous Treasury that realises that there is no benefit to it of a long-term empty home? It is not securing any tax revenues. How about thinking about not charging VAT on long-term empty homes for refurbishment? That is the same as a new build. With a new build, no VAT is payable. What about removing VAT specifically for long-term empty homes? There might be homes that are vacant for more than six months. Perhaps we could create a threshold for that. Why not look at stamp duty? You have to pay that if you transfer ownership of empty homes yet, with new builds, no stamp duty is payable. So, specific things can be done.

I ask the Minister if she would consider these three things: can we go back to the idea of a dedicated pot of money to bring long-term empty homes back into use? Can we come up with creative mechanisms that incentivise? A carrot is often better than the stick, as my noble friend Lord Young has said. Let us look at whether there can be a waiving of VAT or stamp duty to bring this resource back into use for social good.

12:46

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, I am not particularly comfortable talking about my own experiences of homelessness, and I am not going to, but the comments we have heard today prove that it can happen to anybody. I am patron of a brilliant charity in Watford, New Hope, where we know that all too well. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for introducing this debate and for his lifelong persistence in keeping homelessness firmly on the agenda. I, too, start from a position of agreement and entirely share his aspirations behind the call for a national strategy. Like all of us, we also share your frustrations.

At a time when we have over 100,000 households living in temporary accommodation in England and councils are spending extraordinary sums simply managing the consequences of homelessness, it is entirely right that we look at homes standing empty. The costs are eye-watering. I am not usually one for statistics, because I can never remember them, but some figures are too striking to ignore. We are spending £2.29 billion a year on temporary accommodation, while more than 300,000 homes stand empty. Frankly, that is bonkers. We are paying a fortune to manage housing failure, while leaving one of the most obvious solutions gathering dust.

We are also reliably informed that for the public investment needed to deliver one new-build home, we could apparently bring 5.6 empty homes back into use. If any investor were offered that return on their money, they would snap it up without a second thought. Why are we not doing it?

There is also a human cost. For a family living in temporary accommodation, homelessness is not an abstract policy principle or problem. It is a child travelling miles to school or changing schools. It is a parent trying to hold down a job while living out of a suitcase or losing that job. Families are then cut off from the communities and support that they probably used to rely on. There is a neighbourhood cost, too, and you do not hear much about that. Empty properties become eyesores; they attract vandalism, fly tipping and anti-social value, and they certainly undermine pride in your neighbourhood. So, I am very much with the noble Lord, Lord Bird, on the destination, but perhaps I disagree a little about the route—perhaps I am more in tune with the noble Lord, Lord Greenhalgh.

In my former role as an elected mayor and now here, one of the lessons I have learned is that it always looks much simpler from Westminster than it does at the other end of the telescope. Bringing back empty homes sounds relatively simple and wonderful, and the noble Lord, Lord Bird, made it feel that way. However, in practice, it does not work like that.

When I first entered local government, I assumed an empty home was an empty home, but years later I realised that it came with a back story—complications, all the things the noble Lord has said. Usually on some poor officer’s shelf there is a lever arch file several inches thick, and he is trying to wade through it. Properties can be tied down in probate. Owners cannot be traced. Buildings require extensive repairs and families disagree over inheritance. Councils can spend months and sometimes years untangling legal and practical obstacles before any progress is made, and that is where there is a real will. I am proud to say we took on this agenda and the flats above shops agenda from the noble Lord, Lord Young.

One instance comes to mind that really was a lightbulb moment for me. A housing officer spent nearly a year pursuing action against a long-term empty property. I had had a petition and everything about it. Notice had been served, everything had been followed but just as we got a court date, the owner, having been notified of the court date, returned. The utilities were off, the property was virtually uninhabitable, but he went round the neighbours, persuading them that he was going to come back and do it up. The judge was convinced—we were not—and the council’s action ground to a halt. I still remember the look of absolute disbelief and total disappointment on that officer’s face. It was very demoralising.

That experience taught me a lesson. The problem is not always lack of powers, as I believe was said; it is often the gap between having the powers and being able to use them effectively. We already have a range of powers, and it might be interesting to see what the noble Baroness feels about how we can beef those up. The problem is that they are slow, complex, resource intensive, and require a lot of evidence-gathering, legal processes and definitely officers’ time. Time is important, when councils are facing immense financial pressure, enforcement teams are often smaller than they once were and capacity is restricted, if there is any capacity at all.

At the same time, nobody should pretend that 300,000 empty homes are irrelevant to the housing crisis. We should be careful not to think that one more bit of legislation will do the trick. The noble Lord outlined very practically, I have to say, things we could do. I ask the Minister: first, could we make it easier for councils to identify and contact owners? Far too much time is spent on this. Secondly, could we look at speeding up the probate process, which seems very slow, particularly with homes getting trapped following bereavement? Thirdly, we should perhaps adopt a more use it or lose it approach. I am not advocating confiscation, but where a property has stood empty for years, owners should occupy it, rent it out or sell it, or at least demonstrate that they are making genuine progress towards this. A few nights on a camp bed should not be enough to undo many months of hard enforcement work. But fourthly, we need to help owners who genuinely want to do the right thing. Not every owner is a villain. Some have inherited property they cannot afford to repair, some are elderly, and some are simply overwhelmed by the costs involved. That is why I was interested to read the case studies from the noble Lord, Lord Bird, and to learn about the work being undertaken in Greater Manchester. I think the common focus there has been practical delivery, working across a larger patch, and dedicated officers working alongside lease and repair schemes to bring homes back into use and, at the same time, reduce temporary accommodation. What appeals to me about that approach is that it is encouragement and enforcement. It is carrot and stick. Some owners need a helping hand; some, quite frankly, need a firm boot. Good councils know the difference.

Empty homes are not the whole answer to homelessness, of course not, but they are part of the answer. I support the noble Lord’s intentions wholeheartedly, but my plea to the Minister is: what can be done now to improve the effectiveness of the powers we already have?

12:54

[Baroness O'Neill of Bexley]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for raising this very important debate and for his impressive work helping homeless and vulnerable people over 35 years—I must admit that it shocked me when I heard that it was 35 years. The noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, shared with us his experiences, and I thank him for that. My father was a bus conductor, and I experienced as a youngster my parents being able to buy their social housing, so I am going to disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Bird, on that because, at the end of the day, many people such as them stayed in their properties; they were long-term tenants, they did not go anywhere, so actually the homes were not lost as a result of them buying.

On the doorstep of No. 10, the Prime Minister pledged to end rough sleeping by Christmas. I do not think anyone in this room would disagree with that pledge, and we would all love to see it happen. My noble friend Lord Young of Cookham recalled his interventions to address the issue many years ago, and I want to continue in that vein. I remind people about the previous Government introducing the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017, which came into force in 2018. That included the duty to prevent homelessness, moving it to the other side, and the duty to relieve homelessness into the statutory housing duty. It saw 740,000 families helped into housing and long-term accommodation between 2018 and 2024. I saw the benefit of that scheme as a council leader.

I know my colleague here, my noble friend Lord Greenhalgh, who it is lovely to have back again, served us well through that period. These things made a big, big difference, but the previous Government’s rough sleeping initiative provided over £2 billion to help rough sleepers find work, access services and secure accommodation. It was a long-term fix; it was not just a revolving door. What is more, they allocated £11 billion to the affordable homes programme from 2021 to 2026, and met the promise to build 1 million new homes over the last Parliament.

However, when the new Prime Minister’s pledge was made, there was no detail on how it would be achieved, how much it would cost or where the money would come from. These are not just technicalities to be ironed out further down the line. Furthermore, it is not the first time that the Prime Minister has made the pledge. He did the same as Mayor of Manchester, where the number of rough sleepers proceeded to rise. He set up the Bed Every Night scheme and then a Housing First scheme. How exactly will the Get Everyone In for Christmas scheme differ from and work better than those two schemes? Is the national plan to end homelessness, published only last December by the Government, still being followed, or has that now been shelved?

In addition, the Prime Minister has called for the biggest council housing programme since the post-war period, then backtracked on his proposal for the Government’s £10 billion 10-year affordable homes programme to be spent entirely on social housing. Can the Minister clarify exactly how many social homes they are planning to build?

During the passage of the Social Housing Act—of course, many of your Lordships in this Room were on that journey—we on these Benches made constructive proposals to enable the building of more social homes and reduce waiting lists. For example, an estimated 148,000 social homes may be fraudulently occupied; that is a big theme that I have and an issue that I feel needs resolving. The Government themselves estimate that 5,800 social homes may be illegally sublet through short-term letting programmes, and we heard some comments earlier about some short-term lettings. Yet in 2024-25, there were just 476 evictions for illegal subletting. When there are people out there on the streets in genuine need, this is unacceptable. Those are British people for whom the welfare state should be there. I would be grateful if the Minister could clarify this Government’s plans, how they will be funded and exactly what the Government will do to achieve the numbers. I look forward to hearing her response.

13:00

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

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for opening this debate in his usual powerful way. I echo the tribute that other noble Lords have paid to his fantastic work on homelessness and rough sleeping over many decades. The noble Lord has an enormous record of supporting those who have to sleep on our streets or who are facing homelessness, as the powerful testimony from my noble friend Lord Griffiths demonstrated.

I also welcome back the noble Lord, Lord Greenhalgh. I remember meetings with him when he was leader of Hammersmith and Fulham Council, and it is great to see him back. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, for all her work with the Watford homeless charity—she does marvellous work—and the noble Lord, Lord Young, for his constant contributions to housing.

Today’s debate has shown our shared determination to tackle homelessness and make better use of existing housing stock. There is never any argument about that among any of the political parties. Everyone should have a safe, secure and affordable home, and we should make the best possible use of the homes we already have. But there is still work to do. Our Government inherited a profound homelessness challenge. Rough sleeping and households in temporary accommodation have more than doubled since 2010. As my noble friend Lord Griffiths highlighted, one of the issues causing this is that there are people fleeing domestic abuse. There are many issues, and this Government have had to introduce a raft of legislation to start tackling the causes and finding solutions to the homelessness problem.

The situation is unacceptable, and we need urgent intervention. That is why we have invested more than £4 billion for homelessness and rough sleeping services over the next three years, including funding for our national plan to end homelessness and the rough sleeping programme, which is certainly not in abeyance, I would say in response to the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill. We are investing £950 million through the local authority housing fund and offering the biggest boost to social housing in a generation through the £39 billion social and affordable homes programme.

Preventing homelessness fundamentally depends on having enough suitable homes. That means building new homes and, of course, making the best possible use of those we already have. The noble Lord, Lord Bird, is right about right to buy, and our recent Social Housing Bill is starting to action the loss of social homes. We have not decided to abandon right to buy, but we have said that when a social home is sold, we must build a replacement. That is why we have decided that 100% of the receipts from those homes should go back to councils, and that new homes that councils build should not be sold for 35 years after they have been built, so that councils have a chance to recoup through the rent the money spent on them.

This brings us to the role of empty homes. Homelessness and empty homes are distinct challenges, and bringing an empty property back into use will not always provide a swift solution to those in immediate need of housing. But where we can bring previously empty properties back into use, it can provide temporary or settled accommodation and help to relieve pressure on local housing markets. The noble Lord, Lord Young, mentioned a number of initiatives from local government and housing associations. These continue to evolve and I see them all the time when I go around the country visiting our local councils.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for bringing this question before the Committee and for highlighting in his speech the frustration felt by everyone in this sector and by everyone who cares about housing that we have empty homes, sometimes long-term empty homes, at the same time as we have people sleeping on our streets and an enormous temporary accommodation bill, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill. There are around 303,000 long-term empty homes in England. The Government want to see more of these homes brought back into use.

That brings me to the proposal at the heart of today’s debate: a national empty homes strategy. Let me first be clear that our Government share the objective of the noble Lord, Lord Bird; bringing empty homes back into use can provide homes for people who need them, support regeneration and help to relieve pressure on local housing markets. But recognising the importance of the issue does not necessarily mean that a new national strategy is the right response.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, identified, empty homes arise for many different reasons. Properties vary in their condition, ownership and the cost of bringing them back into use. Local housing pressures and property markets also differ considerably. A single national approach could, therefore, be overly prescriptive and may not reflect what will work in each area. It could create additional reporting and administrative requirements for councils, which would in itself draw resources away from the practical work of identifying empty homes, engaging owners and returning properties to use.

We already have national strategies that address the wider challenges to which empty homes contribute, including our National Plan to End Homelessness. Crucially, councils are already taking action. They are best placed to understand why homes are empty in their areas and to decide which course of action will be most effective. Many councils already have their own empty homes strategies, reflecting local circumstances and priorities; I commend them and hope that those councils that have not yet considered an empty homes strategy will do so.

The central challenge is, therefore, not a lack of recognition or another layer of strategy but making sure that councils can make effective use of the tools available to them and match the right intervention to the right property. For some empty homes, financial incentives, such as the council tax premium, may encourage home owners to bring their property back into use. Where owners are unwilling to act, stronger enforcement powers, such as enforced sale, compulsory purchase or empty dwelling management orders, may be used. As we outlined in the English devolution White Paper, we intend to strengthen the ability of local authorities to take over the management of empty homes. We will provide further detail in due course; I hate that term, but I assure noble Lords that in this case “in due course” means very soon.

Where the objective is to use empty homes to provide accommodation for people who are homeless, funding is often required. Councils can access a range of funding opportunities for this purpose. Every part of the toolkit has a role. By encouraging, enabling or requiring more empty homes to return to occupation, these levers can improve the use of the existing housing stock, increase local supply and help ease wider housing pressures.

I want to make some specific comments about funding because a number of noble Lords—everybody who spoke, actually, but in particular the noble Lords, Lord Griffiths, Lord Young and Lord Greenhalgh—mentioned it. Local authorities and registered providers can access funding, such as through the local authority housing fund or the social and affordable homes programme, to bring empty homes back into use. Both can use SAHP funds to purchase market housing for affordable housing, and bids are assessed on individual merit by Homes England and the GLA.

The £950 million fourth round of the local authority housing fund is for councils in England to increase their supply of better-quality temporary accommodation. It also provides safe and suitable housing for some families, such as those on the Afghan resettlement programme. Councils can partner with registered providers to use LAHF funding to purchase existing properties, including empty homes; that is a big resource.

In some areas, empty homes can help reduce reliance on expensive and unsuitable temporary accommodation by quickly bringing existing housing back into use. The noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, commented on the nearly £3 billion spent on temporary accommodation. We want to make sure that we return long-term vacant properties—empty homes—to occupation in order to increase the housing supply. This will vary from area to area, of course.

The noble Lords, Lord Bird, Lord Griffiths and Lord Greenhalgh, referred to the rise in the numbers of children in temporary accommodation. It is an absolute scandal; it is unacceptable that those numbers are increasing. I should say, though, that the number of children in the most harmful form of accommodation—bed-and-breakfast accommodation—is decreasing each quarter. Since the peak on 30 June 2024, the number of families in bed-and-breakfast accommodation over six weeks has fallen by 75% to 1,000 households, as of 31 March 2026—but that is 1,000 households too many for me; I want to see that figure down to zero. This encouraging progress follows our £30 million investment over three years in the emergency accommodation reduction programme.

I am running out of time so let me conclude by saying that I am sure that the purpose of this debate is to draw attention to the importance of empty homes. Let me be unequivocal for the noble Lord, Lord Bird: our Government believe that bringing suitable empty properties back into use is an essential piece of this puzzle. However, we believe that the most effective approach is to empower and encourage councils to act locally, supported by appropriate national powers and funding, rather than imposing what might appear to be a one-size-fits-all national strategy. We will respond formally to the policy paper sent by the noble Lord to the department.

In closing, I thank all Members across the Committee for their very important contributions to this important debate.

13:10

Sitting suspended.

Sports Clubs: Special Enterprise Zone Status

Thursday 17th September 2026 Grand Committee

Question for Short Debate

13:15

Asked by

[Lord Mann]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the economic benefits of giving sports clubs special enterprise zone status.

[Lord Mann (Lab)]

My Lords, I had the privilege and honour of serving in the Blair Government under Richard Caborn and Tessa Jowell for five years and being in the private discussions around the Olympic legacy and the Olympic Park. The one thing more than anything that I took from that was that the creation of a sports park was itself an economic generator. I do not think that we have learned the lessons from that for what it could mean now.

I will take just one sport, but this could apply, albeit not in as big a way, to any sport and at any level. The financially and economically most successful part of UK sport is the English Premier League. According to the Forbes list, five of the top clubs in the world, in terms of wealth, are from the English Premier League, as well as 11 of the top 30. On Deloitte’s list of the most successful clubs financially, which is calculated on a different basis but using the same kinds of principles, six of the top 10 in the world are in English Premier League, as well as nine of the top 20 and 15 of the top 30. Interestingly, the clubs on the Forbes list and the Deloitte list do not totally overlap. If we take the Premier League clubs, as well as some clubs that aspire to it and those that are in and out of it, as business entities, we are talking about a huge amount of money within the transfer window. For the past two years, the Premier League won assets of £1.5 billion just on players.

What we have not done is see this in the wider economic sphere, in which the stadia are a key part. I was over at the World Cup, seeing the way the Americans have configured this. I do not think that they have done it very cleverly, and I do not see what the community benefit is of their new stadiums. There is an economic regeneration model, but it is not a sports park model. There is a way we could have a sports park model in this country really effectively and quickly, and, in doing so, leverage in a huge amount of additional capital as investment into the country.

Football is big money. Investors, through various different means, are keen on our football clubs and on investing. Getting money into the sport of football, particularly at the higher levels, has been relatively easy. Indeed, there are many people seeking to buy low-level clubs at the moment, and doing so with investments, often from overseas, that have the same aim. They think they can at least break even or perhaps make a bit of money.

However, we are only getting in sports money. There are sports stadia that want and need to develop for the Premier League all over the country. I will take an example that I know the best: Leeds United Football Club. The investors there are also building a small amount of housing—well, 2,300 units is not that small—on the land in the development area that the club controls. Let us take the economy of the city and its potential and look at what was done, in a very different model, by the investors behind Manchester City and the City of Manchester stadium. It is a different model because the stadium was already there—the club inherited the Commonwealth sports park and then developed economically beyond it—but it is good synergy to compare it with the Olympic Park, which is also a sports park.

There is no sports park proposed in Leeds, as the land is not sufficient, but the land between the city centre and the football stadium, as the major arena, which is going to be developed and increased in capacity by about one-third in the immediate future, is seen as a stadium development, with all the complexities of transport, et cetera, rather than a community development or a city development. A club such as that should have the option of having some kind of special enterprise zone status, in the way we have done elsewhere. I worked on deals in the past with Nissan and Komatsu, and we have done others for major industries elsewhere. Critically, we gave the master planning powers to the investors, in co-operation not least with mayors, to sign off the overall plan but then allow the detail to go through. If we did that, I think far more investment would go into those sports villages economically, in housing and industry, and in community and social benefit. It is the old Section 106 concept, but without building roundabouts.

The ideal place to have community football facilities in the city of Leeds would be under the banner of Leeds United Football Club. That goes for all our big football clubs. We do not do that. The obvious place to have GP facilities would be precisely there, and we could build a health village as part of it. To get people in, in the way the Olympic sports village does, has been proven to work, so we are denying that capital possibility. If we put money into Leeds United, it is into the stadium and is on a restricted basis. That goes for most of our other clubs, even those that have managed deals. We should bear in mind that the clubs in Manchester and Birmingham, with large city councils, employ lots of planners and can afford to get the top planners. The capacity in planning around the rest of the country is far less, even in big cities such as Leeds.

In Nottingham, again, it has taken seven years to get the stadium through. We hope it goes through this month, but then there will be further problems. There is no way of drawing in inward investment to one of the successful parts of our economy and building community assets alongside as part of the deal.

Look at where the world is going and the Leeds example again. Take driverless cars and driverless multi-purpose vehicles. We want to move people to a large stadium, be it for football or concerts—a big venue in a big centre. Outside London, the way to do that in the future will include driverless vehicles moving large numbers of people. That cannot be done by the sports club owners because they do not have the economic powers.

I put it to the Committee that there are many examples, from clubs the size of Leeds in cities the size of Leeds to clubs the size of Port Vale, with huge amounts of development land around the stadium, and much smaller, lower-level clubs such as Worksop Town, where this possibility would drive investment into the country and benefit the community and our sports clubs.

13:23

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Mann, makes a very good case and I hope that what I say is interpreted as supportive of it.

My support for Brighton and Hove Albion is well known, and I declare it as a relevant interest in this debate. In fact, I have often thought that I should see if it is possible to change my title to Lord Bassam of Brighton and Hove Albion—I think it would be a novel thing to do. However, there is a serious point behind all this. It is a delight that the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, is replying to this short debate, because I know from our many conversations that she loves football like I do and is a big Stevenage FC fan. She understands the economic benefits that football clubs bring to an area.

The noble Lord, Lord Mann, asks about recognising the economic benefits of sports clubs and linking them to enterprise zones. These, as we know, confer several advantages to the businesses which choose to operate within them, as do freeports and investment zones. Most of the advantages are related to tax and business costs, and it is possible to get 100% business rate relief. Other tax reliefs and easier and simplified planning permissions make a very strong case. Major beneficiaries of enterprise zones are usually SMEs, which make up some 99% of businesses generally and some 60% of the private sector workforce.

There is some debate about the relative merits of enterprise zones, with some observers believing that the estimated number of jobs created by them is lower than was originally anticipated. However, in 2025 the Government claimed freeports and investment zones had attracted over £64 billion in private investment; in 2024 it was thought that some 100,000 jobs had come directly and indirectly from freeports and investment and enterprise zones.

We know that Sport England believes that the combined social and economic benefits of sport and physical activity in England is valued somewhere in the region of £125 billion, and DCMS in 2024 also reported that sport contributed £20.6 billion to the economy and 0.8% of GVA. Taking the Premier League as a case study, it believes that the combined value of the clubs operating in that league was worth nearly £9 billion in 2023-24 and contributed over 100,000 jobs and £4.4 billion in tax benefits. The Government acknowledge this and have stated that they also deliver indirect economic benefits to the local communities that the clubs serve, attracting visitors and bringing increased footfall to the hospitality, retail and transport sectors.

There are downsides, particularly if you are a football fan and have to suffer the benefits of losing and winning—mostly winning in my case, but there we are. The Brighton and Hove Albion case is an interesting one. Had the club lost its league status in the 1990s, the impact on the city would have been, in my view, catastrophic. As it was, we were able to rescue the club with the local authority, and I was happy to play a part in bringing the club back to Brighton from Gillingham and ultimately helping it secure its new home of Falmer.

Rightly, the club has undertaken over the years economic impact studies on its impact on the city’s economy. After its first year in the Premier League, it was calculated to have brought an additional £20 million to the local economy and to have created 1,000 jobs directly and indirectly. That was back in 2018, and I have little doubt that if the study was repeated now, those figures would be bigger, not least because the club itself has invested heavily in training facilities, merchandising and hospitality. Now the figure would probably be closer to £500 million a year. When the club brings back the women’s team from Crawley to our new stadium, which is going to be designed with women in mind and for women alone, I think those figures will grow again.

I am very much in favour of creating centres of sporting excellence and, so far, the city of Brighton and Hove has argued that there is potential to add that second women’s stadium adjacent to the Amex and alongside the successful Brighton Aldridge Cricket Academy on the other side of the stadium to the west. There is an opportunity in my city to create a sports zone along with the Falmer academic corridor. We already have a major sports centre there and the sort of benefits that the noble Lord, Lord Mann, talked about of bringing sports science and physical sciences in alongside of that would be tremendous. It begs the question: would they or could they benefit from being designated as an enterprise or investment zone? Clearly, they could, particularly if the planning process was speeded up—and no doubt, being the good entrepreneur he is, Tony Bloom would very much welcome a reduction in his business rates. I think that football clubs outside the Premier League and the Championship that are essentially SMEs, alongside rugby, rugby league and professional cricket clubs, and perhaps some of the other track and field sports discipline stadia would get considerable benefit too.

I am tempted by the idea of the noble Lord, Lord Mann, and I can see a particular benefit to football clubs and other sporting institutions where the economic margins can be tighter. It would work well, particularly for those clubs in the leagues below the Championship and those in non-league football—the National League North, the National League South and so on. This idea is well worth exploring. The benefits that it would bring to many of our harder-pressed communities would be well worth having and could unlock substantial extra investment. As the noble Lord, Lord Mann, says, there are plenty of entrepreneurs and investors seeking now to invest in the lower league clubs, Wrexham being a particularly good example. That regenerative effect has a multiplier that benefits communities much more widely.

13:30

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Grand Committee for allowing me to speak in the gap. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Mann, for this disappointingly short but important debate. It is important because it is clear how much sports clubs contribute to civil society, our health and our economy. The noble Lord mentioned the Premier League, and obviously it is my dearest hope that Wrexham will be promoted from the Championship to the Premier League soon. Thanks to the patronage of Ryan and Rob, the whole town has benefited from that regeneration and the money that they and football have brought into the town.

In 2022, DCMS estimated that the sports sector contributed £18.1 billion to the UK economy, supporting 550,000 jobs and outpacing the growth of the national economy. The previous Government invested more than £1.5 billion in grass-roots, school and elite sports, as well as a sports survival package during the Covid-19 pandemic, which provided £600 million of emergency funding to sports clubs and organisations impacted by spectator restrictions. However, this Government have hammered businesses with higher business rates and higher employers’ national insurance. The Sport and Recreation Alliance, which represents more than 100 national governing bodies, has highlighted the damaging impact of business rates across the sector, both for grass-roots groups and larger facilities. The chair of the Culture, Media and Sports Committee in the other place has warned that business rate rises translates to rising participation fees, some by as much as 85%. Do the Government recognise that higher business rates are making sport less accessible to those who cannot afford these increases?

We have consistently warned the Government about the negative impacts that their economic policies are having on the sports sector. During debates on the Sporting Events Bill, we highlighted the calls from stakeholders to address increasing employment costs and higher business rates. What impact has the Employment Rights Act had on sport where work is often seasonal and contracts need to be flexible? Can the Government give an explanation why they gave a 20% cut in business rates to pubs, clubs and live music venues but failed to include sports venues? What assessments were done to analyse the impacts?

The noble Lords, Lord Bassam and Lord Mann, mentioned the enterprise zones. We currently have 48 such zones in England, which allows businesses to benefit from incentives such as business rate discounts. Furthermore, all business rates growth above an agreed baseline are retained by the local authority to be reinvested in the local area. The Chancellor has said the autumn Budget will introduce greater fiscal devolution with greater business rates retention for local councils and strategic authorities. Can the Minister provide any further detail on these plans? In addition, what plans do the Government have for any new and existing enterprise zones more broadly? Businesses benefit from certainty, and those in existing enterprise zones will want to know which benefits will continue or if there will be changes.

We must all be on the side of businesses, including our sports clubs, large and small. I would be interested to hear from the Minister what action the Government are taking to support those clubs and what impact assessments have been taken of their economic policies so far.

13:34

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when I first saw the title of this debate, I immediately asked myself, which sports clubs? My reflex was to think of small amateur sports clubs, which are the backbone of many a social structure. They are microstructures for employment and so on. Then, after two seconds I thought that we must be looking at senior sports clubs. Then I remembered those heady and wonderful days in Committee and Report on the Football Governance Bill and said, “This man will definitely be talking about professional football”. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Mann, did—and I should have remembered it was Leeds that had the special place in his heart.

Having done that quick bounce-around, which I am afraid took me all of about two or three minutes, I started thinking about what this actually means. It is undoubtedly true that professional sports clubs have an inherent advantage, in that they have a core of people who feel attracted to them. That is true of virtually all professional sports clubs that attract any form of regular audience—you have your fan base and people who associate with it. In the case of football, and possibly rugby league in the right parts of the north of England, you have guaranteed support. Even rugby union has started to develop that—as a professional game it is not that old, and it has taken time to develop that crowd, but it is there. It applies to cricket as well, to an extent. So they have the potential to do things.

However, my mind kept being drawn back to some of the discussions we had on the football regulation Bill. Our clubs tend to be built in specific areas in inner cities and fans do not like them being moved. Classically, clubs can be walked to in an urban environment, and they do not like moving. Indeed, there are many cases going back many years of people trying to do a deal to get a bit of ground for redevelopment and fans resisting. There are pressures around economic development, but the history of these clubs, which are so important, must be remembered in any project.

Whether or not the enterprise zone is a thing of yesterday shall be confirmed later, but are we going to adapt the idea of using these very good brands for developing business and social impact? Everybody agrees that we should, it is just that the environments are so varied that you probably will not have one model. Devolution—whatever it means—may be an opportunity to go through this. I found myself taking part in discussions about the proposed tourist levy and tying this in. How do you work these things in together? How do they work properly? How do they come together? Can there be exemptions? It is not an easy, one-size-fits-all project because all the people and institutions involved have individual stories to tell.

For instance, what Manchester City did with the Commonwealth Games legacy or what West Ham did with the Olympic stadium should probably be considered for some form of zoning—it does not really matter what you call it. But they are specific examples. Most of the clubs we have do not fit this model, but they are trying to do something with it. I was brought up in Norwich. As I have said, I am not a great football fan, but the club manages to have a very successful hotel stuck at the back of the stands. You can do it.

There is opportunity here, and you can do stuff like this, but it is a case of how you encourage it without overburdening or impinging on the traditions that make something attractive. That is the great challenge to everybody. Let us face it, the primary objective of a football club is to win matches and provide entertainment, or at least try to and give the promise of it. In our system, we have embraced the fact that you can lose your status and be demoted, and that is all part of the drama we have accepted as being intrinsic to most of our sporting traditions, even if it is incredibly inconvenient and certain sporting bodies try to get out of it—I would talk about rugby union, for a start.

If you have all this going on, how you work it all in together is an interesting idea. Where could it work? Does the enterprise zone have to be attached to the actual playing zone? It would be better if it was, but it may well have to be removed. To declare an interest, I remember being taken to Brighton & Hove Football Club last time the Liberal Democrats were at our conference down there a couple of years ago—I am afraid I will not be there this year—and being told that we had to get on a bus to go and see it. There is, I believe, a long story, which I got halfway through before the dessert arrived, about the history of why it ended up out there. It is probably not ideal.

How do you create a model that gets the best out of this? Have the Government given it any thought? That is what we can try to get out of this today. It is about recognising the fact that there will be so many different stories, and that you will have to have a flexible structure—it will not always be football in all places—around how you are going to work through this and encourage it.

In addition, are we going to encourage people to play sport in these structures and environments? That means bringing in smaller clubs without taking away their identity. Maybe it is, shall we say, a legal nicety, with a linkage which means you do not have to sell up your ground—which in many places people have actually bought over the years and is a genuine asset to that group and that community; it may be several miles away but the club takes some benefit from it. These are things which we must always think about. If we do not, we are in danger of causing damage to at least some of them.

This is a complicated situation which has many threads pulling across, and sometimes against each other. How do the Government propose—if indeed they have given any thought to it—to get the economic benefit out of something with the great brand awareness and status of a big sporting club? It is something which everybody has had a look at and had great ideas about but then backed away from. That is my experience, having covered this for several decades now. Nobody quite knows how to do it. If the current Government have some ideas on this, I, for one, would be very interested to hear them.

13:41

[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 to this QSD. I thank my noble friend Lord Mann for securing this debate and opening it—because it gives me an opportunity to talk about football, which is never a bad thing as far as I am concerned, but also because it is an important issue. I thank all noble Lords for their contributions.

My noble friend Lord Mann raises an interesting Question. Sports clubs have not been given special enterprise zone status. Enterprise zones were not designed as a designation for individual organisations; rather, they were place-based interventions, intended to support economic growth and regeneration within defined geographic areas. However, my noble friend’s Question raises a broader and important issue: the contribution that sporting institutions can make to economic growth, regeneration and community development, and I do not think we should ever underestimate that.

According to DCMS’s Sport Satellite Account, published in September 2024, the sports sector contributed an estimated £53.6 billion direct to the UK economy in 2021, equivalent to 2.6% of total UK gross value added. That is a fantastic contribution which demonstrates the significance of the role that sport plays as an economic sector in its own right.

Professional football has a particularly strong relationship with place. Unlike many other major economic sectors, football clubs and stadiums are distributed across cities and towns across the country. Clubs can support employment, local businesses, visitor spending and investment, while stadiums can provide a focal point for wider regeneration. That sits at the heart of what my noble friend Lord Mann is discussing.

That important contribution is here, both for the opportunities it provides and for volunteering, participation and community cohesion. Sport makes that important contribution right across the United Kingdom. I have seen this close at hand in my own area. My noble friend Lord Bassam has already kindly mentioned my own football team. If he made himself Lord Bassam of Brighton and Hove Albion, that would be probably a first in your Lordships’ House. I am lucky enough that my team and my town share the same name, so I can have both designations in my title. My football club makes an enormous contribution to our community, across all ages, from youth football to walking football, and across our community, through social events. It has opened a nursery, and recently an all-weather training facility. During Covid, our club played an absolutely key role at the heart of our community. The first-team players took lunches to our older residents, which brightened people’s days so much. It plays a key role.

The government position today is that sports clubs have an important role to play in supporting growth, but the most effective approach is to integrate sporting assets within broader plans for regeneration and local economic development. The Government are already acting on the opportunity presented by stadium-led regeneration. The Prime Minister has reaffirmed his commitment to a stadium regeneration accelerator, through which the Minister for Growth and the Minister for Sport will work with mayors to help major sports-led projects bring jobs, investment and housing to local areas.

The accelerator is bringing together government departments, local leaders, sporting bodies and investors around viable projects, helping to identify and address barriers to delivery. It is not a capital fund for stadium construction; stadium redevelopment is led and funded by clubs and private investors, while the Government use their convening role to help realise the wider benefits for places. As the noble Lord, Lord Mann, pointed out, Leeds illustrates the scale of the opportunity here. The expansion of Elland Road is being taken forward by Leeds United, while the Government and local and regional partners are working to support the wider regeneration potential around the stadium.

This approach recognises that major sporting assets can act as anchors for regeneration and place-making. It also reflects the Government’s wider local growth agenda, which seeks to empower local leaders and support regeneration that responds to the needs and ambitions of individual places. In some places, mayoral development corporations can complement this work by co-ordinating planning, land assembly and infrastructure delivery across complex regeneration areas. The appropriate model will depend on local circumstances and must support a broader plan for the place, rather than simply the commercial interests of an individual club. That does not mean that football clubs and other stakeholders are not key players with mayors and local councillors in driving that regeneration forward.

Alongside support for regeneration and growth—I know that the noble Lord, Lord Addington, is particularly interested in grass-roots sport—the Government continue to invest in grass-roots sport and community facilities. At least £400 million will be invested in new and upgraded grass-roots sports facilities over the next four years, while Sport England invests more than £250 million each year through Exchequer and National Lottery funding to support participation and to tackle inactivity in communities across the country.

There are also forms of support available to many community sports organisations through existing tax, business rates and funding arrangements. Community amateur sports clubs that meet the relevant eligibility criteria can benefit from charitable rate relief providing 80% relief on their business rates bill, and sports clubs may be eligible for the lower retail, hospitality and leisure multipliers where they are open to visiting members of the public—this probably answers the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield.

I know that the noble Baroness will not expect me to comment specifically on any Budget proposals that are coming forward—she would not have done that when she was a Minister either—but we are already undertaking a lot to support sport, including the new, permanently lower multiplier for eligible retail, hospitality and leisure properties, and the wider support package with a budget of £4.3 million. The small business retail, hospitality and leisure multiplier is set at 38.2p in 2026-27, 5p below the national small business multiplier, and the standard RHL multiplier is set at 43p, 5p below the national standard multiplier. They are also eligible for the other benefits that I spoke about earlier.

I also wish to challenge the issue around NICs again, as I have had to do many times. The NICs rise does not apply to young people. Businesses, whether sport businesses or others, do not need to pay the additional charges on NICs for young people who are employed.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield, and the noble Lords, Lord Mann and Lord Addington, referred to the lessons the Government have learned from previous enterprise zones and how these have informed current local growth policies. It is important to say that the experience of enterprise zones has directly informed what we are doing in government around newer special economic zone programmes. The noble Lord, Lord Bassam, mentioned freeports and investment zones; they have all been informed by the enterprise zone experience.

Officials identified five factors as critical to success in any such zone: a clear strategic sector focus; a compelling value proposition for investors, including infrastructure and skills; strong local governance; genuine integration with the surrounding local economy; and co-ordinated investment promotion. These were all built into the freeports model. To address displacement directly, freeport tax reliefs apply only to new investment, and business rates relief can be subject to a displacement test—a direct response to the evidence from enterprise zones. It was felt that enterprise zones were often just moving people locally, not bringing in investment from outside. Freeports and investment zones have been brought together as industrial strategy zones now, offering potential investors a more streamlined and coherent package. I hope that answers Members’ questions.

Mayoral development corporations are developing all the time, and they can enable mayors to use significant private sector investment in world-class sports facilities to unlock that wider regeneration potential, including housing, jobs and facilities for local residents and communities, utilising powers such as planning, CPO and infrastructure provision. I probably should not mention Manchester at the moment—I think Manchester United is having a bit of a tough time, so I will not step on any toes there—but there is a big project in Manchester, and the Old Trafford Regeneration Mayoral Development Corporation is acting as a driving force.

The noble Lord, Lord Bassam, referred to planning. The steps we have taken both through the revised NPPF and the Planning and Infrastructure Act—which we recently took through the House to introduce a clearer, rules-based process for planning—will help with some of this regeneration, whether it is for football grounds or any other sports facility.

In closing, I thank everyone in the Committee for their very important contributions to this debate. Our thinking is emerging on this, so I have listened with interest to what all noble Peers have had to say.

13:51

Sitting suspended.

Civil Service: Impartiality

Thursday 17th September 2026 Grand Committee

Question for Short Debate

14:15

Asked by

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they intend to take to strengthen impartiality in the civil service and the delivery of public services.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)]

My Lords, I begin by thanking all noble Lords who are due to speak, as I will not have an opportunity to thank them later; I promise to take careful note of everything that is said today.

There is much evidence of polarisation across the country in recent years. This is not about politics or parties. I refer to something much more pervasive: a sense that the state itself, exemplified by our public services, is not there for all of us and that, irrespective of what a party’s manifesto says or what voters expect, nothing much changes. “They’re all the same”, is the mantra that is used to describe being let down. Here in Parliament, the only sameness that we all want is to do better by the country; that is why we are here.

This may apply to our public servants, too, but it is not evidenced in public trust. The OECD’s most recent public trust survey, which was conducted across more than 30 countries, shows Britain falling behind on the trust table. Only 33% of us have moderate or high trust in government, a term that incorporates all public services. The OECD average of 40% is low, presumably as newer democracies are still rebuilding after authoritarianism. Another domestic survey, Two Britains, describes how divergent public servants’ views are from those of the public—something I have mentioned before.

Currently, we have the largest number of public inquiries under way to establish wrongdoing. Too frequently, they find that public servants did not do their jobs properly, ostensibly because some internal value or culture led them to believe that appearing racist or Islamophobic had to be avoided at all costs, including the cost of justice for victims. The groupthink that distorts professionalism is what I call “progressive conformity”. It is a state where, in order to be accepted in the prevailing culture of an organisation, individuals do not speak their mind, are not sufficiently curious when they should be, or hold back, as they could be denied advancement if they had a different approach to the culture pervading that body.

I saw this at the ECHR, which I chaired, on my appointment in 2020. Without breaching confidentiality, I can say that, within three months, I had to commission impartiality training across the whole organisation. There was enormous pushback on policy agreed by commissioners, and individual commissioners had to show great resilience for the board’s decisions to prevail. My experience is that there is a real and serious problem in delivery, as well as downstream from Parliament and policy-making, when it comes to accountability in our public services.

I welcome the new review of the Civil Service and its much-needed focus on more effective delivery, which will, I hope, prevail. So far, so good. I am hopeful that what previous Prime Ministers have not achieved—a significant shift in capabilities, culture and outcomes—will transpire. We are told that the Cabinet Secretary is to be guided by an advisory group. Has that been established? Is its composition in place? It should be, for accountability and transparency.

Dame Antonia Romeo needs to take a hard look at the Civil Service Code. Its core values of integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality appear worthy but are irrelevant. Let me explain. Integrity requires, inter alia, accurate record-keeping, for accountability and transparency. However, we are told in written exchanges in the Commons that the records relating to the recently announced policy on anti-Muslim hostility, which will apply right across government, have been destroyed. So, evidence for a controversial policy has no audit trail in terms of who was involved and what was said. This smells, and I predict that it will end up in court at some point.

Honesty requires that staff are not influenced by improper pressure from others. Yet we know about the reach of advocacy groups across government. An example is the influence of Stonewall. The charity Sex Matters has produced an entire dossier about EHRC staff improperly allowing Stonewall to influence decisions, without the knowledge of commissioners. This was of course before my time. Government departments themselves apply what is known as Stonewall law instead of equality law, which adds considerable costs to the public purse in settlements. The Cabinet Office does not appear to have changed its policy advice across government after the Supreme Court ruling of 17 months ago to protect single-sex spaces. Can the Minister confirm that its policy is still in breach of the Equality Act? A new code should emphasise that conformity with the law is not an optional extra but mandatory. Will the Minister restate that it applies to local government as well?

Impartiality, as described in these values, is most contradictory. It is overly narrow, in that personal political views are not permissible but it is silent on non-political views. For me, all personal views should be impermissible if they influence decisions. Some of the most contested debates in recent times are not political in an ideological sense. Racism, sex-based rights and speech are not culture wars; they go to the heart of expectations of what is legal, fair and just. Those latter values—fairness and justice—are described as a requirement for staff in the code, yet they are not defined, so we have a situation where individuals are allowed to be the adjudicators of what is fair and just. It follows that some staff networks use their beliefs to advocate for certain causes, whether at home or abroad.

Another problem is the code’s reach. It permits individual departments and related ALBs to adopt their own values alongside it. While the intention is that different service providers translate their own specific functional needs into their corporate ethos, this allows dilution of the overarching duties and ends in legal settlements in departments, without any apparent learning across government.

For me, it is essential that the duty of impartiality should stand above the other three core values. It should be clarified, strengthened and made an overarching requirement across all public services, with stronger sanctions for disregarding it, irrespective of the independence of the NDPBs. Where tax­payer pounds are spent, high standards of behaviour should follow. Our tribunals are replete with cases of members of the police, the NHS and even government departments flouting impartiality and accountability for their actions.

The problem is here and palpable and it needs resolving. This is an opportunity for a proper reset, so that the public can have confidence that they will be treated as they should be—impartially, objectively and, to use a word missing from the code, professionally—so that we can all be sure of getting the service we deserve from our public services.

14:23

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I am indebted to the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, for securing this important debate. For full disclosure, I worked with civil servants as an elected Member of Parliament and special adviser in DExEU between 2016 and 2018 and found the private office I worked with exceptional and exemplary. That said, the notion of a Rolls-Royce Civil Service machine and the era of complacency arising from the exceptionalism of the Northcote-Trevelyan dispensation is long gone.

I will concentrate on two areas, efficiency and effectiveness and political impartiality, and make some suggestions for change. Despite endless reviews and of course a plethora of delivery units, no Government in the past 25 years have got a grip on the Civil Service, including its poor productivity, its ideological groupthink, its paucity of innovation and imagination, its lack of delivery and its incremental, self-interested expansion over the years, rather than any implementation of changes. Add that to the proliferation of quangos and we see a depressing picture of senior civil servants sometimes using the system to obfuscate the clear instructions and democratic mandate of Ministers and Parliament as intercessors and arbitrators.

In the area of recruitment, for instance, we have seen the concept of results-based performance management marginalised. Even the Institute for Government described Civil Service headcount as “unplanned and uncontrolled” in a paper in 2025. The facts speak to a focus away from delivery. Largely front-line administrators have had their numbers reduced by 45% since 2010, while grade 6 and 7 policy roles have increased to 78,000, up 121%. Overall, the Civil Service workforce has risen by 35% in the last 10 years, while the public sector remains chronically unproductive and too large.

Others will no doubt elucidate on the lack of impartiality and the issue of bias. Suffice it to say that the misuse and abuse, in terms of ultra vires actions, of the Civil Service diversity strategy from 2022 and the Civil Service Code; the pernicious influence of campaigning activist groups in the wider public sector; a liberal groupthink on things such as gender ID, Brexit, net zero, patriotism, capitalism and multiculturalism; and woke recruitment practices, do nothing but damage the Civil Service’s reputation for impartiality, esprit de corps, fairness and efficiency.

The leadership of the Civil Service, particularly the Cabinet Secretary, must radically reform with alacrity, with: a proper long-term workforce plan, as the IfG has suggested; minimum terms of service; targets for reducing turnover; a greater focus on performance management; all Civil Service jobs to be advertised externally; an end to routine working from home in mission-critical Civil Service functions; more specialist roles; and more transparency in respect of HR data, including disciplinary issues and absence management. My favourite, I think, is public confirmation hearings in Parliament for senior civil servants in leadership positions.

Without these radical changes, a future Government with a big or even just a small parliamentary majority will use that and Orders in Council to close departments, sack senior civil servants and bring in their own partisan supporters. The Civil Service should seize the opportunity voluntarily to move towards urgent reform before it is compelled so to do.

14:27

[Lord Butler of Brockwell (CB)]

My Lords, it will not surprise your Lordships that the subject of my noble friend’s debate caught my eye. As my noble friend Lady Falkner has recognised, the new Cabinet Secretary has initiated a review, at the centre of which are the subjects in her Motion—that is, political impartiality and the delivery of public services. Cynics may say, “We’ve seen all that before. We know that those are the ideals, but we haven’t seen much improvement”. However, I really believe that Dame Antonia Romeo means it, and I am very confident that the review that she has initiated will have an effect for good on the Civil Service.

It seems to me that recent history has demonstrated how damaging to effective government are leaks to the media of disharmony at its centre. In this respect, the new Administration has made a better start. The absence of leaks in the period leading up to the formation of the Government was impressive. I think that the review initiated by Dame Antonia has also started well.

However, I want to add this—and I think I am recognising what previous speakers have already said. The concept of an impartial Civil Service, which followed the Northcote-Trevelyan report 150 years ago, is in greater danger than ever before. Times have changed but the ideal should be maintained.

Like any organisation, our Civil Service needs to be continuously improved, particularly as times are changing so quickly, but this is most likely to be achieved in an atmosphere of mutual respect, not one of mutual recrimination. The summary dismissal of a series of the most senior civil servants, the noble Lord, Lord Sedwill, Sir Tom Scholar, Sir Olly Robbins and the noble Lord, Lord Wormald, was unprecedented, and in my view quite wrong. None of these people was incompetent.

In the period ahead, as has been said, the Civil Service faces further threats, not least from the policies of Reform UK, enunciated by its spokesman, Danny Kruger. Where these policies are aimed at improving the efficiency and accountability of the Civil Service, I support them. Where they are aimed at politicisation of the Civil Service, I cannot. I believe that a politically impartial Civil Service is a feature of our government which we would lose at our cost. I therefore hope that Dame Antonia’s review produces a successful outcome, and that the apparently harmonious relationship between political appointees and civil servants, which I see in the new Administration, continues and flourishes.

14:31

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I recognise the problems that the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, describes, and will illustrate with some examples. I led Ofsted, a non-ministerial department with some 2,000 staff, for seven years until 2023. I was a Crown appointee and my staff were all civil servants. We had statutory obligations and were bound by the frameworks for all government departments, including the public sector equality duty and Civil Service HR policies, and I saw at first hand that the principle of Civil Service impartiality has, very sadly, been eroded over the years and urgently needs restoration.

Much of the decay has been driven by the worthiest impulses, especially the impulse to do all we can for those with any kind of disadvantage. Yet, in practice, this means that activism has been embedded at many levels, in many ways. As chief inspector, I was acutely aware that I did not have democratic legitimacy and must always act within the spirit as well as the letter of my powers. Early in my tenure, I ordered a review of our framework equality plan and was relieved to find just a couple of small areas of overreach, which were immediately adjusted, but some staff were visibly puzzled. In their eyes, it was virtuous to overreach if it felt morally right. I had to do a lot of explaining, but I will say that my staff respected my lead.

A little while later, I became aware of activist pressure in relation to various protected characteristics. Some came from external lobby groups, some from our own staff networks and some from within government. For example, our London landlord, the Ministry of Justice, wanted to make our lavatories mixed-sex. After polling staff anonymously and finding strong opposition, I refused, but I realised that MoJ officials probably wanted to score Stonewall diversity index points, and I do not think that that push came from Ministers. I then ordered a full review of our HR policies to identify any overreach, and the main culprit was a long-standing gender identity policy that was pure self-ID. It was little used, but it clearly took a position that had been twice rejected by Parliament. I challenged this and was told that it was good practice to go beyond the law, but I did not accept this and withdrew the policy, which I had the authority to do. Again, I had to explain my view. This was not about my views about trans-identifying individuals, but about the principle that the Civil Service sits downstream of Parliament and should never make policies that may appeal to the senior Civil Service and staff but which sit in contradiction to decisions of the legislature.

I must make clear that this was not about Ofsted. The Civil Service, at its centre, was a powerful driving force for this kind of thinking. For example, the current Civil Service diversity strategy says:

“We will use positive action where needed in relation to training, support, recruitment and promotion to ensure the broadest range of diversity is achieved”.


In other words, there is a strong push to produce equality of outcomes, not just of opportunity, which goes beyond the current legal framework. That pressure has consequences. I know of a Permanent Secretary who told their senior team that they should prefer an appointable candidate from an ethnic minority, even if the candidate was not the highest performing. More generally, the concept of “bringing your whole self to work” has encouraged both senior and junior officials to believe that they are entitled to sway policy or its implementation to fit their personal political preferences. This is critical, because it blinds them to their loss of impartiality. All this is corrosive and must end. The Cabinet Secretary is famously grippy, and she has some gripping to do here.

14:35

[Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome today’s debate and register my interest as the First Civil Service Commissioner. The commission is an independent statutory body and plays a key role in safeguarding the impartiality of our Civil Service. The Civil Service’s professional standards are underpinned by the Civil Service Code’s four core values: honesty, integrity, objectivity and impartiality. Impartiality is fundamental; it means to be ready to serve the Government of the day, whatever their colour.

I am supported by commissioners who have experience of private, public and charitable sectors. We serve five-year, non-renewable terms of office. The commission provides oversight and assurance across the entire life cycle of a civil servant’s career. We ensure recruitment is open and fair, and that decisions are based on merit, so if a Permanent Secretary—as the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, mentioned—instructs a panel to not appoint on merit, they should let us know because that should not happen. We act as the final appellate body for complaints raised under the Civil Service Code and, at exit, we offer independent advice to departing senior officials and special advisers under the Business Appointment Rules. Our purpose and mandate is to safeguard an impartial Civil Service.

I thank the House of Lords Library for its briefing. The briefing describes how the commission handled a fundamental breach in the recruitment principles in one department and the subsequent steps we took to ensure it does not happen again.

The commission is also the appellate body for Civil Service complaints. Our expectation is for departments to have adequate processes in place and for them to resolve the complaints internally. We have consulted all Permanent Secretaries, including those of Scotland and Wales, to understand how they consider complaints and to give us details on their numbers and outcomes. We value the question in the annual people survey, because it enables us to check awareness of the code and of mechanisms to raise any concerns under it.

I am consistently impressed by civil servants’ professionalism and ability to deliver policy with total impartiality. But impartiality is not having no opinions; it is about the discipline of setting them aside. This is not an unusual request and it applies to many professions. If a civil servant’s disagreement with any aspect of government policy or action is profound, the ultimate recourse is to resign from the Civil Service. This is an honourable course, but it is a profession that can and should insist on professional standards.

We see ourselves as constitutional guardians of the Civil Service Code’s application. The code already extends in some areas beyond a civil servant’s time in post, in the form of the Business Appointment Rules, which are designed to protect against improper influence and information use in post-government employment. We will soon be publishing a review of the Cabinet Office’s Business Appointment Rules as they apply to Civil Service leavers on their subsequent appointment.

As an independent constitutional guardian, we operate at arm’s length. We know that the Government value the independence of the commission and have given us increased responsibilities. We will play an active and supportive role in any steps the Government intend to take to strengthen impartiality in the service and delivery of public services.

14:39

[Baroness Prashar (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, for securing this short but important and timely debate.

As we have heard, impartiality is the bedrock of our Civil Service. We have also heard that it is fraying, and that has been well illustrated. My experience as the former First Civil Service Commissioner from 2000-05 convinced me that, while the Civil Service needs to constantly change and evolve to meet the challenges and changes in society, its values of honesty, objectivity, impartiality and integrity, allied with flexibility, sensitivity and commitment, remain crucially important, perhaps even more so at a time of enormous upheaval. They must remain the guiding principles.

These principles not only root the Civil Service but engender trust, a word more important than ever before when change runs deep in the environment of the Civil Service and in the very definition of public service. Development of policy, delivery of services and explanation of policies are taking place against low levels of trust in government, politicians and institutions, and in a less cohesive society. Integrity of the process is therefore crucial. It is for this reason that these values are essential and not an impediment.

The Civil Service, while by no means perfect, has come under a great deal of criticism and scrutiny. It is an organisation and institution under strain. Reforms, particularly since the 1980s, have been driven in response to external pressures, perceived dilemmas and political drivers, rather than any continuous systematic assessment of the organisation. The Civil Service is a national asset. It is held in trust by the Government of the day for the next Administration. Capability, capacity and the constitutional position of the Civil Service should not become just the domain of the Government of the day; it is a matter of national interest.

Over the past four decades, a view has developed that the values of the Civil Service are a hindrance to reform. This is a misconceived view. Reform of the Civil Service and these values are not incompatible. Understood and applied properly, they enable change and do not hinder it. These concerns led to the publication in 1995 of the Civil Service Code, which has been updated several times and will, I understand, be updated against the background of the review that has been initiated. This update should not be a paper exercise but an opportunity to clarify, reaffirm, reinforce and reassert these values, and explain what they mean in practice. It should be an opportunity to convey to the politicians, civil servants and public servants their utility and how they assist in restoring the self-worth and identity of the Civil Service as a professional and impartial service.

I hope the Minister is aware of the Governance Project report, which was published in 2024. I should declare an interest as a member. The report recommended that the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 should be amended to make explicit that civil servants have a legal obligation to act in compliance with the responsibilities under the code and that Ministers cannot direct them to act in opposition to the code. This recommendation should be acted upon, to ensure that we do not have the sort of issues that have been raised in the debate today.

14:42

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, for giving us an opportunity to discuss this important issue. I declare my interest as the director of the Free Speech Union. In the past six years, in its caseload, the Free Speech Union has taken on 167 cases in which a Civil Service body—a Whitehall department—is the recorded other party. Those are cases where employees have been put through disciplinary processes, and in some cases dismissed. The largest single category in that caseload is female employees who ran afoul of institutional orthodoxy on issues such as access to single-sex spaces.

To bring home what kind of case the Free Speech Union typically deals with, I thought I would tell the Grand Committee about one particular case: namely, that of Anna Thomas, a mother of one who was employed at the time, in 2020, by the DWP. She was employed as a coach at a jobcentre in Portsmouth. She was alarmed when she was directed to an anti-racism hub on the department’s intranet which encouraged civil servants to treat racism like Covid-19 and to

“assume that you have it”.

This was in the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minnesota. The hub was prefaced with a statement by Peter Schofield, then the DWP’s Permanent Secretary, telling staff they were

“responsible for being actively anti-racist”,

and asking them to

“make the DWP an anti-racist organisation”.

I am sure that noble Lords are familiar with the fact that anti-racism is a central concept in critical race theory. In case they are in any doubt that the DWP was embracing critical race theory, learning resources on this hub included a diagram from the American activist Ibram X Kendi, one of the authors of critical race theory, and that diagram asked staff to

“admit that you deny racism is a problem”

and to

“promote and advocate for policies and leaders that are anti-racist”.

Staff were also directed to the work of Robin DiAngelo—again, this in a hub that they were referred to by the Permanent Secretary—who, as noble Lords may know, is a critical race theorist who claims that white people, including children, are “inherently racist”.

Anna Thomas raised the alarm. In the context of a whistleblower, she discussed this with various senior members of the department. Initially, her complaint was taken seriously and upheld. The DWP’s own behavioural science expert advised that the anti-racism hub was political, and Mr Schofield should not have gone down the road of anti-racism. Nevertheless, the culture endured and Anna Thomas’s fears about political bias within the DWP materialised when she was asked to promote an event in Portsmouth for people interested in a career in the Metropolitan Police, and straight white men were explicitly excluded from participating in this particular recruitment opportunity—an example of what my noble friend Lord Jackson of Peterborough refers to as a woke recruitment practice.

In due course, Anna Thomas was placed under investigation because she would not keep quiet about these concerns, and in November 2021 she was dismissed for gross misconduct. The Free Speech Union took on her case; we brought a case in the employment tribunal against the department claiming that she was the victim of unfair dismissal, belief discrimination, victimisation as a whistleblower and harassment. I am pleased to say that after three preliminary hearings, the DWP settled and paid Ms Thomas £100,000—an example of the kind of expense that the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, was talking about.

If the Minister would like to convey to Antonia Romeo that I am certainly available to give evidence to her inquiry into impartiality, among other things, in the Civil Service, I would be very happy to share some of our data with her.

14:47

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, for this important debate.

I will come at impartiality from a slightly different angle, because technology is changing what we mean by an impartial state. There used to be a reasonably clear idea of where policy stopped and delivery began. Ministers made decisions; the Civil Service implemented them. Technology is making that distinction much less clear, because the design of a digital system is itself a policy choice.

For example, let us quickly take fraud. When you build a system to identify suspicious claims, someone has to decide what looks suspicious. If technology helps determine access to a public service, somebody decides what information is important, who is important and who is not. Those choices may be buried inside software but they can have a profound effect on an individual life.

One of the lessons we learned when we were building GOV.UK was that you could not just take an existing process and put it online. You had to rethink services around the user. I would argue that services have improved enormously, but technology and policy are now more closely linked than ever. AI takes this much further. Systems can assess information and recommend what happens next. The Government should use these tools—our public services desperately need better technology—but we need to be alert to what is happening.

A biased decision no longer requires a biased person. The problem might sit in the data or in software bought from a supplier. It might be an assumption that nobody has noticed. It might be built into a system, and it can be repeated across thousands of cases. Impartiality in a world of increasing digitisation and transformation cannot be left just to the technologists.

More than 20,000 civil servants took part in the Government’s generative AI trial last year, and there is now training aimed specifically at the senior Civil Service. These are good initiatives. The harder question is whether understanding AI becomes part of the ordinary professional competence of being a civil servant and how the parallel skills of scrutiny and critical thinking are developed. You do not need to be able to build a model; you need to know how and when to question one. How will working in an increasingly AI-first world become part of the everyday expectations of civil servants rather than a training course that people complete?

Finally, I turn to the Government Digital Service. Last month, when DSIT was abolished, GDS was moved into an expanded DCMS. Like many Members of this House, I believe that that is completely the wrong home for it and that the decision has consequences for the capacity of the Civil Service to act impartially across government. GDS is not simply an IT function; it builds the services through which millions of people experience the state. It is the front end of policy. The choices made in designing those services—such as who is eligible, what evidence is required, how decisions are explained and when a person can reach a human—all determine how policy works in practice. These questions are not merely technical. In my opinion, the only home that makes sense is the Cabinet Office. When digital systems shape how citizens experience the state, those who build them must be near the centre of power.

14:50

[Lord Pack (LD)]

My Lords, when the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, talked earlier about protecting people from improper pressures, I thought that there is a different aspect to that from that which we have heard in the many varied speeches so far, which it would be helpful to explore a bit: the importance of ethical standards and processes to protect impartiality, for Ministers and lobbyists.

Good Ministers, just like good leaders in any sort of organisation, inspire and lead, and they see challenging advice and robust critique of their ideas as a strength, or even as being essential to them to do their best. Weak leaders or poor Ministers can get annoyed by it and can feel threatened when not surrounded by compliant yes-people. Sadly, we have had a series of scandals, particularly those involving allegations of bullying, which highlight the problems of the shortcomings in the Ministerial Code as an effective safeguard both for impartiality and, frankly, for treating people decently and well.

The Ministerial Code is a slightly unusual document in that it is not a law; it is not even in that more nebulous but important category of a constitutional convention. As the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee of the House of Commons described it earlier this year, it is very much “the Prime Minister’s document”. At its heart, it is very dependent on the Prime Minister to decide what it says, when to change it and how to apply it. Indeed, as that House of Commons committee complained earlier this year, albeit when talking about it in a slightly different respect, it seems to be possible for people to break the code, sometimes with impunity. That was not a partisan but a cross-party conclusion.

It reminds us of the importance of having stronger foundations for the Ministerial Code in future, and stronger enforcement, because protecting the Civil Service’s impartiality is in part about protecting civil servants from improper behaviour by Ministers. There is a similar risk with lobbying. The examples I have given so far have highlighted the risk of civil servants perhaps deviating from impartiality because of the threat of the stick. With lobbyists, it is perhaps more a case of the carrot—the lure away from impartiality.

As we heard in the debates earlier this year on the Private Member’s Bill of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, on the regulation of lobbying, we often talk about the significant loopholes in the current protections in the context of Ministers and lobbyists, but the interaction between lobbyists and civil servants can be just as important as an area of risk. The Ethics and Integrity Commission’s report earlier this year set out a very good road map for improving the regulation of lobbying.

I say this as somebody who, in a previous role, was for a period covered by the existing lobbying regulations. I have to say that they were very light-touch. At the time, I quite enjoyed the fact that I did not have huge amounts of paperwork to fill in or hugely detailed records that needed keeping. Unfortunately, however, we have seen from practical examples the risks that come from that very light-touch approach and from the exclusion of in-house lobbyists and lobbying firms that are not VAT-registered. If there is an improper conversation between a lobbyist and a civil servant, the questions of whether the lobbyist is in-house or out-house, or whether the lobbyist firm pays VAT, are not really germane to whether there is something in that conversation that is a risk from which we need protection.

I hope that, in due course, we will hear from the Minister what steps the Government are taking to continue the initial progress they have made—to be fair—in improving the regulation of lobbying and strengthening the Ministerial Code.

14:54

[Baroness Finn (Con)]

My Lords, I too begin by congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, on securing this important debate and on her informative, impressive speech.

This was the view of the Constitution Committee of your Lordships’ House—I was a member of it at the time—in its 2023 report on Permanent Secretaries:

“The impartiality and perceived impartiality of the civil service is a central and uncontested tenet of our constitution”.


The two-part principle remains uncontested. The Civil Service cannot afford merely to act impartially: it must avoid any perception that it is falling short of that expectation.

In 2014, my noble friend Lord Maude of Horsham and the late Lord Heywood of Whitehall jointly wrote:

“The Civil Service is sometimes said to be ‘independent’ or ‘neutral’. It is neither. It is wholeheartedly committed to serving the elected government of the day in devising and implementing its programme. What is internationally unusual and often envied is the service’s ability to preserve its impartiality so that it can transfer seamlessly its expertise, commitment and loyalty to a government of a different political make-up tomorrow”.


That paragraph remains as true today, but there were and are conditions to preserve that ability. Civil servants must act in a way to earn and retain the confidence of Ministers, and, once a Minister has made a decision, they must make that decision a reality. They must also sustain the skills and capability of the Civil Service to serve future Governments equally well. Time and resources are scarce so, if there is a conflict between ministerial priorities and the organisation’s professional capability, the accounting officer should seek a ministerial direction. Civil servants should not pursue their own politically partial objectives at the expense of doing their job.

The Civil Service Code has correctly anticipated the ever-present risk in any permanent bureaucracy. It states that civil servants must not

“deceive or knowingly mislead ministers, Parliament or others”

or

“frustrate the implementation of policies once decisions are taken by declining to take, or abstaining from, action which flows from those decisions”.

If there were no risk of either behaviour occurring, there would be no need to prohibit them, but there they are on the public record. These are the true risks to Civil Service impartiality: misleading those whom officials are appointed to serve and frustrating decisions once they have been taken. Too often, we have seen the will of Ministers being frustrated rather than facilitated by their departments. When Ministers pull levers, all too often the machinery of government fails to respond. The Civil Service must police these risks properly. It must not reward, through promotion or appointment to key positions, those who exemplify the very behaviours that its own code prohibits.

14:57

[The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, and Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Baroness Twycross) (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to answer this Question for Short Debate on what steps the Government intend to take to strengthen impartiality in the Civil Service and the delivery of public services. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine, and noble Lords for their contributions to what has been an interesting debate, and I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, that it is a timely one.

Before I move on, I draw noble Lords’ attention to my ministerial declaration of interests. I also ask noble Lords to note that my husband is a serving civil servant in the Government Digital Service. Like the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, I have nothing but praise for the private offices with which I have worked and which have supported me since 2024; it is probably universal across Ministers that we rely heavily on our private offices to help us navigate the Civil Service.

The key aspect here is how the impartiality of the Civil Service is a vital component of our constitution and of how we run government business on behalf of the public. As the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, stressed, the basis of our politically impartial, permanent Civil Service goes all the way back to the Northcote-Trevelyan report of 1854, which urged a move away from recruitment based on patronage and set out the standards that laid the foundation for the modern Civil Service that we have today.

The Armstrong memorandum of 1985 set out:

“It is the duty of civil servants to serve their Ministers with integrity and to the best of their ability”


and said that

“the British civil service is a non-political and disciplined career service”.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, highlighted, this was codified in 1996 with the creation of the Civil Service Code—a vital document that sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants to this day. The code’s importance is such that it is now based in statute, as set out in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010. It is a contractual obligation for civil servants to abide by the code.

The code sets out four key values that should be demonstrated, which underpin those standards. Those core values are integrity, honesty, objectivity and, of course, impartiality, including political impartiality. These values largely stem from the Nolan principles, established in 1995, which civil servants and all public office holders are expected to adhere to, meaning that civil servants are also expected to demonstrate selflessness, accountability, openness and leadership. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, that these values are still relevant and appropriate, and I look forward to reading the report she referenced, which is on my pile of reading but which I have not read yet.

Impartiality, as was noted by a number of noble Lords, is fundamental to the code. In order to serve effectively, it is essential that civil servants do so impartially. Impartiality means faithfully and fairly serving the public as a whole rather than any particular group or interest. It also means loyally serving the elected Government of the day—a point referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Finn—whatever its political persuasion and no matter what their political beliefs may be. That essential requirement ensures that the Civil Service can gain and retain the respect of Ministers, Parliament and the public and maintain the highest possible standards in everything it does. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, in how she described what this means in practice and how impartiality applies. I also agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, that both impartiality and the perception of impartiality are key in this regard.

The noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, asked about civil servants seeking to influence based on identity. It is civil servants’ duty to provide honest, objective advice to Ministers which presents options and takes account of expert advice. Good advice should be informed by understanding and awareness. However, advice should never be determined by a civil servant’s own personal or political views. Civil servants must also speak up and take action if someone is acting contrary to the code.

The Government are keenly aware of the need to protect this important constitutional principle and the importance of the Ministerial Code. The Ministerial Code includes a requirement that Ministers must uphold the political impartiality of the Civil Service and not ask civil servants to act in any way which would conflict with the Civil Service Code.

I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Pack, turning the debate on its head, in a way, and looking at the behaviour of Ministers but also the issue of lobbying reform. It is right that we look at lobbying, and the Government are considering the recommendations of the EIC following its review, so I look forward to reporting back on that to your Lordships’ House. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Pack, that I will be very happy, when we have our long overdue meeting, to pick that up as well.

In turn, civil servants are required by their code to act in a way which deserves and retains the confidence of Ministers. It is a clear and established part of our democratic system that it is for Ministers to decide government policy, operating within the legal frameworks which apply. Ministers are accountable to Parliament, and civil servants are accountable to Ministers.

On the point from the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, on the enforceability of the Civil Service Code, as part of the contractual relationship between civil servants and their employer, civil servants are obliged to abide by the Civil Service Code, including its requirements on impartiality. Departments take these matters seriously, and breaching the code can result in a range of disciplinary actions being taken, including dismissal in severe cases.

As noble Lords are aware and as has been mentioned, the Cabinet Secretary set out her intention to refresh the Civil Service Code to ensure that it is up-to-date, well understood and adhered to across the Civil Service, including on the importance of impartiality. She spoke about this in her oral evidence to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee on 15 June. This work is ongoing, and the Government will communicate further on the subject in due course.

The issues of diversity and groupthink were raised by a number of noble Lords, including the noble Baronesses, Lady Falkner and Lady Spielman. The latter suggested that bringing your whole self to work is a potential issue, as it could, in her view, blind civil servants to impartiality. I strongly feel that a diverse Civil Service ensures that we truly reflect the communities we serve; in my view, this leads to better policies and stronger public outcomes. I feel that, rather than contributing to groupthink, diversity can actually help us avoid it, but noble Lords may wish to debate that matter with me in future.

I want briefly to talk about the subject of the future of the Civil Service in the UK. We must ensure that the Civil Service is equipped and supported to meet the challenges of the future. This Government are committed to that, including safeguarding its impartiality and core values so that we can enhance trust and confidence in the institutions of government. The Cabinet statement Rewiring the State set out that devolution by default will lead to good growth in every postcode and a more strategic Civil Service that is focused on the challenges that can best be dealt with at a national level.

The review into the organisation, performance and transformation of the permanent Civil Service, led by the Cabinet Secretary, will define a clear vision for the Civil Service as a world-class organisation, delivering a once-in-a-generation transformation. Like the noble Lord, Lord Butler, I and the Government agree that she means it. The review will consider, among other things: the size, shape and structure of the Civil Service; the impact of artificial intelligence and technology on the service, which was highlighted by the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox; our ability to attract and retain the best talent from across the country; and the statutory footing of the service. The review will draw on a wide range of expert advisers from academia, the private and public sectors, civil society and international spheres.

The noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, made a specific point about the review’s expert advisory panel. It will be constituted in due course to inform the review. A report will be published before summer next year, and any decisions will be for the Prime Minister to make.

On the offer from the noble Lord, Lord Young, to provide evidence to Antonia Romeo, the review welcomes input from across Parliament, so I can certainly take that offer back to the Cabinet Secretary.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)]

May I ask for some clarification before the Minister concludes? I fear that she is coming to a conclusion, and I do not want to stop her mid-speech. The most significant question I asked was: does the Minister believe that teams across the Civil Service are now compliant with the clarification of the Supreme Court on single-sex spaces on 16 April 2017? Can she either say that they are compliant or, if they are not, write to me and place a letter in the Library explaining when she expects them to be?

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

I thought I had an insert on that. I have been going a bit fast because I am running out of time; if I have skipped over an insert, I apologise. I would be happy to write to the noble Baroness on that point. I am now over time, but we have a short amount of time—

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I should have asked this earlier, but, because the Minister has not mentioned productivity, can she say whether the Cabinet Secretary review will look specifically at Civil Service and wider public sector productivity?

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

We are generally interested in public sector productivity, but I would be happy to write to the noble Lord.

Let me return to where I was heading at that point in my speech: the work of the Cabinet Secretary in not just waiting for the review but trying to get on with improvements to the Civil Service as we move forward. With their indulgence, I remind noble Lords that, earlier this year, the Cabinet Secretary launched the Future Civil Service programme, which is a collective movement to build a world-class Civil Service that better delivers for Ministers and, more importantly, for the public. It will be more productive—to answer the question from the noble Lord, Lord Jackson—and high-performing, and it will harness technology and AI to be fit for the future. This amounts to the most fundamental reset of the state and how it works in decades, and will focus on how the Government are organised and simplified to promote greater productivity, efficiency and accountability. The Future Civil Service programme is delivering a broad range of interventions, owned by Permanent Secretaries, to drive forward the change to build a world-class organisation that delivers for the public.

In conclusion, the Government will continue to protect the impartiality of the Civil Service. It is a central tenet of our constitution—one that we believe has stood the test of time. We will continue with our work to rewire the state, ensuring the effective delivery of public services.

15:10

Sitting suspended.

Healthcare Development: International Partnerships

Thursday 17th September 2026 Grand Committee

Question for Short Debate

15:15

Asked by

[Lord Crisp]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to ensure that their international partnerships with organisations in African and Asian countries support the development of healthcare in those countries.

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, first, I thank noble Lords for participating in this last sitting before our Recess. I declare an interest as patron of Global Health Partnerships, GHP, formerly known as THET, which is what people probably know it as. GHP has received some funding from the FCDO over several years to support these sorts of partnerships; I will refer to one in Myanmar that it currently contributes towards.

I understand that my noble friend Lady Prashar will refer to a recent important report from Global Health Partnerships on the recruitment of health workers from low and middle-income countries. I am delighted to know that the noble Lord, Lord Oates, and others will be referring to some of the many different sorts of partnerships, and I believe that the right reverend Prelate will be talking about his personal experience in this area.

My purpose in this debate is to think a bit more strategically about this issue. I want to ask the Minister about strategy and encourage him and the department to think about how health can contribute more extensively to development and foreign policy—this is why I wanted an FCDO Minister to respond, rather than a Health Minister.

The context is that the UK is one of the great leaders in health globally, second only to the USA, for example, on medical research. The UK is extremely prominent in professional education, with many innovators in biomedicine and medtech, and great not-for-profits such as Global Health Partnerships and, of course, the much bigger Wellcome Trust. I and others will be publishing a report in the next year about the global footprint of the UK in health.

The UK has extraordinary reach in health, and this is the fundamental underpinning point. In our last report, 10 years ago, it was shown that 63% of peer-reviewed medical journals where there was a British author had a foreign second or third author. There is extraordinary partnership. Even as we sit here, there will be emails whizzing back and forth between researchers all over the world. We have extraordinary reach, partly because of the Commonwealth. I am sure this is true of other sciences, but I am talking about health.

Let me get to my conclusion at the beginning, just to make sure that I do not get carried away by talking about the examples. The sort of things that I am talking about here cover the ordinary overseas development agenda, if I can put it like that, which relates to the benefits of supporting low and middle-income countries with their health issues. It deals with the ODA goals and the global goals. The UK also has great influence in global health policy. There is a whole set of development agenda.

Another set of issues here involves how that development is delivered, and it is something that I will come back to in the case of Myanmar. It is about the ability not to go Government to Government but to use civil institutional links that exist to provide support and ultimately help to rebuild countries and rebuild peace.

The third area is about UK values, and our health professionals carry those with us. That is not just about soft power. People talk quite softly about soft power, but this is about some real leverage that comes with this. Of course, we need all the friends we can get at the moment in this dangerous world. The fourth area is the commercial benefits of partnerships. I forget what it is called now, because it keeps changing, but NHS Global, I think it might be called these days, sponsors partnerships between commercial organisations and our brilliant innovators.

Finally, there is the whole area of support for the NHS. It can be extraordinarily valuable to work in overseas countries and then to come back to the UK with different ideas, to see one’s own health service in different ways and to develop. I know that is outside the FCDO remit, but it is part of what I am talking about here.

I invite the Minister to tell us where he thinks health fits into the wider partnership strategy of the department, and whether he thinks, as I do, that it could play a much more strategic role in foreign policy, whether we could leverage health much more effectively in foreign and development policy, and whether it would be useful for him or colleagues to meet a few people from the sector—I would gladly bring them together to discuss how the health sector could provide more leverage and support.

In the last three minutes, I turn to two examples, including one that I know I have circulated to noble Lords about the awful situation in Myanmar, five years on now. Health workers were among the leaders of the original civil disobedience movement. They were targeted and they retreated to the countryside, and they needed new skills—people had to learn how to deal with bombs and bomb fragments, and nurses had to deal with bullet holes and such like, and of course health deteriorated. There has been an extraordinary response, which has come, in part, from Burmese/Myanmar health professionals in this country. It was very good that the Government allowed them to work here professionally—some of them were here already but some subsequently came. I think that is tremendous.

It is also good that the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has supported the approach here of dozens of Myanmar and UK health professionals providing training, with something like 290,000 consultations, training, mentorship and education activities. Over 1,600 health workers have had training or support in the past two years. A new nursing school has opened, sort of behind the lines, because we have moved on from purely a coup to a civil war—it is now a really difficult situation. There are monthly medical training webinars, with 16 groups of educators from 12 ethnic health groups and four ethnic medical schools receiving technical support. It is a tremendous voluntary effort, with some support for its underpinning from the FCDO. It is a one-off example—I hope it is a one-off example—but it shows how important this is. It is clearly important to the UK, not least because of the great history and relationship between our two countries but because the UK is the penholder for Myanmar at the UN.

My second quick example concerns a group of anaesthetists. In 2012, I got some funding from DfID, as it was in those days, to support a training programme for anaesthetists in Zambia. Zambia had no way of training anaesthetists, who had to go abroad to be trained and did not necessarily come back—they stayed in South Africa or wherever. We set up a programme in 2012 which is still going, under its own steam now and its own funding, where anaesthetists from this country go out to that country for short or longer periods. These are often anaesthetists in training, and they work with the local anaesthetists, train them and, of course, gain so much themselves.

In conclusion, I invite the Minister to tell me how he thinks health fits into the wider partnership and whether he believes, as I do, that we could leverage it more effectively in foreign and development policy.

15:23

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, for securing this debate, and it is an honour to follow him. I thank him sincerely for his sustained work over a number of decades to show how medical partnerships with low-income and middle-income countries bring benefits both to those countries and to our own NHS.

This is something very dear to my own heart. My wife is a paediatrician and, together, we worked for a number of years in west Africa. My son has just graduated and started his first job as a doctor in Derby. Earlier this year, he did his medical elective in east Africa and, because he studied at the University of Newcastle, he was able to do the whole of his second year at Newcastle’s campus in Malaysia, an advantage he did not know about when he applied to that university. In a number of ways, cross-cultural medical work has been a big part of my family’s experience.

More than this, the principles that in giving we also receive and that we have much to learn from those with whom we differ—culturally, socially, economically, religiously, or whatever it may be—have shaped my experience of Church ministry in various parts of the world and in the multicultural context of Leicester, where I now serve. Indeed, I have written about my learning on gift exchange in different contexts.

So there is a lot that I could say on the benefits to our own NHS of UK-based healthcare workers spending time working in low-income and middle-income countries. A quick list could include: increased awareness and knowledge about cultural differences and similarities; increased cultural sensitivity, which is so important for the NHS today; the ability to work with limited resources, which, again, is critical for the NHS today; the ability to deal with the unexpected and work towards solutions; improved flexibility and adaptability; and the ability to innovate in overcoming challenges. The list goes on. Importantly, these skills and attitudes are hard to pass on in classroom settings or familiar clinical contexts. Working overseas is a particular learning experience that really does have a lifelong impact.

However, I also want to speak of something that is, I believe, a major barrier to healthcare partnerships, particularly where lower-income countries are concerned: the attitude that we know best and have nothing to learn from these countries. As one chief executive is recalled to have said in a report by NHS England, “What on earth are we going to learn from these poor countries?” This air of superiority—assuming that, because of our technological advances in this country, we are also culturally superior—was, of course, core to colonialism and, sadly, is still present today. We have it in the Church, and we see it in academic studies and so many other areas.

There is, therefore, a need to develop what I call “cultural humility”—that is, an approach to interacting with people of other cultures that says, “We always have something to learn”. This is linked to the concept of “reverse innovation”, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, whereby higher-income countries learn from and adopt practices developed in their lower-income counterparts. Kangaroo care in neonatal units is one example; oral rehydration sachets are another.

The lack of cultural humility is also, I suggest, a factor that explains why UK healthcare professionals working in other countries do not always have the local impact that they would wish for. People can sense whether we have a genuine desire to serve them or are simply in it for our own gain. Good partnership working requires cultural humility—both the willingness of the individual to learn from the other and the willingness of the other to receive the gift that is being offered them. In other words, it is a form of gift exchange; as I say, there is a whole body of literature on that.

I ask the Minister: what are the FCDO and the Department of Health and Social Care doing to encourage genuine partnerships with overseas healthcare bodies and to equip staff to work well within these partnerships? It is not simply a case of having formal partnership agreements, important though they are; there is also a need for the training and development of staff to work well within these partnerships. For instance, I am struck that my wife, who works in the NHS, has protected time for teaching and learning, quality improvement and clinical governance—all of which are recognised as statutory requirements—but it is much rarer for any NHS employee to have protected time to support global health. This means that it has to done in evenings and weekends, or during annual leave, thereby restricting it as an option for many—particularly those with caring responsibilities.

Perhaps most surprising of all is the fact that there is little recognition of those who have spent time working in other countries. Indeed, research with some of those who volunteered abroad found that., because it means deviating from the typical training pathway, it is sometimes considered career suicide. Some returning healthcare professionals report difficulties with professional revalidation or securing permanent employment on return because, more generally, they lack experience in this country. This could be addressed, as participants in the NHS England report mentioned, by having national bodies, such as the DHSC or NHS England, recognise the benefits of global health partnerships and encourage executive buy-in. If this were more common across the NHS—indeed, if every trust had an enduring partnership with a hospital overseas—the two-way positive impact would be greatly magnified, and the obstacles that some individual volunteers face would be done away with.

Finally, just before the matter of costs is raised as a possible barrier, let us remember that by recruiting healthcare workers from overseas, it is estimated that the NHS has saved £14 billion in training costs. That saving should surely come with a responsibility to offset the loss to these countries’ own healthcare systems.

15:30

[Baroness Prashar (CB)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, for securing this debate. He has made a unique contribution in this area, and characteristically he has situated this today very strategically in terms of what we can do about developing partnerships. He has given a powerful account of the benefits of partnership working in health and how these support the development of healthcare in those countries.

These partnerships embody the Government’s new approach to development, as stated by the new Secretary of State for Health: from paternalism to partnership. As we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, these arrangements are highly cost effective and give NHS staff insights that improve clinical practice, leadership and efficiency. They are equitable and country-led, and UK and overseas health services can invest in, learn from and mutually benefit from them. The noble Lord also mentioned the values of the National Health Service, which I think are extremely important.

Partnership working was introduced in 2008. Now, nearly two decades on, there is an opportunity to breathe new life into this approach. This means moving away from voluntary arrangements to some formal partnerships supported by predictable and multi-year funding, and obviously by looking at them much more strategically as well.

Renewed investment in global health partnerships following the recent cuts would not only enable the Government to reinforce their commitment to partnerships but would be mutually beneficial for the UK and other countries. Such partnerships can be further enhanced if we take a different approach to the international recruitment of the health workforce.

In this context, I draw the attention of the Committee to the report published in March that the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, referenced, which was published by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Health and Security, entitled An Honest Account of the Benefits and Costs of International Health Worker Recruitment. The report was prepared by Global Health Partnerships, an organisation which has not been mentioned but which acts as a secretariat for this APPG and has done some excellent work to promote health partnerships. The noble Lord, Lord Crisp, and I were members of this inquiry, so we both declare an interest.

The report argued that international recruitment will remain a necessary component of the National Health Service workforce for the foreseeable future and it would neither be responsible nor fair to continue with ad hoc recruitment, which in the long run I think is detrimental to the sending countries and often not fair to those individuals who are recruited. Source countries often lose health workers faster than they can replace them. These include countries such as Nigeria, Zambia and Zimbabwe which are currently on the red list, which means that no recruitment from these countries should take place.

Evidence from Kenya and Uganda captured in this report describes the loss of doctors, nurses and clinical educators, with serious consequences for patients and overstressed health services. This has become such an important issue that the WHO’s guidelines were updated this year for the first time in 16 years, adding an expectation that countries recruiting from abroad also invest back into the health systems that they recruit from.

The report proposed recruitment through deliberate partnerships that deliver mutual benefit and strengthen systems globally, an approach which is responsible, ethical and in our self-interest. International recruitment is a structural feature of the National Health Service, and the report estimated, as has already been said, that over the years the UK has saved approximately £14 billion in training costs. The inquiry concluded that the UK must move from a reliance on massive overseas recruitment to a more structured and responsible approach.

As I said before, international recruitment will continue in the short to medium term. Reducing dependence on overseas recruitment as proposed in the 10-year plan will take time, and recruitment from overseas in the short and medium term will remain a necessity. This report recommended replacing the ad hoc recruitment drives with transparent government-to-government partnerships, aligned with national health workforce plans and priorities. This approach would align self-interest and practical gain for both parties. A connected, responsible global health force will strengthen us, support partner countries and enhance global health security, an issue that is high on the Government’s agenda. Minister McNeill, in a speech on 14 September, named health as one of the five securities that will define the UK’s approach through its G20 and G7 presidencies.

The logic of the argument that this report advances is compelling and deserves serious consideration. Today, the Government have not responded to the report, but it merits serious considerations here and in international fora such as the Commonwealth and the upcoming G20 presidency next year. I urge the Government to discuss the report’s recommendations with the members of the inquiry and its authors. Further, the Government should demonstrate global leadership by putting this issue on the agenda of the forthcoming G20 meeting in 2027. Health worker mobility is exactly the kind of cross-border risk-sharing issue that the G20 under the UK’s leadership should be addressing.

The Global Health Partnerships, the organisation that supported this publication, organises the health summit each year. The summit in 2027 would be a suitable vehicle for promoting these partnerships. I attended the summit this year and can speak from experience about its value and impact. I remain hopeful that the Government will give serious consideration to health partnerships highlighted in this debate. I look forward to a positive response from the Minister.

15:36

[Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is a great honour and privilege to follow my friend the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, for securing this debate and for the briefing he so generously shared with all of us taking part. His long-standing record on global health and international partnerships reminds us that our commitment to international development is beyond the significance of finance. It is about co-operation between people, institutions and nations—a partnership capable of building sustainable capacity and strengthening development systems at country level.

Yesterday, a number of noble Lords listened to the right honourable Speaker of the Parliament of Uganda. It was clear from that conversation that many African nations continue to value Britain’s partnership in economic development, education, health research, technology and defence. But we must acknowledge honestly that our bilateral relationship across Africa and the global South have historically included an approach too often defined externally. Development assistance has rightly supported vaccination, literacy, maternal health and other services, but these relationships have existed alongside different co-operation cloaked historically as international development assistance and the extraction of valuable natural resources, sometimes without sufficient attention to the priorities and aspirations of local people.

Today, we face an increasingly complex environment, with wars and conflicts and infectious diseases, including Ebola, in our daily view. Dengue and malaria continue to threaten communities, while famine and hunger remain realities for many millions. At the same time, international development funding is under extraordinary pressure with the reduction by the US and the changes in the UK’s defence priorities.

The consequences, with receding resources, are fewer health services and less support for women and children, which communities have come to rely upon for decades. In these circumstances, we need a collaborative response. I would welcome the development of a stronger coalition between international funding agencies, national Governments, respected local organisations and experts. Such co-operation would pool scarce resources and help donor organisations design services more effectively, reduce duplication and improve service delivery. It would put the people who understand local circumstances at the heart of determining priorities.

That includes women. The UK has an honourable tradition of supporting women’s organisations across the world, yet in societies afflicted with conflict, displacement or economic instability, women’s voices and influence often diminish precisely when they are needed most. In the face of these existing and emerging crises, how do the Government intend to ensure that the basic needs of vulnerable women and children in Africa and Asia are reflected in the way that development programmes are planned, designed and delivered? I seriously question whether women themselves would prioritise defensive military training within the framework of international development over feeding and educating their children, securing clean water, accessing healthcare and ensuring the safety of themselves and their families.

The UK’s modern approach to development is very welcome. It recognises the importance of local leadership in defining country priorities, but the principle must be lived in practice. We need to ask what happens to well-established programmes when international NGOs withdraw offices because of funding cuts. Have we done enough over the years and decades to ensure that locally created organisations and solutions have the capacity, resources and confidence to respond when international support diminishes? I sincerely hope that we will not sacrifice the good work that is already under way.

Nevertheless, Britain retains significant strength and influence. As has been mentioned, our universities, financial institutions, the NHS—as was mentioned—research and technological capabilities and strong civil society have all contributed to the relationships and co-operation built over generations. They are assets which readily enable Britain to remain a trusted international partner with humility as well as expertise. I recognise that practice can sometimes fall short of the principles we espouse, and we must remain vigilant and willing to improve at all times.

I say this having visited UK-supported programmes and spoken to Rohingya women in Bangladesh who had experienced rape, torture and ethnic cleansing, and to women from Syria, Lebanon, Sudan and elsewhere facing equally devastating circumstances. It is impossible to overstate the hopelessness of such experience and of how far removed women are from the decisions made about development assistance that directly affects their lives. We should therefore be cautious about imposing burdensome conditions that, however well intentioned, can unintentionally undermine the well-being and dignity of the very people the programmes are intended to support.

Of course, at the same time, we must keep in mind the legitimate expectation of British taxpayers that public money is properly governed and accountable. Transparency, therefore, should not become disconnected from upholding humanity. We need a balanced approach that recognises the realities of people who have endured extreme hardship, lost homes and livelihoods, been deprived of basic choices and, in many cases, fled unimaginable violence. In the current financial environment, this is undoubtedly a difficult balance for all countries and Governments, who are managing competing demands while families in their own nations experience pressures and bear the cost of living crisis. This is precisely why locally led solutions can be more sustainable, responsive and cost-neutral, particularly when we place women as partners at the heart of development decisions.

Women’s organisations across Africa and the global south possess practical experience in all the areas that development assistance intends to address. A similar principle applies to young people. As usual, I have written far too much to read out, but I want to say that I am encouraged to see the shift in the Government’s approach towards Africa, which places greater emphasis on mutual respect and the long-term relationship, encompassing trade, investment and education. I believe that that approach can inspire a new generation of young women and men to see Britain not as a donor but as a partner and help build towards a better international development space and a more balanced and equitable world.

15:44

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, for securing this debate and for his long-standing leadership on global health. I also pay tribute to the work of the global health partners with which I have had the opportunity to work in the past. This is the first time I have taken part in a debate with the noble Lord, Lord Wood, since he has become a Minister, so I welcome him to his ministerial position and congratulate the Prime Minister on making such an excellent appointment.

I have spoken in previous debates about my experiences earlier in my career: teaching in a rural school in Zimbabwe and, later, working in South Africa for a few years. Although I hope that the contribution I made in those roles was valuable to the communities in which I worked, I know that it was absolutely priceless to me. I learned about living in a resource-constrained environment, about the ingenuity and commitment of the community and about the perspectives of people with very different life experiences and cultural backgrounds from mine.

Those experiences shaped my life. They taught me how much we have to gain when we are prepared to listen and learn. That is why, this afternoon, I want to speak in particular about the contribution of NHS England’s Global Health Volunteer Fellowships programme, which puts that principle into practice. I want to make what seems to me to be the overwhelming case for continuing the modest financial support that enables the scheme to operate, allowing doctors from the UK to contribute overseas and bring valuable skills home. The programme deploys doctors for four to six months in health facilities in a number of low and middle-income countries, including Kenya, Malawi, Namibia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Uganda and Zimbabwe. These doctors are paid a small stipend to cover travel and living expenses. More than 450 have been deployed to date, making a significant contribution to the communities they have served but also gaining new skills and experiences, to the benefit of our National Health Service.

An independent evaluation of the programme by Hughes Hall, Cambridge, found that 94% of fellows responding reported improved clinical skills, while 92% reported better problem solving and decision-making. One doctor described returning to British general practice calmer, more confident and more aware of how poverty shapes patients’ health; working with limited diagnostics had sharpened his skills of observation, examination and clinical judgment. Another explained how they managed presentations of which they had little or no prior experience, including trauma, burns and snake bites, building confidence and a practical skill set that they would not have developed in the UK. Another described learning from highly skilled South African doctors and incorporating those skills directly into NHS practice. These are benefits that they can provide to the NHS and their patients throughout their careers.

Secondly, the programme encourages a more thoughtful use of resources. Doctors described learning to weigh decisions carefully, adapt to constraints and avoid waste. An Oxford radiology registrar who worked at George Hospital in South Africa’s Western Cape explained how the experience better equipped him to allocate limited resources, avoid waste and appreciate the resources that are available in the National Health Service.

Thirdly, there is the benefit to morale and retention. One participant described rediscovering the joy of practicing medicine. The evaluation records testimony that the programme can help retain GP trainees and renew their commitment. We invest heavily in training doctors; helping them remain motivated and committed to NHS practice should be part of protecting that investment.

The benefits to the partner hospitals were also clear. In Mitchells Plain, a highly deprived community outside Cape Town, fellows are described as integral members of the emergency team. Both fellows and local medical staff reported learning from each other.

At George Hospital, the partnership has helped sustain patient care while developing future healthcare leaders, and the Tshemba Foundation, which supports volunteers at Tintswalo Hospital and surrounding rural clinics in north-eastern South Africa, describes the Global Health Volunteer Fellowships programme as invaluable and explains why continuity matters so much—a regular flow of fellows allows it to plan.

Finally, there is the benefit of the personal relationships that are built, which contribute to the kind of personal diplomacy that is important for the UK’s relationships abroad. I know that myself from the time I spent working in South Africa and Zimbabwe; I built enduring relationships which remain to this day. Lots of those personal relationships contribute to how the UK is seen.

Despite all these benefits, there is deep concern that the programme may be discontinued. I very much hope that this will be reconsidered. Ministers should consider what will be lost: training opportunities, clinical contributions and relationships built through years of co-operation. Can the Minister tell us what the Government’s position is in this regard and explain how the benefits to NHS training and partner hospitals are being assessed?

I understand the pressures on resources, but we are talking here about very modest funding. A small stipend can make possible months of service and learning, with benefits that last well beyond a placement. We should have the judgment to recognise that value and the commitment to sustain it.

15:51

[The Earl of Courtown (Con)]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, for securing this important debate on what the NHS can learn from partnerships with hospitals in Africa and Asia. It was particularly interesting to hear his description of the situation in Myanmar, and I learnt much from the noble Lord’s speech.

I should also declare an interest, like the right reverend Prelate. My daughter did her elective in Kerala, India, and she spent a year after the pandemic teaching at Warwick Medical School. She was only too aware of the importance of British doctors—people living in England—actually going to help and teach people coming from overseas, and of course there is much evidence of that at Warwick Medical School.

As the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, said, we are a leader in this field. Partnerships between the NHS and healthcare providers abroad have been recognised as mutually beneficial by successive Governments. Under the coalition Government, Healthcare UK was launched as a joint initiative between the Department of Health, the NHS Commissioning Board and UK Trade & Investment to increase the profile of UK expertise in healthcare and the trade in healthcare goods and products overseas.

Indeed, successive Conservative-led Governments provided funding for Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. Governments have also signed agreements on healthcare with India and Kenya, and the previous Government published the two-year global health framework in 2023. All this work has helped to strengthen the UK’s reputation internationally as a global leader in healthcare. That is a reputation that has been hard won, and we will support the Government where they seek to improve healthcare provided through the NHS. We will work with Ministers to deliver these improved outcomes.

This is slightly outside the Minister’s brief, but for these arrangements and partnerships to work, we need a functioning NHS. Unfortunately, as all noble Lords will be aware, the NHS has too often been brought to a standstill by industrial action, with patients bearing the costs. Can the Minister briefly say what Ministers are doing to protect patients from the damaging effects of strike action in future?

Turning back to international partnerships between the NHS and healthcare services, can the Minister say what particular efforts are being made to engage with healthcare providers in Africa in the light of the ongoing Ebola outbreak? It would be useful for the Committee to hear what the Minister can say on this issue. I was also particularly interested to hear the report from the noble Lord, Lord Oates, of his time in South Africa and Zimbabwe. The fact is that partnerships help places experiencing so much undue suffering very much; it was interesting to hear about the noble Lord’s connections there.

Once again, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, for bringing this debate forward. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply.

15:56

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Wood of Anfield) (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, for securing this debate. I pay tribute to his work on strengthening global health partnerships and championing collaboration, as well as to his role as a patron of Global Health Partnerships; I will come back to his Myanmar example later. I echo his words on how our health sector is world-leading with extraordinary reach, as I think he said. That is the foundation of the development partnerships, which we and—to go back to the point from the noble Earl, Lord Courtown—the previous Government have pursued with such principle and vigour; I pay tribute to them as well.

I thank all noble Lords for their contributions. So many of your Lordships have such valuable experience in the area of health partnerships—experience that I have not had. I wish the son of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester good luck, and I thank the right reverend Prelate for his story about his son’s experience.

Our approach to development is having to modernise, as noble Lords know, with the aim of having a greater impact abroad and achieving better value for money at home. That is not an easy combination. It is based on four shifts: from donor to investor; from service delivery to system strengthening, on which I very much take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Uddin, about the sustainable development of new systems, rather than just transitory ones, being crucial; from grants to expertise; and from international intervention to local leadership.

In health, this means an approach that is increasingly rooted in partnership by listening to countries, responding to their priorities, combining UK expertise with local knowledge and building relationships based on mutual benefit—as we have heard about today from various noble Lords’ experiences—in order to strengthen health systems, build sustainable capability and support locally led approaches. I refer again to the point made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester about the gift relationship and cultural humility—I, too, am a Richard Titmuss fan—as well as the idea that knowledge transfer is not just one-way. The noble Lord, Lord Oates, spoke very movingly about how it changed his life; I will come back to the programme that he talked about in a minute.

Unless exceptional circumstances or a crisis require a different approach, we see our role as not to deliver services on behalf of others but to work alongside partners in order to strengthen their own institutions, capabilities, and systems. To support this, the Foreign Office has established a community of expertise for health, which brings together expertise from across the UK and around the world and makes it available to our international network. Its purpose is to help partner countries strengthen their health systems, improve health security and deliver better health outcomes, particularly for women and girls—another thing that the noble Baroness, Lady Uddin, rightly highlighted as an oft-neglected dimension of development work. A fundamental principle of this community is that it is demand-led and not donor-driven.

This brings me to today’s Question. Let me answer the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, directly on what we are doing. We support healthcare development by working with Governments, health ministries and local organisations. We focus on the priorities that countries have identified for themselves, rather than imposing our own. We focus on areas where the UK has expertise to offer, while drawing on local knowledge.

Of course, there are occasions where more direct support is required, and one such example is the current Ebola outbreak, which the noble Lord asked me to comment on. The outbreak on 15 May has been declared an Ebola outbreak—the 17th. We are allocating up to just under £80 million to support an Africa-led response, and we are helping the WHO, the United Nations and NGO partners to strengthen surveillance, support front-line workers, improve infection prevention and control, and support access to life-saving care. I thank all those who are taking part in the collective effort to respond to this crisis as we speak.

The UK was among the first international partners to commit funding to the Africa-led response and is providing up to £80 million through the WHO, Africa CDC and the United Nations. Together, we are helping to strengthen surveillance, support front-line workers, improve infection prevention and control, and accelerate access to vaccines, treatments and diagnostics.

In all our activities, we are working through a range of partnerships, including partnerships at home with the NHS, universities and professional bodies. We supported health system partnerships in countries including Ghana, Malawi, Nepal, the Philippines, Tanzania and Zimbabwe, which draw on UK expertise, including from NHS England, and create opportunities for health professionals to improve their quality of care and experiences. We have heard today many examples of successful partnerships supported by this and the previous Government.

The noble Lord, Lord Oates, discussed the Global Health Volunteer Fellowships programme and gave some quite moving examples. He responded to some of the challenges put forward by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester of embedding training in specific contexts rather than expecting skills to be transferred without bespoke training. I want to thank the doctors who take part in that, who provide their valuable time and skills on a volunteer basis. As explained by the noble Lord, Lord Oates, the programme provides clinical support through placements for doctors in partner countries but also encourages mutual learning between practitioners from different countries.

I am not aware of DHSC financial plans for this programme but I will make it my business to try to find out for the noble Lord. The experience and evidence that it generates will clearly be valuable, whatever programme develops in the future. I will get back to the noble Lord, Lord Oates, on anything I can discover in advance of the spending review.

We also provide flexible technical assistance. We help partner Governments access the expertise they need to address their priorities and strengthen their health systems. Good examples include Bangladesh, also brought up by the noble Baroness, Lady Uddin, where we are supporting efforts to improve services for women and girls, and Somaliland, where we are helping the Ministry of Health strengthen health financing and planning. Alongside this, a recent £19 million DHSC programme has operated in several countries across Africa, linking NHS organisations, universities and royal colleges with counterparts overseas, helping to strengthen the health workforce through learning and collaboration.

The noble Lord, Lord Crisp, mentioned Myanmar and the fantastic work done by what I think became known as the UK Health Partnerships for Myanmar after the military coup five years ago. This involved a UK coalition, which the noble Lord mentioned in some detail, of more than 50 institutions, including royal colleges, NHS bodies, universities, parliamentarians and local clinicians, which developed teleconsultations, GP support, quality improvement, a nurses’ college and virtual clinical support—a real flagship example of what health partnerships can do.

I also want to draw attention, parochially, to my own department, the FCDO, whose principal health partnership programme since 2023 is the Health Systems Connect programme. The noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, rightly pointed to the importance of having multiyear programmes rather than single off-one grants or more fleeting forms of financial assistance. This is a four-year initiative, delivered through the NHS Consortium for Global Health, which connects partner Governments with expertise from NHS England, UKHSA and other bodies. The partnership work aims to accelerate progress toward improved healthcare systems and universal access.

The noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, asked an important question about the impact of recruitment in the UK on the supply of health professionals in low-income and middle-income countries. This is obviously a complicated question. As she pointed out when talking about the GHP report that she discussed, the Government’s health plan aims to reduce reliance on international recruitment by reducing it to under 10% by 2035. That said, a continuing reliance on overseas recruitment will still be there. It is important, therefore, that we approach this in an ethical and sustainable way that supports, rather than undermines, the UK’s wider development objectives. As the noble Baroness knows, our code of practice for the international recruitment of health and social care personnel is the foundation of these ethical standards, which prohibits active recruitment from red-list countries, as she mentioned. We will continue to invest in partnerships that strengthen national health workforces in countries facing the greatest health system challenges.

All these efforts sit alongside our major investments through multilateral institutions and global health initiatives. Through partnerships with organisations such as the World Health Organization, the World Bank, Gavi and the Global Fund, we are helping to strengthen health systems more broadly. The Government seek to ensure that their support for healthcare in partner countries starts by listening to partners and supporting their priorities. We work alongside the Governments, civil institutions, organisations and local workforces on which health outcomes truly depend.

Lastly, I again congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, on this debate and the work that he and the GHP have championed. I thank all noble Lords for the experiences that they have shared today.

Committee adjourned at 4.06 pm.